Black C90

Day 19: Galati to Vama Veche, Romania

After yesterday’s three-country, 209 mile schlep we awoke feeling rather groggy and tired, filled ourselves with breakfast and hit the road once more. It was strange to think only 5 km or so from here was Reni, one of the worst places either of us had ever been, yet now we were in a new country, seemingly a world away. The fact that Romania is so very different from the Slavic world it is surrounded by made it all the more surreal; no more cyrillic, no more Ladas or Kamaz, no more Russian. Suddenly we were in a Europe that was recognisable – the Roman alphabet, a vaguely comprehensible language and a multitude of English speakers. It really felt like we had crossed a major cultural divide.

We had of course crossed a major georgraphical divide also; the River Danube, and for the first half of today we buzzed through the Danube Delta, the mighty river flowing out to the Black Sea, on our left. Annoyingly we were also a few kms from Ukraine until about lunchtime, having had to do at least an extra 100 km circuit in order to cross the border. It had been tempting yesterday to give the bikes flippers and try an alternative entrance to the EU. But alas no.

At Macin we stupidly realised that yes, there was a river to cross, it was rather large, being Europe’s largest, and we would have to get a ferry. Somehow we had omitted to realise this. So Kkkken and Zulu drifted across the rapidly flowing Danube an on again to Tulcea. A man with the bluest eyes you have ever seen tried to sell us wonderful smelling bread on the ferry, followed round by a cheery looking brace of ferry dogs.

We spent the morning riding through some of the most beautiful scenery on our trip. Wonderful marsh lands, agricultural villages, winding hilly roads. It’s fully autumn now so the leaves are a beautiful array of yellows, oranges and burnt reds, leaves drifting off them in the breeze. On one particularly beautiful stretch of road oak orchards stretched uphill to our right, and under an oak sat two men, at a picnic table, playing chess, whilst their sheep grazed contentedly nearby. They even had a red and white gingham tablecloth for the occasion. How nice it would have been to stop and join them for a while.

At Babadag, once the headquarters of the evil Ali Pashar, we hit the Black Sea again and turned south. Soon after we took what we assumed to be the scenic route, a little road hugging the coast, through Romania’s oldest known settlement, Histria. But alas, it turned out to be the depressing village and heavy industry route, as opposed to a beautiful seaside road. The only interesting thing about it was what looked like a mass of ancient kurgans dotted around the hillsides as far as the eye could see. Otherwise it was grey, brown and fairly dull riding.

Just before Varna we came to a gigantic Rompetrol Oil Refinery, the biggest in Romania we have since found out. The refinery sprawled over the landscape, like a vision of Armageddon, all twisted metal and belching smoke, with hordes of ant-like workers streaming in and out of the gates. Oil has been a big feature of our Black Sea trip, so in a geeky way we were rather interested to see this and stopped to take photos, much to the puzzlement of passers by.

Last night, at supper, Marley had said, with a determined look in his eye, “I am going to get Zulu to 50 mph before we finish this – tomorrow, downhill, witha  good wind, I’m going to do it”. On the way into Varna we came to a long, straight stretch of road and I saw Marley in my wing mirrow flatten onto the bike and twist the throttle fully open. For the next 10 minutes we raced along at terrifying speeds of nigh on 50 mph, giggling hysterically, pressed flat against the bikes, engines wheezing and buzzing with the strain. Kkken, ailing somewhat with a few minor problems, only managed 46 mph but Zulu, the older of the bikes, with double the milage, got to 51 mph. Classic.

Having very nearly got squashed by a bus going into Varna – my closest shave yet – we headed south for Doi Mai and Vama Veche, two villages on the Bulgarian border where we intended to lay our heads for the night. We soon learnt the folly of having a 1998 Lonely Planet of Romania. The LP descrtibed Doi Mai as a haven of left-wing counterculturalism, with a lovely beach, no hotels or development and pot-holed roads. The Doi Mai of 2010 now has a main road running through it, a gigantic Daewoo Heavy Industries Plant on the beach and bits of freighters layed out in bits along the sea-front waiting to be put together. Dismayed at how much things could change in so short a time, we headed 2km further to Vama Veche, described also as an uber-chilled hippy haven with not one hotel, where you could camp on the beach or stay in people’s houses. Sadly alot can change in 12 years and now Vama Veche is a sea of hotels, bars, clubs, shops and half built houses. And to make matters worse the season here finishes on September 15 so we arrived at dusk, in the rain, to a shut-up ghost town. Not a hotel was open, not a person in sight. Everything shuttered up and banging in the wind. The whole thing was most eerie.

