First I had to get there - Hitchiking to Kiev part 2

After leaving Marius I tried hitching for a bit but it was getting dark and I was tired, I walked a short way into the fields, put up my tent and slept. Next day found me worried, this was a pretty poor place really, all the traffic was heading to Warsaw, and I wanted to go onto the ring road. I worried again, stuck stuck stuck. The only escape would be to accept a lift into the city and public transport out again south, another horrendous waste of time. There were many lorries here but none with a Ukrainian numberplate - I saw Russian, Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian. I was in the wrong place, this much was clear. Regret, regret.

A red van came chugging past with Ukrainian numberplate. It stopped! And here was Igor, driving slowly from Poland to home, taking his time about it, fiddling with the GPS as if he didn't understand it. He'd been away for 3 months, driving lorries across the EU, now he had two weeks at home before going back to work again.

We had trouble communicating, Google Translate didn't seem to work as smoothly, there were basic misunderstandings about where he was going, where I wanted to get out. There was a lot of silence but that was OK. I was exhausted, kept slipping into sleep, bundling my jacket up against the cold window as Igor smoked incessantly out of the other, heater blaring sauna air against my knees. We were driving to Lublin and then stopping for an hour, he said. But when we got there the GPS address was wrong, it was a town another 50 minutes away. I drifted in and out, aware I was sleeping too much but unable to keep my eyes open.

We arrived in the place, a house on the edge of a village, I knew not where. Igor reversed in and got out and I spent 1.5 hours waiting as darkness fell, watching the moon rise from the front of the van as Igor and a fat man did unknown important man van mechanic things in the yard behind. I watched their movement in the mirror and wondered if I should feel worried. There I was in a village in rural Poland, with 2 Ukrainian men and no idea what they were saying to each other, plus only a vague idea that one of them was heading to Ukraine. I felt no fear though, I had fully given myself over to the vagaries of the journey. Igor had given me no reason to mistrust him, with his large brown eyes and thick whiffly moustache. He shared food with me, bread, meat, cucumber and tomato. Then, long after we left the mechanic, he stopped to buy more bread and sausage. We talked about where he was going. He was worried about taking me across the border - do you have a passport? Visa?
I assured him there would be no problem. But for me, he said, they will ask questions about why an English person is in the car. "Ok, then I will get out when you tell me and cross the border on foot, find another car on the other side." We nodded, it was set. He would arrive at the border after midnight, I knew I would have a hard night finding somewhere to camp in the dark but there was nothing else for it.

I faded in and out of sleep, it got later and later. Igor rubbed his eyes, he was suffering too. He pulled over, 30km from the border. "Pausa. I sleep." I couldn't get out and leave him here, it was too far for me to walk to the border and I'd never get another lift. "Do you want me to get in the back?" I said. He made non-committal noises, leaned back to sleep sitting up. I decided to wait for him to say what next. The next thing he did was to fold over towards where I was sitting, lay his head on my thigh and curl across two seats. I smiled in surprise, it was a nonsexual move, he didn't touch or stroke me, in fact he was asleep within 30 seconds. It was deeply sweet. I rested my hand on his shoulder and dozed against the window. It was a natural thing to do.

He woke after an hour, stretched and yawned and we continued towards the border. I was struggling to stay awake, trying to keep alert for the final Polish village. It passed in a long blink and suddenly here we were approaching the bright lights and line of traffic of the borderline. I waited for Igor to say something as we inched forward and eventually grabbed the phone.
"Do you want me to get out"
"You can stay"
"Thank you"

We looked each other in the eye and nodded. He'd slept on my knee, we were a team now.

There was a long wait at the border, people getting out of their cars, walking, smoking. Bright lights in the distance, a bus disembarked, people in greydark clothing milling around the building. I felt nervous, checked the Internet for my entrance conditions one more time. Passports were handed over, taken away into a building, come back, pass over the river to Ukraine, cars inching. Igor cannot turn his van off, the battery won't charge, so we idle, even when he stops to sleep. We get out to stand at the blacked out window, be inspected; I see my reflection squinting and the deeper shape of the big bald man, sausage fingers, looking at me, about 6 other people watching as they wait their turn. It's done, I'm in, I'm actually here in Ukraine.

We drove ahead into pitch black roads, no streetlights, it was 5am. The roads were immediately worse, the buildings shabbier. It reminded me of Bulgaria and I saw how much richer Poland was in comparison. I wanted to stay awake to see the sunrise as we drove east but could feel myself sleeping again. Igor was the same. There was a faint light in the sky as he pulled into a lay by in the first town we came to, derelict concrete buildings to either side. I slapped my thigh in invitation and laughed and he curled up once again. This time we slept for 1.5 hours.

