This is all a bit post dated! We have not connected to the internet for a while and have been travelling a lot so there is plenty to catch up on…

The Nazi concentration camp complex near Krakow is an excellent reminder of peoples’ weakness. The two of the three main camps that are complete and accessible as a museum cover an area which took us an entire afternoon to meerly brush over. The monsterous size of it really hits home that one person did not create the thing or even dictate its construction, it must have taken an army just to dream it up. We spent an afternoon walking up and down lines of barbed wire taking in brutal examples of practical solutions and efficiency. The area is dead flat and the needle sharp wind has a lot of run up before it thumps you, this made it cold in the sunshine of October with a fleece on, let alone in January when its snowing and you’re naked.

We decided not to try that particular experience. Having organised an exciting place to stay in Berlin with our favourite social website we carried on West. The EU’s contribution to Poland (apart from providing work) is the superb roadside lorry parking facilities. The toilet was so nice and the mirror so effective that I promptly shaved the majority of my ginger beard off with a blunt razor. The nice attendant man even filled up three gallon water containers for me whilst I was doing it!

The roads have suddenly got a lot better and the scale on our map has increased; this means we suddenly seem to be travelling much faster! Krakow was amazing despite the drab background. We walked pretty much the entire city in search of a launderette before spotting one advertised: “The only Launderette in Krakow” it said. We reckon its the only one East of Krakow too as our washing was beginning to walk by itself! Make sure you visit this launderette if you go to Krakow with dirty washing (not that you’ll have a lot of choice), it serves coffee and tea and there is free internet and comfy sofas in a bright and inviting environment!

So, after our 2 weeks of travelling by train it was great to be back in the van and have some freedom back. As L’viv is fairly close to the border with Poland (our next destination) we envisaged a couple of hours driving then maybe an hour or so going through the usual formalities to leave Ukraine and enter Poland. We had no such luck.

After enjoying our 2 hours of freedom driving west at 1pm we hit a queue full of Polish and Ukrainian vehicles, which we guessed to be the border crossing. We were instantly offered the chance (using a combination of Ukrainian, charades and pictionary) to queue-jump: only 30 dollars/euros/hryvnia (we had several offers from several different dodgy-looking guys). Being cheap and also from Britain – where queue-jumping is considered a social evil – we naturally refused their persistent offers. We were told therefore we’d have to queue for maybe 10 hours (until 11pm) to get to the border – we assumed they were probably exaggerating but still, this we could deal with.

After witnessing a frustrating number of other people paying to push in further up the queue and having lunch and dinner in the van it was dark and we started taking turns in getting some sleep on the bed in the back of the van. After 3 hour shifts through the night we finally made it to the Ukrainian exit border at 6am after a wait of 17 hours. (The queue from when we joined it to the front was only about 140 cars and maybe 500m long, so our average speed was an impressive 29 metres an hour!) Here we had the van thoroughly searched for the first time on the trip and then queued a further 7 hours waiting to get to the Polish frontier 200 metres away.

The shining, golden gates of the EU were so close! When we got to the Polish border we joined the queue for EU citizens (which of course the cheating, queue-jumping Ukrainians couldn’t get into. ha) and were through in minutes after a quick check and showing some photos of our trip to the Polish customs guy! I love the EU.

Total time to cross the border: 26 hours. Total distance covered: 1,500 metres.

The cost of Moscow and trains and actually PAYING for accommodation eventually got to my (Will’s, obviously) student budgeting psyche, it is definitely time to head back Nevilwards.

On the way back to the car park in L’viv we made a weekend stop in Kiev to complement our tour of former Soviet capitals. Making more use of couch surfing we stayed with a guy called Alexey who lives in a wicked central flat with his girlfriend and a small kitten (called tit). Alexey was a great host and after meeting us from the station and feeding us showed us the sites of Kiev. The city is a lot less rectangular than Minsk and Moscow and the architects steered clear of the “bigger is better” mentality, there are also hills and we found the top of one with a great park and views over the river and Dinamo Kiev’s stadium. As with the rest of Eastern Europe Saturday seems to be getting married day. We shared our park with about seven or eight individual happy couples, all followed by an entourage of photographers, film crews, friends, relatives, small dogs and mother inlaws. It was great fun, Ben managed to get three brides in one photo.

