December 16-17: Journey to Khmelnytsky, Ukraine
Grigore and Lena took me to the train station in Chisinau and put me on the overnight train. Somehow I lucked out—I had the entire kupe’ (a 4-bed compartment) to myself.
I was a little more nervous about this trip than past trips into Ukraine because it was my first time crossing the border into Ukraine under Ukraine’s new “visa free regime” for Americans. I knew someone who had flown to Kyiv and entered the country without a visa with no problem, but I’d heard stories about train crossings between Azerbaijan and Georgia. It was supposed to be possible to get a visa on the spot, but the person ended up having to pay a bribe to the border police above and beyond that in order to cross the border. One person refused to pay and held up the train for seven hours as a result. Kashmar! (What a nightmare!)
Fortunately, the only surprise on my trip across the border was a visit from the Transdinistrian border police; for the first time in my travels, they collected a 6-lei (50 U.S. cent) border-crossing fee. Transdnistria is an impoverished sliver of land between the Dnister River and the Ukrainian border. It was part of Moldova until 1992, when it started a war with Moldova and created its own border and its own flag. It’s also considered a good place to store or smuggle guns and other illegal goods. Eventually, it wants to be a part of the Russian Federation. I doubt that is going to happen.
In the morning, I ordered tea from the providnik (train car conductor). To me there is something poetic about sitting on a Ukrainian train, listening to the clickety-clack of the wheels on the tracks, looking out the window at the miles of snowy plains I’m passing, and drinking tea in a tall glass with a silver glassholder.
I arrived in Vinnitsya at 9:30 a.m. Normally I would have gotten off an hour and a half earlier in Zhmerinka, an east-west north-south train junction. As Grigore says jokingly, “All roads don’t lead to Rome. They lead to Zhmerinka.” However, when I checked the train times online, there was no connection from my overnight train to another train going to Khmelnytsky. My friend Tina told me there are elektrichkas (regional trains that run on electricity) that go between Zhmerinka and Khmelnytsky, but no one knew the schedule and I didn’t want to be stuck sitting in Zhmerinka for hours on end. I knew in Vinnitsya I could catch a taxi to the bus station and then catch a bus to Khmelnystky; they run at pretty regular intervals and only take two hours.
When I got off the train in Vinnitsya, I was surprised there were no taxi drivers waiting on the platform. In the past they were always there when you didn’t need them. Now that I was hauling a 50-pound bag of winter clothes, teaching materials, and gifts for friends, they were nowhere to be found. I ended up lugging the big bag down the stairs to the underground platform passage and back upstairs again to the exit. Not only did no one offer to help me, one man in passing said, “you should use the ramps”. There are special polished concrete ramps for carts with wheels, but I could not figure out how to get and keep my bag and myself on it.
Finally, at the train station exit, I found a taxi driver willing to take me across town to the bus station. I got really lucky—he took me to directly to the bus platform, and the bus took off about 5 minutes after I got on it. I was able to buy my ticket directly on the bus; I didn’t have to go to the kassa and get one.
About 40 minutes into the journey, I felt a need to go to the bathroom. There are no bathrooms on Ukrainian buses. I tried to ignore it, even when we stopped for another 20 minutes 50 yards from a gas station while the driver and assistant fixed something that was wrong with the bus engine. After we started moving again, I asked when we could stop for a bathroom break. They said not for another half an hour. After another 15 minutes, I said, “could we stop here?” He said, “5 more minutes.” Of course, In Ukraine, “5 more minutes” translates into American English as anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours. I felt like an idiot with my constant asking and tapping my feet like a three year old. I imagined the other passengers on the bus were getting impression that foreigners don’t know how to hold their pee. I asked myself, what happened to the girl who used to pride herself on her “biological control” in Ukraine? The girl who once took a 15-hour train ride from Kharkiv to Odessa and didn’t use the bathroom once?
When the bus finally pulled into a town bus station, I walked as fast as I could to the bus station outhouse. It was a dirty, concrete hole in the floor with no lights and no door (there was a wall for privacy from the rest of the station). Snow flurries were drifting in. On my normal bathroom rating scale, it would have received zero stars, but at that moment it was the best bathroom I’d seen in my life.
Tags: bathrooms, bus, Chisinau, Train, Travel, Ukraine
admin
Leave a Reply