Published in Intrepid Times
May 2022
In 2013, myself and a friend travelled from Romania to the Polish Tatra Mountains, by way of Lviv and western Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused me to revisit that journey and see my fleeting impressions of that country in a new light. Writing about the devastation of the thrilling country I briefly passed through was something I couldn’t do, because I don’t have the right; I was only a tourist there, merely seeing the surface of things. So this is a piece about the joy of travel and the wonder of unknown places, with the knowledge that one of those places is now transformed by war. One day I hope to return to Lviv and to see things with wiser eyes.
Part 1
The bridge across the Tisza was made of wood and full of holes. We could see the sluggish water flowing beneath our feet. Behind us, Romanian border guards joked and puffed on cigarettes. Ahead, Ukrainian guards looked on without expression. ‘Do we just walk across?’ we had asked the Romanians, and they had shrugged dismissively, as if it were no concern of theirs. That laissez faire attitude stopped at the river. On the Ukrainian side, a man in an enormous hat erupted furiously when we tried to photograph the flag, blue and yellow, on its pole – ‘Niet foto!’ We tried to smile. The smile was not returned. Neither was there any smile on the suspicious woman in green who thumbed our passports sceptically, taking a vast dislike to mine, glaring at my photograph as if I had just drawn it on. At length she gave it back to me with theatrical reluctance.
On we walked into Ukraine, Chris and I, step after step. A dusty road. Small tiled homes. Stray dogs. No shops that we could see. From here we hoped to catch a train onwards to Lviv. But we had no currency, only Romanian lei, and there were no banks in town. We really had no clue about where we were going. Suddenly, on this shabby street, appeared an apparition in red: a woman in a scarlet dress, commanding, blonde and powerful, her dress so bright it looked unreal. She gestured. We followed her through an unmarked doorway. Inside, the room appeared to be some kind of general store, full of boxes, crates and cans, in which a couple of bulky men loitered in the dimness. But the power clearly lay with another woman at a desk, whose arms were as fat as thighs. From a drawer she produced a brick-thick wad of banknotes. Her fingers deftly counted out the hryvnia like a magic trick, transmogrifying currencies, at a rate we did not ask. She dismissed us with a wave. The hyperreal woman in red led us to the street again and pointed up the hill. The station was up there, she said. Soon we would reach Lviv.
Lviv was a hundred miles away. A two-hour journey, we’d assumed. Three, if the train was very slow. The journey took thirty hours. We caught train after train, rumbling round the villages, being told by helpful, pitying people when to disembark, where to wait for other trains, constantly muddling up the names of the unfamiliar stops, whose syllables blended into one in a thick Cyrillic soup. It was monotonous, glorious. We were in Ukraine! Outside the window: sodden fields, pale cattle, little farms, dull green hills, dull grey skies, golden Orthodox onion domes. The carriages had wooden seats. Young soldiers came and went. We smoked between the carriages as we had seen the soldiers do, and were shouted at again by another big-hatted man. Everyone chewed sunflower seeds and spat them on the floor. The conductor took sweet care of us, mothering and concerned, until Chris got his deck of cards and performed some sleight of hand to entertain a curious child. The woman paled, horrified, and quickly backed away. With his bald head and his brilliant eyes, as vivid as that dress was red, Chris must have seemed a sorcerer, foreign and diabolical. After that he stopped his tricks. We knew nothing about this country. Darkness fell. Another change. We assumed we’d catch one final train – perhaps we’d reach Lviv that night – but no, the station master led us to the waiting room. ‘You sleep here,’ he said, pointing at the floor. ‘The next train is at four a.m. I will wake you with a flashlight.’
We made our beds on the floor. But we were very hungry. We had eaten nothing since breakfast in Romania. At the ticket office we inquired about a restaurant. ‘No restaurant,’ the young woman said. A shop? ‘No shop.’ Food? ‘No food.’ We mimed eating hungrily, which she seemed to find pathetic. There must be food somewhere, we said. ‘No!’ she snapped. The only thing she could suggest was a vending machine. Dismally, we went to check. Crisps. Weird-looking chocolate bars. We took a stroll down the road to see what we could find.
About a minute’s walk away was a brightly lit grocery store, packed with food of every kind. Bread, cheese, sausage, cucumber, chocolate, fruit and beer. We returned triumphantly, carrying loaded shopping bags, and brandished them at the ticket woman. She gave no reaction. Had she wanted us to starve, for obscure reasons of her own? Had she genuinely not understood our charades of desperate eating? No matter, we possessed a feast. We ate on a deserted platform under the full moon. Stray dogs howled in the night, hulking Soviet-era trains rusted on the railway sidings, the beer went straight to our heads, we laughed and marvelled at it all. That day felt like a dream.