In the evening we found our favourite Ukrainian cafeteria chain, “Pazata Khata”, before Alexey took us down several dark alleys; all of which seemed to have trendy hidden bars at the end! Sunday was once more grey, so we went to the beach on the river and had a beer. Some guy was swimming! or maybe he was washing… The grey skies have recently prompted Ben to say, and I quote, “I’m definitely not going to complain about the weather as much when I get back home… well not in Autumn or Spring anyway.” You heard it here first.

We left Kiev on the night train for L’viv with a good overall impression. The city had a weekend quiet about it, but there were lots of people in the bars and cafes despite the seemingly empty streets. There are some tastefully grand Orthodox churches and the President lets you walk right outside his house! For a change everyone was friendly and patient at our inventive communication skills; rarely using language, masters of pictionary.

Although I’d (Ben) heard about Couchsurfing before neither of us had ever used it. Jose (an Aussie we picked up and stayed with us for a while in the van in Bosnia) was using it while trying to travel as cheaply as possible back to Australia from the UK, so we thought we’d look into it. We eventually got around to using it in Moscow and, as mentioned in our last post, after less than 5 minutes of talking to her at a couchsurfing party were invited by Sasha to stay with her! For a first experience it couldn’t have been better. Although she only lives in a very small apartment with one small room, a kitchen and a bathroom she still finds space on her floor to people from couchsurfing.

Housing (and living in general) in Moscow is possibly even more expensive than in London. Fortunately the vast majority of people own their apartments as a result of the fact that in Soviet-times housing was provided for everyone by the state, but food prices can get ridiculous at times. In one supermarket full of standard western food I found a small packet of ‘Kellogg’s Special K’ for EIGHT POUNDS!! I guess the large number of shiny expensive black cars on the roads is some indication that maybe this isn’t so expensive to quite a few people who live in Moscow.

Moscow is a crazy place, even more so for us having driven through eastern Europe where everything is cheap and tourism is welcomed. At times it was almost as if foreigners aren’t wanted there. Official prices for all sorts of things can be ten times more for a foreigner (or non-Russian speaker) than for others. To get into the Kremlin it was 2 pounds for Russians or 13 pounds for “foreigners”. This is standard across most museums and anything else you have to spend money on in Moscow. Fair enough if they need the money, but Moscow did not seem a particularly poor place.

Other things that we found only in Moscow

• every government official (there are a lot of them) appear to have one of those expensive-always-black cars but they get to have a blue light on their roof which seemingly gives them the right to drive anywhere at any speed irrespective of other cars or pedestrians!
• novel tactics for extracting money from tourists such as old women asking for you to have your photo taken with her and her monkey who’s dressed/buried in a bright pink coat
• the army/militia are everywhere
• a refusal by some to even acknowledge you if you don’t speak Russian (even the French don’t go this far!)…

During our last couple of days we spent in the most amazing museum – the Polytechnical museum: scale models of everything from Soviet nuclear power stations to Soviet spacecraft to Soviet coal mines! Surely everyones favourite museum. We were also treated to a comprehensive four-hour walking tour of Moscow by Sasha’s friend Olga including a visit to the ’skylounge’ restaurant/bar for a drink and the impressive view it has of the city from the 13th floor. The view was nice (despite the low cloud!) but an espresso cost 4 pounds! Obviously we didn’t stay there long.

Moscow was great, the couchsurfing made it much more interesting for us as we met some ‘real’ people. Despite the fact that a visa costs 100 pounds I’ll definitely make it back one day. Next time though I’ll have to learn some Russian!

Ben’s photos from last three weeks up until leaving Moscow…

 http://bristol.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2134618&l=e89d5&id=193107027

 Will wrote this a week ago when we were in Moscow but couldn’t post it up so it’s a bit behind where we are now (Poland!)…

 I am slowly beginning to appreciate the inventive phonetic translations of many english and french words into cyrillic. My (Will’s)  name for example becomes beautifully foreign as it contains three sounds which just don’t exist in Russian; W, F and Th. Its ok though as they have exciting letters that more than make up for it, “the spider with two legs missing” (Ж) is my favourite .

We’re staying in HomefromHome hostel in a very central location in Moscow at the moment. Москва is excellent and everything is BIG. The buildings of the Red Square were impressive against the drab, nondescript grey sky, and almost alien when they were lit against the black night.  Mr. Putin was not in but Mr. Lenin was, much against his will it seems as he was locked away behind glass with some of the highest security I have ever encounted.