Just as we were wondering what to do a man drove past in a battered white Dacia and I hailed him down. Marley was resigned to camping on the beach but I was not in the mood for a night under nylon, having a filthy cough and being totally frozen. Our Man in the Dacia was our guardian angel, and opened up a room in his closed hotel for us. So we spent a night drinking local wine and cooking pasta over a camp stove. So we sort of camped….!

Went to sleep to the sound of the wind and the rain, sad to think this was out last night on the road. Tomorrow we only had to get 240 km to Sarafovo, just north of Varna, where we started. Amazing to think we had come so far on our little 20-year old bikes, powered by an engine the size of a melon……

Our Odesan night was a brilliant sample of Ukrainian hospitality at it’s very best. After wandering the city, we met with a friend of the family – the lovely Olga – and although we were prepared to have a drink in town and then head to bed, she wouldn’t hear any of it and whisked us off in her private taxi-for-hire to her home town, some 30kms south of the main sprawl of Odesa.

She firstly refused payment for the taxi and then refused our offers of payment for the food we went to buy at the local supermarket, indeed it was only by constant applied pressure that we managed to be allowed to pay for the local vino tinto we bought to oil the conversational wheels.

We need not have worried though – Olga is one very driven and super-intelligent woman and her apartment was like a modern peaceful haven of calm in what, for us, had often become a relatively hectic trip – especially as we were pushing the boundary of whether we could make it round the sea in time to catch the homeward flight. She had laid-out a terrific spread of delicious local cheeses, salads, bread and homemade borscht soup – yum! We chatted, drank, ate copious amounts of food and drank some more until nearly midnight, after which she bundled us into the taxi again for a midnight tour of her home town, and then acompanied us to our hotel in Odesa (once again refusing payment!). She must have got home well after 1.30am – what amazing kindness we were shown, and which we both hope we will be able one day to repay. Thankyou Olga for making Odesa unforgettable for us both.

Next morning and we were on the road later than the norm – Ants was in no mood to leave the duvet, probably thanks to a mixture of the late night and the possibility of meeting Catherine the Great [Cockroach] on our hotel room floor. We skipped the meat sandwich that comprised breakfast and rode off in the direction of our next, and briefest, border crossing yet. Despite getting lost in the miasma that is the road network around Odesa, we managed to find our way to the border with Moldova that straddles the Dniester river at Palanca. It was strange, as after being given a ticket by the border guard which bore the registration number of each moped, we trundled off into a sort of no-mans land amongst the marshes. Ants noted that for the first time in her life, she really had no idea which country she was in, and neither did I. Anyway, after just 3 kms we gave the tickets to another bored border guard and passed straight back into the Ukraine, where we stayed for the rest of the day.

We rode down past Yaroslavka to lunch near Tartarbunary – a place name which derives from a Turkish heritage around 1630, and means Well of the Tartars, thanks to the water source to be found there. It’s intriguing how all the countries we have passed through have cultural and ethnic histories that intertwine like snakes on a caduceus – a bit of Tartar here, some Turkish there, a smidge of Georgian over here etc.

For much of the day’s riding, the views to the South and East were inclusive of Danubian vistas – perhaps only a glimpse here and there, but very much omnipresent during our day – which is fitting for such a major river, often known as the Amazon of Europe. We may not even have seen the river proper, but a tributary or one of the many hundreds of veins that the estuary becomes as it wends it’s way seawards. These views accompanied us all the way to the town of Izmail (another Turkish import) where we swung almost due East along the Danube and across hundreds of hectares of wetlands and past thousands of fishermen trying their luck amongst the shallows and lillypad islands.

