april 26 th  

Sebastopol

In the Crimea, if you ask whether the wine is from the Ukraine, they'll tell you, "No, it's from here." For here, at the tip of this little peninsula, all eyes are first and foremost turned toward Russia. I should mention that the land was granted to the Ukraine only 50 years ago. It was an obvious choice geographically-speaking (hey, we have provided you with a map, dear readers), but everyone speaks Russian here and no one feels "Ukrainian". Hence, the Crimea enjoys a rather special status, one that entails a certain degree of autonomy. It isn't that they hate the Ukraine, it's just that the people who live here simply feel Russian. Especially in Sebastopol, a city that is teeming with Russian soldiers from the ships maintained by "big brother". So, it is best not to ask our hosts if their wine is Ukrainian. They will invariably reply that it is not! 

We happened across the young citizens who are our hosts hanging out by the roadside. We hadn't been in Sebastopol five minutes when, totally wiped out after crossing the first more rugged stretch of our trip, we came across a group of teenage bikers who were busy spitting on the tarmac and practising stunts on their bikes. We pulled to a halt to show off our most impressive stunt: how to keep two wheels and both feet on the ground and scratch your eyebrow at the same time. I'm not sure whether it was thanks to this stunning performance or not, but a few hours later here we are staying at one of their much older friend's house (age 22).

We have been given a wonderfully warm welcome: the friend and his girlfriend are like French city-folk just like ourselves. This is something of a relief after a longish stretch of small villages! We have been spending the day with them, being shown around Sebastopol, the city that swung the outcome of the Crimean War, which was won at the end of the 19th century by France, England and Turkey at the expense of the Russians. One of Napoleon III's aims was to impress the Turks in his bid to extend his influence over the Eastern Empire.

This break (the first of our trip so far!) will be brief. Tomorrow, we tackle the first mountainous stage, aiming to reach Yalta the day after! In the last four days, we have travelled 350 kilometres. It's exhausting. Just before this, we allowed ourselves around 150 km by coach. Two hours on the road seemed more like two days… The wind was unbelievably strong and we fell behind schedule.

  april 21 th  

Kherson, 

A warm wind


We left the main road to check out the more picturesque country roads. Between Nikolaïev and Kherson, we watched the sun set over this seaside village with its 3,000 inhabitants. Here the hardened vodka drinkers get started early - at around 10 in the morning. Nationwide, many men under the age of 30 die from alcohol abuse and the resulting demographic imbalance is not just a statistic: this is obvious by the number of women you can see any day of the week wearing mini-skirts and high heels in bars, in the streets and restaurants. Here, we are in a minority and I can assure you that not all minority groups in the world suffer from oppression!

In the village, there are also the good blokes, like Sacha, who, together with his mates, spent a couple hours fixing the broken wheel on Matthieu's bike, and his bicycle tube that had burst dramatically. He had lived in Portugal for a year and a half. So we chatted in Portuguese, because my Portuguese is about as good as my Russian. Then there were the old women who came and posed for us, proudly parading in front of such gorgeous young men and their offer of a glass of wine while waiting for Sacha to finish welding… Their headscarves (note that covering your head is not the subject of national debate in these parts), like the houses and tombs here, are incredibly colourful…

Then there was the super model family who put us up for the night. They pretended to eat with us because it was obvious that they had just finished supper when we arrived. The daughter, Katia, spoke a little English, and we are now beginning to make a modicum of sense in Russian: there were eight of us at the table and, what with their vodka and the Bordeaux that we had brought with us, we had a great time. The father, who has a moustache, divides his time between his fields and his livestock (which includes two or three pigs, two cows and some chickens), the mother teaches at the village school and the daughter is due to start at university next year, hoping to become a top businesswoman.

So, all's well in this warm and friendly setting. Apart from this atrocious wind that means we have to pedal hard, even going downhill! After four days on our bikes, our thighs are starting to ache and petty irritations are rising to the surface. Matthieu has given up smoking (compensated for by an ice-cream break every half-hour). He is better at pedalling than I am. I'm going to give him more stuff to carry because I feel like a pack-horse.