Woken by a blinding light and an urgent voice saying ‘train!’, we staggered from our sleeping bags. The train came with the dawn. Blearily we watched the plains of western Ukraine roll by, all greens and greys, much like before. There was only one more change. At the next station, we’d been told, we could catch the ‘electric train’ – the elektrychka, people said in an almost reverential way – that would whisk us to Lviv in no more than an hour. But we must not miss it: there was only one a day. We waited on the platform, almost at our journey’s end. The electric train was due in forty-five minutes, half an hour. Fifteen minutes. Ten. Five.
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ Chris announced. ‘OK,’ I said nervously, ‘as long as you’re really quick.’ He disappeared. Three minutes. Two. A train slid into view. It looked like an electric train, bigger and sleeker than the rest. There was an excited surge as people moved up the platform. I looked around. Chris wasn’t there. People were rushing for the train with increasing urgency. ‘Elektrychka?’ I asked a woman in a smart green uniform. ‘Da!’ she said excitedly. ‘Get on! Go! Electric train! Go! Train!’ Then Chris reappeared, grasping two small paper cups. ‘I got some coffee,’ he announced, looking pleased with himself. ‘That’s the electric train!’ I yelled. His face showed utter panic.
We reached the doors as they closed. The electric train pulled away. It glided past us silently, electrically and magically, like a smooth and graceful god. We stood and watched it go. Neither of us said anything. Chris had dropped one of his cups, and the contents of the other had splashed his trousers and his shoes. I was too furious to even look at him.
After some time he said, ‘I fucked up there, didn’t I?’
It took another eight hours of local trains to reach Lviv. I didn’t hold my anger long. It was too absurd. The day rolled past in a blur, the land turned dim, and we were there. Lviv, after thirty hours and a night on a station floor. Lviv. A city in Ukraine. Why were we there? We didn’t know. We had picked it on a map. Neither of us knew a single thing about this country.
Our first glimpse of the city was sinister and menacing – the central station was immense, a towering, domed edifice looming in the gritty night, sharked around by taxicabs. Every gruff-voiced driver seemed to be out to get us. Refusing offers of a ride, we wandered into the streets. We found a room with two beds, basic but comfortable, better than a tiled floor. And no one stuck a bright light in our faces in the morning.
The next day, Lviv was beautiful. It gleamed and glowed and sparkled. Its walls were pink and green and blue. There were church bells ringing. The robin’s-egg sky was pale. We wandered through the morning. Sunlight lit the golden domes. The cobblestones shone lustrously. We climbed a path to some high place, an ancient ruined castle. From that point we could see flatness spreading everywhere, seeping onwards like a sea. The steppe, vast and featureless. Tartars, Huns and Cossacks. Freedom. Fierceness. Openness. Horseback archers, German tanks. Russians. Bloodlands, they were called. Famine. The Holodomor. We turned a circle slowly.
A man with a leather glove had an eagle on his arm, was charging tourists for photographs. Chris could not resist it. It drew him in magnetically – those yellow eyes, that small hooked beak. He stared. The eagle stared. Chris had the same eyes as the bird, clear-sighted, totally intense. I wanted him to look away because it scared me somehow. Then the eagle panicked. It flapped and lost its grip, fell upside down and dangled there, leashed, flapping desperately, until the man roughly righted it. It was a small, ugly scene. Chris paid the man. I felt upset. No one took a photograph. We went back down the hill.
One more night in Lviv. We went from bar to bar. The first bar had a kitsch theme of Second World War partisans, the waiters dressed in battle gear and singing patriotic songs. The password on the door was smert rosiyanam, ‘death to Russians’. ‘What do Russians think of that?’ we asked some students drinking beer and eating giant sausages. ‘It is only fun,’ they said, ‘a joke between neighbours.’ The year was 2013. The following year, there would be an anti-Russian uprising. Eight years after that, Putin’s army would invade. That password was not a joke. But we laughed and drank our beer. We ate our giant sausages. The waiters played accordions and our new friends clapped and cheered.
Another bar. Another bar. And then we found The Bar. For half an hour it was dead, six people there, no atmosphere. We were just about to leave. And then something happened. Something undefinable, transformative. One of those nights. It was like the appearance of the woman in the scarlet dress. A techno DJ started up. Suddenly the place was full. Everything took on a shine. The beat was heavenly. It became a glorious night, one more night in Lviv. We danced and bought people drinks. We made transitory friends. Chris almost got into a fight — something about a stolen scarf — and won the approval of the room, his enemy bundled out the door. The hours blurred by. We danced and danced. People gave us cigarettes. They grinned and shouted in our ears. We ordered vodka cocktails that the barman set alight with a blowtorch, searing orbs of blue flame that burned parts of our eyebrows off, everything was wonderful. One night in Lviv! We staggered through the streets.