That trajectory bought us finally to the town of Reni, to which all signs had been pointing since Odesa some 5 or 6 hours previously. Founded as a principle Danubian town in Bessarabia in the 1500′s, and once a vital part of the Ukraine’s ship-building infrastructure, it sadly now has the dilapidated face of a town on the wane. Seldom have either of us seen such remarkable poverty in such a short few kilometres of dusty, pot-holed road. Apart from the port with it’s grand and triumphal Soviet entrance arches, much of what we saw was shanty-town. It is a mere couple of kilometres further to the border with Moldova – our second entry today – at a familiar place named Giurgiulesti. Familiar, because this is the port in which the M/F Guniz, our effervescently bobbing ferry from Trabzon to Sochi, was registered and which is ‘landlocked’ Moldova’s only port.

The border guards here often speak French, as it is a school-taught subject, and those who do not speak either Russian or Romanian, which coming from Latin is far easier to decipher (for me at least) than the depths of the Cyrillic alphabet. The border formalities for our 1.5 km trip through the Republic of Moldova, took us past twighlight into darkness – never a situation we are pleased to encounter, as thanks to one of the few traits of weakness in our little mopeds, they have to be revved to make the lights bright enough to see where we are going. This leads to the comical situation of having to rev and travel faster (there is no clutch to ride on a C90) to be able to see anything, when all your insticts are telling you to go more slowly to avoid what the lights do not allow you to see!!

Anyway, Ukraine exit and Moldovan entry stamps in our passports, we rode the mile to the Moldovan exit (more stamps) and the further 500 metres to the Romanian entry (no stamps here thanks to our re-entry. Frankly, it’s all rather bonkers, and we left the “militarized” zone with no clear idea of what had just happened – we felt like well-stamped sausages that had just been squeezed through a bureaucratic sausage machine.

Suitably sausaged, we rode very slowly into the town of Galati – a place which the 5-year-old guidebook describes as a dismal industrial town with little to see and few hotels to offer the stranded tourist. As usual, it was rather incorrect; the border guards had been lovely on the Romanian side – even allowing us to by-pass a string of 12 other cars to the front of the queue – and when  we stopped to ask a policeman for directions, I had the surprise of my life, in that after assessing each other for lingual compatability (no French, Russian, German or Russian on his side and no latin or Romanian on mine) he asked “Elenika katalaves?”. Yes, I replied, I do understand a tiny bit of Greek! And so, in pidgin Greek in the middle of a town on the Ukrainian/Moldovan/Romanian border, a policeman told us where to find a hotel.

Of course, a conference was in town, so there was only one room in one hotel available, which I rapidly snatched. We ate some delicious food, had a gin and tonic, and passed-out under yet another set of Egyptian cotton sheets. We certainly know how to slum-it.

Day 17: Mykolaiv to Odessa, Ukraine

The day got off to an inauspicious start with an altercation with the hotel staff over breakfast. For a passive person Marley looked like he might actually resort to physical violence, but we escaped before it came to this and set out on the road for Odessa.

Hoorah! No rain! No wind! Blue skies! For the first time in I think 13 days we set out with the sun on our faces and not a miserable black cloud in sight. What a difference it makes. Odessa was only 120 km away so we pulled out the throttles and headed west along the coast, hitting the outskirts of the city by midday.

As I’ve said before, driving in cities is not our favourite part of the moped safari, and Odessa this morning was no exception. Impatient drivers beeped at us and one van driver actually rode us off the road into the pavment. Quite baffling and very, very infuriating. Both of us yelled a stream of obscenities at him and stayed on the pavement to regain composure.

We’ve been really surprised by the aggression of some Ukrainian (and Russian) drivers on this trip. I drove through here four years ago (in a tuk tuk) and had no problems whatsoever. But this time, on mopeds, we’ve experienced alot of agression; people seem to have NO tolerance for being held up, and no empathy for the fact that we’re foreigners on small bikes and might be lost. We’ve been beeped at, shouted at and actually driven off the road every day we’ve been here and it’s really pretty unpleasant. No wonder there are flowers and graves by the road side every few kms or so (very off-putting whilst on a moped). I’m not trying to give Ukrainians a bad name as many, many people here have been extremely lovely, kind and welcoming to us, but the driving really ain’t a pleasure to be on the receiving end of.