Last night we went to a house party with some Moscow “couch surfers” and met lots of people living, travelling through, studying and working in the city. I met Thomas from Toulouse, Tanya from Krasnojarsk in Siberia and Iakov from Georgia to mention a few. We have a couch to surf for tonight and the rest of the week with a very nice girl called Sasha.

Its worth mentioning that our plans changed somewhat upon hanging around in Lviv. We decided to leave the van in some “secure” parking (I certainly wouldn’t mess with the attendant, but you wouldn’t have to if you walked through a hole in the fence) in Lviv and complete a brief former USSR taster trip on the train. A number of reasons compelled us to leave Nevil out in the cold:

• It gives us a chance for a bit of a change. Experiencing Russian trains.
• A break from cold mornings
• Ensures we are totally broke upon return (not used to all this paying for accomodation lark and there are no hostels)
• We looked at a map

We’ve been in Moscow now for a couple of days and had nearly forgotten to write a post about Minsk, but have just found some spare time while waiting for Will and our second Canadian friend also called Nick to get out of bed!

Quite an interesting place Minsk: their president has pretty much made himself into a dictator (“president for life”) and they still have the state security service KGB which keeps close tabs on its citizens. Everything in Minsk is very clean and tidy and there are armies of cleaners and gardeners out all over the central streets.

It is the first city we’ve been to for a while which feels a little like a western city centre (clean, modern, decent roads with no holes/cracks, smart looking shops etc). Apart from their pedestrian-crossing militia who give you a bollocking (and apparently a fine if you can understand what they’re saying, which I couldn’t) for crossing an empty road when the pedestrian light doesn’t say you can cross, the bitter cold temperature and the over-regimented streets, Minsk was quite nice.

In a cafe we met a guy called Sasha who spoke very little English and had nothing to do, and after an hour or so of working through our phrasebook we arranged to meet up the next day for him to give us a tour of the city! Next day saw a museum and a really cool art gallery, I think one of my favourite visits to any art gallery. They like their arts here in Belarus/Russia – ballet, opera, music: there’s lots of it and, unlike in London, it’s dirt cheap.

We were planning on staying a couple more days in Belarus but we were both keen to get to Moscow where there’s much more to do. Also, as we’ve left the van in L’viv (Ukraine) for our travels through Belarus & Russia – had I mentioned that?! – it’s a lot more difficult to get out of the city and see the countryside. Therefore after two days and one night in Belarus and we set off for Moscow.

Belarus is relatively difficult travelling in without knowing any Russian as it is a difficult language and with the different alphabet too gets tiring after a while and can be hardwork. Moscow is not so difficult as there are quite a few English-speaking tourists but still, very few Russians speak any English. More to follow soon…

After our previous border crossing attempts, most of which since leaving western Europe have resulted in us parting with money or bottles of wine, we were a little apprehensive approaching the Ukrainian border. As with all the other border-crossing shenanigans we’ve had all would have gone smoothly if I (Ben) had sorted out international insurance properly. But since leaving Slovenia we’ve been effectively uninsured and so border officials have been a little wary of letting us enter the country. However, we tried our usual tactic of playing dumb and with a little bit of creative story-telling they eventually let us in.

After some jokes trying to work out what all the signs in cyrillic were pointing to (L’viv for example is spelt: лвов) we rolled off the road and parked up in a field for the night. Next day we made it to L’viv, the main city in western Ukraine. Tourism isn’t very big here and as a result there were no backpacking hostels to stay in with the usual collection of British, Aussies and Canadians to share travel tips and beers with. So instead we found a soviet-era hotel to stay at for 5 quid a night.

Although L’viv was visually very nice, there wasn’t much to do other than see yet more churches.

Because I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to write in sentences (just been on a long train journey into Belarus and am v tired) some observations about Ukraine…

-Almost all Ukrainians girls here massively overdo it with the makeup and the vast majority also wear uncomfortable-looking (presumably “fashionable”?) knee-length boots and black. Seems to work for the Ukrainian guys!
-The streets are hugely busy at all times of day and queues for the buses and trams are massive.
-A tram ride costs 5pence
-A (good) beer costs maximum 50pence
-Petrol/diesel is 40p/litre
-A meal costs a quid

Am sure I could think of more interesting things to say another time, but this will have to do for now!