The remaining drive was a relaxing 5 hours through rural Ukraine., we were on one of the main highways but the tarmac was cracked and pitted, vehicles swoosh in and out around the potholed and bumpy road edges, ages ranging from tin box rusted Ladas to brand new Mercedes and audis. The houses we passed were old; Poland seems to be full of new houses, the country transformed in the last 20 years. Here there are wooden cabins, wood darkened with age, each small bungalow, a door between two windows, in its own square of land, sometimes carefully tended, sometimes bushy and trailing. There are people in surprising places, walking alongside the road edge, no pavement, old men shuffling, carrying bundles of plastic bags, or squatted women beside a tray of foraged fungus, roadside mushroom sales.
Occasionally I spy a cohort of babushka. The babusha is easy to spot, she stands out - short, stout and skirt wearing, a scarf is tied over her head and she has a stupendous bosom. Something incredible is happening to older women's breasts in rural Ukraine, some fantastical piece of engineering is cantilevering their frontage high and proud. Like the Madonna cone bra but less pointy, it laughs in the face of gravity and, as possessor of my own slowly descending ample endowment I am, frankly, jealous.

Igor and I chat about nothing in particular. He asks if he could get work as a boat mechanic in the UK and I tell him I don't know, and in any case it's really tough to get a work visa. He thinks that the UK is part of the Schengen Agreement and I tell him no.
"We sit separate on our island and we think we are kings."
"But the king is naked" he says through the phone translation, and I shoot him a sharp smile of acknowledgement.

Eventually we reach Zhytomyr and the road splits, Igor must turn south for Vinnytsia and I will head for Kiev, now only 200 km away. I offer him a hand to shake, unsure of how a hug would be regarded, and he opens his arms for a wonderful squeeze of a hug. He was a great guy, large framed with bumbling strength. My first Ukrainian interaction.

I am left at a great spot, the gas station at the beginning of the main highway off the Zhutomyr ring road. People stare at me as I walk through to the bathroom, squeezing between crowded shelves feeling bulky in my rucksack, clacking my sticks against the ground. No wonder, my hair was all over the place, 4 days since my last shower and I feel it. I did my best in the cramped and leaky bathroom, washing my face and scraping my hair back, then proceeded to the kerb at the exit.

It was a wide, open road, blue sky and small clouds, very little slip road from the gas station as the traffic doesn't get fast enough to need avoiding so I was standing almost on the side of the motorway. There was a huge metal framed arch crossing all six lanes, carrying the logo of the gas station, it felt like a triumphant state sculpture and I was small here, dwarfed by it.

Here I was by the side of the road again and nothing to do but wait, unsure if I'd be able to speak a single shared word with the people who stopped for me. It was 1pm, I'd been with Igor 22 hours and had slept for maybe six at most, same for the third night in a row. I watched and waited, cars passing, holding up an arm for each of them, keeping steady, keeping a smile on my face, unsure of how hitchhiking is treated in this country.

After maybe 20 minutes a jeep pulled in. Shades, baseball cap, takeaway coffee. We can speak English, he said, I live in USA. He was my age, pockmarked cheeks and blonde hair. Ivan talked a lot, very money focused, property owner in Ukraine, discussing business deals to buy more land to build on, telling me how many cars he had, his income, the important jobs his friends had. He was a little abrasive and talked more than he listened, but it was interesting enough and only 90 minutes to Kiev. He came here once a year for a month at a time, balancing his businesses in each country to allow it. He talked about politicians, their massive ownership of private business, the two recent revolutions Ivan had played his small part in protesting. Here was a man who was 14 when Ukraine left the Soviet Union and, in the economic free-for-all that followed, is taking full part in the race for new riches. If I'm making him sound unkind he certainly wasn't, just not someone I might choose to be friends with.

As we approached the city, the road dipped down and rose up again, and I saw a broad city avenue stretching a mile ahead, skyscrapers. Here I was, the place I'd been aiming for for so long. I am going to the centre, said Ivan, how about you? "I will go to see a friend in Podil, an outlying district, and will contact him when I arrive." And this is where Ivan became incredibly helpful. We used his phone to call my contact and when they couldn't host me because I'd arrived a day earlier than expected, he took me to central Kiev to buy a Ukrainian sim. We parked outside his apartment and he bought me a coffee, told me he'd trained as a doctor despite now working as a long distance lorry driver in the US. "I can earn almost the same without studying and paying more for my medical certificate and working many many hours in a hospital. To become a doctor you must become hard or the pain of others will overtake you and I don't want this." I nodded, thinking of my doctors in the UK, blank faced and benign in the face of the 20 appointments they would see in clinic that day, the 20 life stories, the 20 faces waiting for good or bad news and I understood.

This kind man took me on a tour of his city for no reason at all, we whirled past St Sofia's Cathedral, the motherland statue, tall dark embassies and government buildings, small parks, the jeep wheels rattling on ancient cobbles. He took me over the wide quiet river Dneiper to the suburbs and back again, showing me river beaches, summer amusements. Ivan was constantly throwing out information, about who owned what, stories of corruption, arson, stories of his friends growing up. He gestured to a patch of high rise apartments - "here used to be summer houses, we would come here to drink and swim in the river. Then they sold all, once the land became precious." It was breathtaking, to be driven around this huge city, not just to arrive, tired and in confusion, desperate searching for an Internet cafe to get access to hostel information, trudge through the streets to find it, but to come here like this, to whirl over bridges with the sun shining on banks of high rise apartments.

Ivan took me to the hostel and again, we shook hands. I sincerely thanked him while trying not to seem too earnest. He had made the end of this long journey incredibly easy. Then into the hostel. Too excited to sleep but eventually, after a much needed shower and meal, I did.
I had arrived in Kiev, this was the beginning of the adventure.

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