However, we did make it to the Passage Hotel in the centre in one piece and within 30 minutes were enjoying lunch in a beautiful sunny square, watching the passing parade of glamorous Odessan women, one of the things Odessa is famed for. Neither of us felt like sightseeing per se so instead spent a lovely afternoon dawdling round Odessa in the sunshine gawping at the stunning neo-classical architecture. The city was founded in 1789 by Catherine the Great and she really did do an excellent job of creating a beautiful place, with no $$ spared. Most beautiful of all is the Opera House, built by a Viennese architect – a be-columned giant towering over the port. As neither of us actually like opera we decided against going, despite it being the thing to do here, and tickets only being 1-10 pounds a pop. Instead we’re going to hit the bars and perchance even end up in a club….

Here is a brief encounter with the sounds of the Odessa Children’s Orchestra, which was setting-up near the Opera.

Moldova and Romania beckon tomorrow and then it’s truly the home run. X

Ps Marley spent a very exciting morning counting cars and ascertaining that 7/10 cars here on average are Ladas

One of Russia and Ukraine's many war memorials

Day 17, Mikolayev, Ukraine

Another 8am start today, straight out of Simferopol and onto the straightest, flattest road in all the world. And quel surprise, it’s raining again and blowing a hooly!

The route was actually very boring by comparison to many of those we have followed, but cut through the black earth (chernozerm) of Ukraine and the ex-Soviet Unions’ bread basket. So sad that over 7 million Ukrainians dies here during the gret famines as a result of Stalin exporting all the produce elsewhere in the CCCP.

We passed through very poor settlements, still marked with Soviet statuary and populated by ancient tractors and Lada’s. At one point I noticed a chap on a bike talking to a brown cow across a drainage ditch. It looked like a perfectly rational conversation to have in the pouring rain.

We stopped for coffee at one place that was extreme poverty personified. The cafe was in a cave that went under the main road, and was run by a woman with greasy hair who had clearly not woken up yet. I imagine that in the depths of winter, a cave is a sensible place to keep warm – we were there on a cold day but nothing whatever like they get in deepest darkest winter when it must be hell on earth -  or perhaps there is a community spirit which we simply didn’t see on our passage through, which makes it a bearable existence. Still, the fact that most of the men were drinking shots of vodka and standing around doing nothing at 10am does not bode terribly well for leaner times of the year.

We rolled-on, suitably fortified with coffee, and arrived at the settlement of Krasnoperkopsk, where the Crimean peninsula narrows to a point barely a few miles wide having been pinched on one side by the Black Sea and on the other by the Bay of Syvash in the Sea of Azov. We were absolutely frozen and dived in to the first cafe we saw. These snap decisions sometimes are the best, and the old dear – in fact a sprightly-looking 70 year old babushka – was one of the best cooks in the known universe, producing for us hot borscht soup and blini buckwheat pancakes with hot jam, as well as coffee, and sat us down by a hot, crackling fire. She really fussed over us, and made us feel not only welcome, but at home too. We learnt from her that her pension amounts to $50US per month, thus her necessity to continue working into her twighlight years. It also throws light on why we have seen so very many old people sitting outside their houses by the side fo the road selling whatever they have made or grown – from fresh tomatoes to pickles salads, jams, honey, raki (homemade firewater or wine) and bags of roasted nuts – they simply need more money to survive. It is sad to behold people who gave their working lives to the Party and the good of the Soviet many, to end up practically destitute and facing cold and austerity in the closing chapters of their lives. How lucky we are in the West, and often we are not even precsient of it. Anyway – here’s a clip of a relieved Marley during our borscht-break.

After lunch, we continued alongside at least 60kms of irrigation canal lined with poplars, which was a refreshing change from the monotony of the morning’s ride, and passed literally hundreds of people selling vegetables and fruit from ramshackle stalls made from waste wood – selling aubergines, tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, chillis, potatoes and red onions. This trail brought us to our planned halt for the night at Kherson, but as it was early and we still had light and enough energy to go on, we kept the wheels turning.  Leaving Kherson and turning due West, we passed a giant ex-Soviet airfield, on which there were parked literally hundreds of pachydermic Mil helicopters, with one such relic meandering around the sky above us in the most cumbersome way – flight sometimes amazes me still, even though I understand the physics, I still find it incredible!