The next morning it was grim. We had to get to Poland. Everything ached and stank. A long bus ride to the border. Hours of waiting in a line next to green metal gates, passport checks, declarations, boredom and anxiety. A strip of scrubby no man’s land which we crossed hungover. At a currency exchange our hryvnia transformed into euros – no strong-armed village woman there, just a sterile countertop – and we entered the EU. The Polish flag, white and red. My muzzy head was pounding. We boarded another bus, and afterwards another bus. I felt sick and underwhelmed. Outside the window: well-paved roads, neat gardens next to bungalows, rows of well-placed conifers. It looked like anywhere else in Europe.
We dragged ourselves onto a train. Exhaustion crashed over me. All I wanted was to be still, to close my eyes, to have some peace. But Chris would not stop talking. Ayahuasca, UFOs, string theory, sacred geometry, quantum physics, pyramids. He was really on a roll. I sat there reeling with fatigue, my breath still rank from last night’s booze. After hours of this, he paused and gazed thoughtfully out the window. Ten minutes, I thought. That’s all I ask. Ten minutes of silence, nothing more. Then Chris’s eyes turned back to me, glowing with intensity.
‘Do you think the Buddha really achieved enlightenment? He must have, mustn’t he?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this now,’ was all I said.
Eventually there were no more trains, no buses. We were somewhere. I can’t remember why we had travelled a gruelling day to reach this place – a small town in Poland after dark, with empty, streetlit streets – but this place had been our aim. Our speech slurred with exhaustion. Another room with twin beds, more cigarettes we didn’t need. But the border had been crossed.
And when we woke: the mountains.
Part 2
We tried to hitchhike out of town towards the distant mountain range, the mountains we had come to climb. The Carpathians. The Tatras. No cars stopped for us. Just blank pink faces staring back. We walked slowly down the road, our thumbs at the ready. We were in fine spirits with the sunshine and the trees, away from the flatness of the steppe, with the promise of high ground ahead. Eventually a car slowed down and a hand waved through the window. A skinny man with a moustache. His name was Piotr, he announced. A crucifix hung from his rear-view mirror. At first the ride went well. But soon he stopped at a petrol station and we had to buy his fuel. Then he stopped at a shop and we had to buy his beer. Every few miles he would think of reasons to demand more cash. He wanted food. Cigarettes. He grew petulant and angry. His whining, persecuted voice twisted into nastiness, and when we said this was far enough he refused to stop the car, just sped on, ignoring us, complaining bitterly all the while, claiming that we were using him. We had no idea where he was going. Were we being kidnapped? He named a fee, which we refused. The atmosphere was horrible. At last he skidded to a halt and ordered us to get out. He swore at us and drove away. It was good to see the back of him. We had no ride, but we were free. Piotr. What a wanker.
Did we thumb another lift? I really can’t remember. By some means, that afternoon we reached the town of Zakopane, the gateway to the Tatra range. Wooden chalets, shingled roofs, pine trees on the slopes above. The evening sky was blue and clear. The next day it was pouring.
We climbed in rain through dripping trees, out of the trees, over dripping rocks. The sky was grey. We walked in cloud. There was nothing of a view. At last we reached a mountain hut that had been built by the communists, a sturdy stone-walled feasting hall. It was full of dripping people. There were bowls of hunter’s stew, sauerkraut and sausages, foaming pints of strong red beer. We slept among snoring bodies.
The next day began with rain again. The stone path stretched away. We followed spots of red and white daubed on rocks along the trail, heading for a higher hut. The rain stopped and the wind began. It was colder than we’d expected. Suddenly we came to snow. We hadn’t been expecting snow. It was summer down below. Up here it was winter. Then we found ourselves on ice. We were not prepared for ice. I didn’t even have hiking boots, just worn-away Doc Martens. My grip kept slipping on the rocks. There was still a lot of up to go. The cold wind hurt my ears. Up we went, up and up. Then it began to blizzard. The snow fell upwards, from below, surging in the rising wind, frosting the backs of our heads. Chris didn’t have a hat. Neither of us had gloves. My fingers hurt. We carried on. Now the snow was ankle-deep. The trail got only steeper. Then we came to metal chains bolted into the rock walls, a via ferrata, which we used to haul ourselves hand over fist. The path grew steeper, narrower. And the light was fading. The wind was rising to a gale, snow hammered down and stung our eyes, there was ice everywhere. We should go back, I thought. But going back was perilous. There wasn’t time. We’d climbed too high. The only thing was to go on. My stomach dropped with fear. We could die, I thought. It was a possibility. I took a step and slipped again. My fingers had grown so numb I could hardly hold the chains. The mountain now seemed monstrous, ice and rock, rock and chains, the screaming wind, nowhere to hide. To my right, a deadly void. One slip, that would be it. I realised I was panicking, not thinking straight, not looking at my feet, moving clumsily, hurrying to outrun my fear. Chris had been silent all this time. I forced myself to pause.
