The Long and Winding Road

For the final leg of my journey through this region I chose to go by road. It was a trip that I had done before, from Kiev to Rivne and Lviv. I went with Kyryl, our office administrator, and Victor, trusty driver.

I knew what was coming. The first time I did this trip to Rivne, Victor, who speaks little English, and I (whose Ukrainian and Russian is very shaky) faced some long silences. But Victor produced a tape of the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction and we reminisced; since then, whenever I get in the car at the airport he tunes into the radio station Nostalgie, and we rock into Kiev accompanied usually by eighties tunes.

Anyway, the two of them had obviously done a deal and they were both ready with CDs; a couple of Beatles albums including Abbey Road, an Elton John Greatest Hits, a sixties compilation, a Wings (Wings!!) album and a Rolling Stones CD. Nothing under 25 years old, it seemed. And so we went on our way.

The route is a straightforward one; one of the great arteries of Europe, the E40 which starts in Ostend and goes fairly straight to Rostov on Don. Our bad fortune is that the Western Ukrainian portion is almost totally being re-laid in time for Euro 2012; I have never been in a 300km contraflow before. So instead of being a straightforward breeze down a good road it was quite a struggle.

We called in at Rivne where the hospitality of the lab manager Tatyana has been unequalled over the years. (By the way, if it was Minsk it was Ludmilla. If it’s western Ukraine it’s Tatyana. The head of the labs in Rivne and Lviv are Tatyana. We were met in Rivne by my interpreter……Tatyana. So no problem remembering names here). And so on to Lviv. We arrived late, but early enough to complete our work by the day’s end, looking forward to a walk around Lviv.

You must visit this city, one of the great treasurers of Eastern Europe; a completely intact Hapsburg city, mercifully untouched by the war. It is, deservedly, a World Heritage Site and has a very special atmosphere. It also has great food, which we all celebrated with in an end-of-term meal in a cellar restaurant, ending up with pudding and Irish Coffees at a pavement restaurant on the way back to the hotel.

And so, the next day we had to make the journey back, another 7 hours of contraflow. And of course the continuing attentions of the Ukrainian traffic police. They are everywhere, and people will tell you that when you are stopped you can negotiate a direct payment of a few Euros rather than have a fine on your licence. I don’t know about that, but it’s a real cat and mouse game, with drivers warning you of oncoming traps as you drive through villages.

But Victor was a victim of a real piece of resourcefulness by this particular police group. We had been warned of a trap and lowered our speed, and as we passed through we saw the police, seemingly stopping only lorries. Past the trap we sped out of the village, but there was a second one in wait! The upshot is that Victor has a fixed penalty notice, which he regards as the fortunes of war.

By the way, I know that Long and Winding Road isn't on Abbey Road, and the Lviv-Kiev road is as straight as a die, but it seemed appropriate at the time.