By the time we reached the town of Mikolayev, straddling the mighty River Bug (one of the major contributors to the nutrient-overloaded, anoxic nature of the Black Sea) we were fit to drop. The town does not see many tourists, and is not even mentioned in the guidebooks, so finding a hotel was not the easiest thing. Thankfully a kind-hearted young travel agent worker, whose business card actually showed that he was involved in ship-building in the town, showed us the way in his car – once more the kindness of strangers overwhelms us at times. We stayed at the ancient behemoth of a hotel named the Alexandrovski. Like many Soviet hotels of that era, it had a grand entrance, with rapidly diminishing grandeur the further into the bowels of the building we ventured. Still, it was comfortable enough and even had a banya, or sauna for us to warm ourselves in. Those of you who know me will recall that I have built my own mobile sauna and operated it across Europe at festivals and events, so I am no stranger to using these chambers of heat. However, this one had the air of, well, brothel about it. The stainless-steel-faced female automaton who showed us in seemed to have a knowing air about her, and the seediness was confirmed by the existence of not only the sauna room as we expected, but also a dining area, massage slab, and notably a ‘bedroom’ with simplified bedsheets and wall-to-wall mirrors at bed height. Now call me suspicious, but why on earth would anyone require a bedroom with mirrored walls for a traditional banya experience? Methinks that businessmen are the sole usual clients of the establishment and that one can simply rent the banya for one’s own salacious purposes.  The city, together with nearby Odesa, is the epicentre of the Ukraine’s runaway HIV epidemic, much of which began from drug use that increased rapidly after the collapse of the Soviet infrastructure. The drug was not the opiate heroin as we may know it in the West, but a cheaper derivative called shyrka which needs to be injected 7 times to have the same effect as one dose of heroin. This, coupled with the illegality of clean needles or methadone distribution programmes have led to a very nasty situation with the highest HIV infection rate in Europe and the need to curtail unsafe sex as a high priority.

We went out to eat a a brilliant restaurant in central Mikolayev, after wandering the streets to the accompaniment of piped soviet-style rock-and-roll musak, and then headed up the wooden hill for some well-earned sleep.

We managed 206 miles today, which is a record for us, and equivalent of Bristol to Kendal – we are very proud of that achievement….. and the bikes, touch wood, continue to behave like angels.

Day 15, Alyushta, Ukraine

A rare bit of sunshine in Ukraine

Waking up in the palatial surroundings of the Kerch Hotel, we made a brave early start and headed out into the surprise sunshine.  It was a glorious morning’s ride across a landscape that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Great Glen, all upland moors of mottled browns and beiges, with the occasional view of the Sea of Azov over to our right (north east). The road was practically our own and in good condition so we rattled along famously; right up until we stopped a few miles short of Feodosia to take a couple of pictures, and attempted to set-up the camcorder for a drive-by shot. We had just got the camera attached to a signpost and had put helmets and gloves on to drive away when a beep and rush of air heralded the approach of our two Lithuanian friends, Arturus and Asta, as they bowled-up in their jeep.

We had met them in Trabzon at the ferry booking agent, and obviously on the ferry itself, but had got ahead of them somewhow on our high-speed mopeds. We exchanged greetings and realised from our planned routes that we’d probably bump into each other again, and then they sped off to look more closely at the Azov coast on a sand road only accessible to those with 4-wheel traction.

We then felt our way into a strenthening headwind and some nasty showers, and by the time we had reached Feodosia, it was pouring and the streets were awash. It was, frankly, minging;  akin to the wettest of winter days in Grimsby Town. Finding the old town proved very difficult, and no-one seemed to know where the old gates or walls were, but by a process of elimination we eventually found them surrounded by a shanty town of hang-dog settlements delightfully cascaded in wind-blown rubbish.

It’s hard to imagine the impact that this place had on European and world history, and few people here or elsewhere know much about it – it, together with something that Ants is writing about at Yalta, make Crimea uniquely important to the formation of the modern world as we all know it. Why such a dramatic introduction? Well, in 1347, the sea gate in the walls of Feodosia was the entry point of the yerstinia pestis bacterium – that’s the Black Death, bubonic or pneumonic plague to you or me. Either via a rat from a ship from the Scythian coast of northern Abkhazia, or via an infected soul – we will never know which – the plague wandered nonchalantly through this very gate and within 12 short months, a third of the population  of Europe had died. The carnage was worse in some areas than others – for example in Florence, a contemporary chronicler  said

” all the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried……and later others were placed on top, and then another layer of earth, and then more bodies just as one makes lasagne with layers of cheese and pasta”

Not great….and it changed the way society functioned, who ruled, and how many of the things we take for granted today came into being.