‘Are you a bit scared?’ I asked, glancing back at Chris. He scowled, as if it were a trick.
‘Are you not scared?’ he demanded.
‘Yes, I’m pretty scared,’ I said.
‘Me too.’
Huge relief. Somehow those words saved us.
Until that point both of us had been walking silently, not admitting to ourselves that we were scared and struggling. Once we’d spoken it out loud the fear became smaller. Now we talked constantly, a reassuring litany, as connecting as those metal chains: ‘Watch out for that rock, it’s loose,’ ‘There’s ice there,’ ‘More ice there,’ ‘Carefully here, it’s slippery.’ We talked ourselves up the mountain. The path of chains came to an end and there were walls of snow above. The light was fading rapidly. We walked in a stinging blizzard. A sense of dread came over me that we would never find our way, that this journey would not end. That last stretch seemed impossible. We reached a curving crest of snow. Ahead there were two people.
They moved like yetis, silhouettes, lumbering away from us. In moments they were out of sight, but they left their footprints. We tracked the path they had made through the deep drifted snow, exalted, no longer lost. Their trail led to the mountain hut that we were looking for.
Through a fog of sauerkraut, wet boots, warm bodies, melting snow, woodsmoke, sweat and alcohol, we collapsed into cosiness. We slurped on bowls of hunter’s stew and drank strong red beer. The stew was spicy and intense, with bits of cured sausage chewy with lumps of fat. It tasted better than anything I had ever had before. The beer went down easier than anything I had ever drunk. After one glass we were heroes.
Already we were telling stories of the things that we had seen, the places we had travelled through, inventing our own legacy. That woman in the scarlet dress. That one night in Lviv. Piotr. The electric train. That path of ice, and the moment – as I had glanced back at Chris – when I had snapped him on my phone, a photo of him standing there with nothing but a sheer drop inches from his boot, that boot resting on a rock that was clearly loose, about to slip. The fear apparent on his face. All around, a howling void. Are you not scared? It might have been the last image anyone ever saw of him, my broken phone discovered next to two thawed skeletons next spring. We laughed and joked about it now, with hunter’s stew to keep us warm, but at moments it hit home. The aftershock. We drank more beer. We smoked and told our stories.
It snowed heavily that night. We awoke to brilliant skies. Everything was blue and white, crystals sparkling everywhere, plump contours of untrampled snow. No wind. Not a cloud in sight. As we left the hut we trampled fresh tracks through the snow. Mountains soared on every side, gleaming in the morning light. We ran and slid, tobogganed on our bodies down the virgin slopes. We sang songs and took photographs. The Tatras! We were here. The trail ran up, down and across, between the mountains, under them. The red and white spots led us on. We had no fear that morning.
Above us towered Rysy, the highest mountain in the range, grey and triple-summited, with Slovakia beyond. By the time we reached its base it was afternoon. A rocky, upwards-leading path like a broken flight of stairs. Chris had trouble with his knee. The gradient was painful. Again we hadn’t been prepared. Non-preparation was our theme. Of course we came to ice again. My useless boots kept sliding. The feel of ice beneath my boots, the sight of ice ahead of us, the certainty of more ice on the sheerer slopes above – my body tingled with fear, the aftershock resurfacing. We were warned yesterday. We might not be warned again. We climbed as high as we could, a little further than we dared, perhaps two thirds of the way up. It was enough. We had arrived. We found a place to sit. We made a little ceremony. Both of us spoke some words. Chris said a prayer. We shared a final cigarette and tipped the rest of the tobacco out across the mountainside, watched it vanish in the wind. We gave a little of our food. Small offerings and thanks. Rysy. The Tatra Mountains. Poland, the Ukrainian steppe. Romania beyond the river, distant now in memory. From there we could look back and see them all.
Below the mountain is a lake, Morskie Oko. It means ‘Eye of the Sea’. Deep blue, with a turquoise fringe. Pine forest sloping down. Having made our offerings we descended to its shore, took off our clothes and jumped in. It was so cold it hurt. I only managed ten or twenty seconds before clambering out, my body stinging in the sun, pink and painfully alive, but Chris did his deep-breathing thing, slowed down his metabolism, floated there in meditation or in semi-hibernation, breathing slowly in and out, gazing at the sky.
Legend says that Morskie Oko is connected to the sea by an underwater passageway, that shipwrecks and gleaming treasures surface after distant storms. If we had dived deep enough we might have swum back to England. And in a few more days we would be back there, in our lives, in London, doing other things. No longer adventuring. No longer crossing borders.
But for now we are here. This exists and nothing else. The lake. Rysy in the sun. We have more roads ahead of us, and a glass of strong red beer.
For photo credits see original piece