I'm writing this email from Kerson, a big town where the street lighting is minimalist. Which means that you can look up and see the stars…

  april 15th  

At least the Mafia isn't after me

A Ukrainian face-to-face with a bike is like a chicken faced with a carving knife. As soon as he sees one, sitting comfortably behind the steering wheel his car, he feels the need to sound the horn. Well, that's if you're lucky. More often than not, he acts as if you don't exist, cutting you up when he wants to turn, practically knocking you over in the narrow streets, etc… So, for the last week that I've been here in Odessa, I've been locking up my bike with a ridiculously small chain, which doesn't even reach around the front wheel. If this were Paris, the bike would have vanished faster than greased lightning, but here in this city which, apparently, is pretty much a Mafia stronghold, nothing could be safer. Your typical Ukrainian wouldn't know what to do with this strange apparatus which is the preserve of a mere handful of deviant children. 

All the same, I'm keeping my guard up because as in the series entitled “always nick useless stuff” someone stole my anti-theft locks (without the key, of course) on the train from Kiev to Odessa! I have since traipsed around every store in town looking for new padlocks. A guy in a shop that sells scooters (which seem to be about as popular as bikes) eventually promised he'd have one for me tomorrow morning, a U-shaped bicycle lock that ought to do the trick. But all the virile chaps in the shop laughed like hyenas as I described what I wanted: "As if anyone goes around carrying a pair of pliers to cut through bicycle chains!" I really wanted to tell them that this had already happened just a few hours from here by plane, but the longest sentence I've learned so far from my Assimil teach-yourself Russian course is: “Is your sister married?” And I haven't felt quite ready to move on to the next lesson as yet. 

While I'm on the subject, don't ever bother to learn Ukrainian, they practically all speak Russian! The government is trying very hard to encourage people to use the national language (recently, they narrowly avoided passing a new law making it compulsory to have ads in Ukrainian), but it isn't catching on at all, especially in the region that I'm about to travel across – the South. Apparently Ukrainian is more widely spoken in the West and in the more isolated villages. I'll keep you posted in future chronicles, but for now I just wanted to mention briefly one of the many paradoxes inherent in this nation that I can't wait to find out more about and tell you all about.

We'll be leaving Odessa tomorrow, to start the real journey by bike. Matthieu has just arrived... From now on, you'll have a chronicle once or twice a week.

  april 5th 

I began thinking about what to write for this first report one night when I found myself stuck in a dark corridor in a rather seedy building somewhere in Kiev. For ten months, I had been dreaming of wide open spaces while planning this trip, and suddenly, a few hours after arriving here in the Ukraine, there I was all alone in the dark with a broken bicycle.
It first began to dawn on me exactly how far anything and everything could go wrong when my flight was delayed for three and a half hours which would mean that I would arrive in the region of Chernobyl in the middle of the night. This was one more good reason to make friends with the French-loving guy sitting next to me on the plane who told me he had a friend who would be happy to put me up for the night. The friend in question was not exactly over the moon about the idea, from what I could gather, three hours later, from the phone conversations I had. So, there I was, waiting while Mr Dodgy Plan called around all the hotels listed in my guidebook to find me a room for the night for no more 15 dollars.

I later learned that there was nothing for under 50 dollars. Meanwhile, thank God, the friend in question had arrived home (for this was the building where he lived). However, I can't say that I felt that relieved at the sight of this muscle-bound amateur wrestler with a rather fetching 70s hair-do. However, contrary to first impressions, my host actually turned out to be have a Masters in Economics. You never can tell… Anyway, this 22 year-old hulk was a big softie and underneath his image of a “hardened clubber” and king of Saturday night alcohol-induced brawling, there lay a deeply vulnerable young man. I saw proof of this the next day when, by late afternoon he was sleeping like a baby in his sister's bedroom after downing a bottle of 40% proof cognac as we talked about emotional matters, mainly focusing on the subject of separation. The strong but sensitive type – don't worry, I'm in good hands!