So, it is not a little odd that more of this epic location isn’t made for tourists or locals. Now it’s just crumbling away and covered in broken glass and dog mess. Perhaps a fitting eulogy?

The old gate of Kaffa

We carried on along the coast road towards Sudak, through more vineyards than one might see in Mosel or Bergerac or St Emilion. The export taxes from Russia and the Ukraine mean that it is rare that any wine makes it’s way to our European palattes, but you can take it from we pair of old soaks – the quality is excellent and the price averages  two pounds a bottle for a good vintage. Forget your tours of Nappa Valley, this is the place to be – sun, sand, history, nudist beaches and oodles of booze at every turn!

Stopping for lunch at an unassuming roadside cafe, we were treated to homestyle Ukranian ccooking – brilliant borscht soup warmed the coldest cockles, and as we were finishing, the Lithuanian delegation appeared again, and with that our evening rendez-vous was set. Whomever arrived first in Alyushta woiuld let the others know what they had found and we’d eat and make merry.

We hit the road in sun, but it rapidly turned to predictable pouring rain and howling wind – it was getting really boring now on the 10th consecutive riding day of precipitation….still, it beats a day riding a hillock of paperwork in the office at home! We passed some interesting sights – one memory that sticks is of a wind-scoured seaside town absolutely devoid of any life except people who seemed to walk in front of our bikes. it was like armageddon out there for an hour or two, and when we had negotiated the final few twists and turns to reach the town of Alyushta, we were both exhausted and really fit for nothing but 30 minutes under a hot shower each. However, even though the first impression of the town was horrid, we have now learnt that first impressions can be entirely misleading – one needs to give time to a place to let the character seep out to deny low expectations.

The hotel was spanking new and run by a lovely babushka who fussed over us. The place was a stones’  throw from the church in the old town, and the singing coming from it was simply heavenly (sorry for the lack of imagination) – like nothing you would hear in the UK on any old Saturday afternoon. We have a video recording of the sounds we beheld.

Arturus and Asta arrived and after a freshen-up we headed for the seafront to a Ukrainian buffet restaurant where you bring your own booze and choose food from a bewlidering selection of dishes. I bought a couple of bottles of local Cabernet red, but Arturus – made of stronger stuff – went for a locally made chilli vodka, and we had an obligatory toast which nearly knocked my eyebrows off. Wowzers, that is a strong drink…..I stuck to wine and by the time we left the place, Arturus had completed the bottle and was absolutely none the worse for wear. How is this possible??! We grabbed a local Lada taxi with leopard-print seat covers and then fell into a deep, deep slumber to await the morning’s payback….

Day 11, Trabzon, Turkey and Day 12,  Sochi, Russian Federation

The Port at Sochi, Russia

I’m updating this from a computer a long way from where the action happens, so the tenses may shift around a bit, but otherwise it should be relatively accurate!

The morning of our 11th day- Tuesday – was wonderful. Our enforced stop-over in the city meant that we had time for the hammam that we had previously been unable to squeeze into the schedule. Men and women have separate buildings and there is no mixing whatever, so I can only talk from my own experience here. I have had a few of these turkish baths before; one in a town called Khutaya in central Anatolia some years ago – which was excellent – and one last year on a visit to Istanbul – which was terribly expensive and not overly pleasant. This hammam rarely sees tourists so was more of the authentic real deal! One strips off in the main atrium after being given a locker, and you are given a pastil (I think that’s what they are called) or a rough linen towel a bit like an Indian lunghi to wear under which you are nekkid.

Your chap then leads you through to the main heat room where a slab of volcanically hot marble 15 yards in diameter fills the centre of the room, and it is on this that you lie to warm for 10 minutes. Then it’s into a sauna at 60 degrees C for a further 10- minutes before you are taken to a heated slab in an ante-room for a scrub and massage. The scrub is done thoroughly with a loofah to get all dead skin and dirt off your body, and there was a lot of ingrained dirt from days on the bike in my case, on which the guy remarked, as if to say ‘dirty Englishman’! Then you are covered in soap suds and beaten….ahem…’massaged’ to within an inch of your life. It was a good beating and I came away feeling properly clicked, contorted and requiring coalescence.

