2012 Travels: Kiev & Crimea
Kiev is a pleasant city, and we enjoyed our time there. It is not full of tourist attractions, though there are a couple of religious sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The city is on the Dnieper River, and is located on both sides of the river. The west bank is the main city and the east bank is the smaller side. I wouldn’t imagine that the average visitor would go over there. In the middle of the river, they have several islands. At some point way back when, they had the foresight to keep these islands as parkland, such that today these islands are the jewel of the city. They have beaches, and since it was hot we went over there to check it out. The beaches were packed, and people were swimming in the river. In one place, they built an outdoor gym with the most unique weightlifting equipment I have ever seen. This stuff was re-purposed farm equipment or something. Pretty cool but most of us would have a learning curve figuring out how to use the stuff. Still, it was impressive and a neat thing for a city to have such positive living conditions.
In general, that was the thing we liked best about Kiev. It is a modern, very livable city with a standard of living much higher than the rest of the country. We whiled away afternoons just relaxing in the parks at the beer kiosks, which stand as one of the most civilized things about this corner of Europe. They have a lot of different beer choices, including draught, and you can spent a long time trying them all. They sell food, too. And nobody gets stupid drunk at these places. They just relax, drink a couple of beers in a great setting, and move on.
Speakings of moving on, we next needed to visit Crimea. This began with an epic train ride overnight to Simferopol, which is the capital of Crimea and by all accounts a pretty forgettable place. We actually felt pretty good getting off the train, something that was not necessarily going to last. For some reason, perhaps masochism, we decided to take the world’s longest trolleybus ride for the 79km from Simferopol to Yalta. At first, all went smoothly and we were pretty happy with our decision. We crossed over the pass to get over the Crimea Mountains and were greeted with stunning views of cliffs, vineyards and the Black Sea.
Then, coming into the town of Alushka, we got stuck in some truly awful traffic. The roads in that part of Crimea are single lane, and even though this area has been touristed for 100 years, these roads were clearly not intended to see the kind of traffic that they do in a typical modern summer. We rotted on the pavement outside of Alushka for about an hour, lurching two or three inches at a time, all the while vehicles not attached to overhead electrical wires going by us. They were stuck, too, just not as badly nor for as long. We found ourselves in a similarly awful traffic jam outside of Yalta itself. What was intended as a 2 ½ hour bus ride took five hours. We were not amused, and probably would not make the same decision again.
Yalta has a number of sites, but dealing with them can be a bit of grind. Most tourists are Russian, and many of these bring their own cars. For chumps like us without cars, and unwilling to deal with driving around there anyway, we can either hire a driver (expensive nuisance) or take the local jitney transport (cheap nuisance). This system, the marshrutka, is not all bad. In some places, I find it works better than scheduled municipal busses. But sometimes they are worse, like when the minibus to all the tourist sites in town only leaves once every twenty minutes. You have a waiting line of over one full bus, and then you’re crammed into the thing like sardines. And as always in most parts of the world, there is always room for a few more passengers.
Our mission was to get to the top of the mountains, which involved a long line for the cable car. At the top, it was totally in fog and we couldn’t see a thing. So we actually wasted a few hours and a lot of money to see fog and get hassled by touts selling all manner of stupid junk.
The next day was more successful, because we cut the marshrutka out of the equation and took a boat to the famous Swallow’s Nest, basically a mock castle perched a cliff overlooking the sea. The setting is pretty, but it was more the scenic boat ride that we appreciated.
After Yalta, we went to Sevastopol. The highlight here is Balaklava Bay. Yes, this is where the hats come from, as they were made for British troops that were there during the Crimean War in the 1860s. The other neat thing about this place is that it was the home to a secret nuclear submarine base during the USSR days. We took a tour by boat, and it went through the base, under the mountain, to where the exit to the Black Sea is. You don’t get to see secret bunkers very often, so this was a pretty cool experience.
The nearby town of Bakhchysarai is a town populated by Crimean Tatars, who are descendants of the Turkic peoples who had arrived there during the Golden Horde days of the Crimean Khanate. The Crimean Khanate was one of the leftover empires that succeeded Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Bakhchysarai itself has the Khan’s Palace, where the local ruler lived. It has Turkish food, and the Crimean Tatars also have a unique pale kvas that is unlike any other I’ve tasted. It seemed like maybe a cross between kvas and kefir, but even that is only a loose descriptor.
Also in Bakhchysarai is an old cliff town and cemetery of the Karaite people. These are a tribe of Israel, who left before the Torah was written, meaning that they are pre-Torah Jewish people. They identify, I suppose, mostly as their own culture, but their unique history allows for that.
Next stop, Odessa.