The afternoon was spent in the jaws of officialdom at it’s murky best. The ship had been changed from the Apollonia 2 to the smallest and perhaps most elderly tub in the fleet – the M/F Gunis, registered in a port within Romania that barely no Romanians have ever heard-of. The vessel was scheduled to leave at 8pm,  but we had to arrive at 2pm for customs, which didn’t open until 4pm. They then put us on the ship and there we stayed, like hostages, until it finally departed at 9pm. In the intervening time, it got windier and inky black. The passengers were very interesting to behold – some Lithuanians on a jeep safari, several bikers with whom we instantly had accord, lots of Kazakh or other oriental faces, and also three long-bearded Uzbeks, who had a bicycle each and were returning to Baku from their Haj to Mecca. What a way to go – they were disallowed a far more direct route thanks to ridiculous politcs (Mecca is not that far from Baku, and Turkey and Russia should not be on the itinerary).  Our drinking and biking contemporaries were very warm people and although one is technically not supposed to drink your own alcohol on-board (Turkey is a muslim country in all but constitution and there is certainly no bar on-board) we managed to get quite a few ‘wee bevvies’ down us by mixing large bottles of gin and tonic in empty water bottles. The Russians would then ask us if we’d like a swig of their ‘special Altakayu Spring Water’ with a wink and a nod. They had bribed someone on shore to get this for them after we had been initially incarcerated on the ship. It was during this session of bike talk and much other banter that we were invited to stay in Sochi if the need arose. We politely thanked them but said that given our 9am arrival time, it would be better for us to get straight on the road and get some miles under our belts. They gave us knowing looks, as only those who have made this crossing 3 or 4 times before possibly could.

The ship was calm to begin with, but as we got away from land the calmness desisted, and resolutely became roughness. People began to be seasick, and the loos became uninhabitable very rapidly. We quickly realised the front of the ship (I believe that bit might be called the bow) was a bad place to be, as everytime there was a wave it thudded and shuddered and reared like a wild mustang. We took refuge in the pullman (ha ha – think formica and a smell of ancient vomit, not the Venice-Simplon Express) lounge where the movement was less, but still at 2am in the morning it was very, very rough indeed and movement at that point had to be curtailed because it had become akin to human pinball. About this point, I remember thinking that it would be a good idea to avoid any further ferries on the Black Sea. Ancient mariners feared this sea and for centuries the Greek and Thracian traders accessing the Scythian lands to the north and pontic steppe to the South East hugged the coast like a magnet, before venturing across the sea with any regularity. I may have mentioned before that the Cherno More (as it became again when leaving Turkey after being the Kara Deniz for 1200 miles) is famous for having a calm face on shore, but then giving you a proper battering off-shore when you least expect it.

Anyway, the crossing was not great, and we arrived with joy off the coast at Sochi at 11am, 2 hours after our scheduled arrival time. I say ‘off’ Sochi, because we then sat at anchor within sight of the harbour walls, for 7 hours. We just sat and bobbed around in the sun, which was pleasant enough but not ideal when you have some time-contrained mopedinations to complete!

The customs people we surly and by-and-large inept, unhelpful and rather irritating. They were also huge, like yaks on anabolic steroids, so annoyance was best hidden. They kept us until 9.30pm, by which time our comrades – Illyana, Vladimir, Olga and Igor (all of whom had been absolutely correct about how long the boat and customs process would take) - had gone to  a local bar. We caught up with them at their regular biker cafe, were the star attraction and centre of amusement for 10 minutes on our safari mopeds amongst all the glitzy Harley Davidson chrome and Japanese speed-machines, and then we were off to stay with our new-found friends.

We were both exhausted, and after 24 hours on that damned boat, we were both swaying when we were stood still. I wanted sleep urgently, but our hosts were so kind to us that after laying our our bed and allowing us to shower, they had gone twice to the shops to procure supper for us – all this after returning to their own home after a month away on tour. We could not refuse and gratefully accepted huge bowls of pasta carbonar at 11pm, before staying up and drinking an entire bottle of Russian brandy and shootign the breeze until 1am. It was wonderful, spontaneous and so welcoming that one could not have wished for a better entry to Russia!

Will try to update with some pictures and footage as soon as we are able.