I awoke the next morning to the sounds of tropical birds singing in the rain forest. This was somewhat confusing as I was fairly certain that the Ukraine didn’t have any rain forest and was definitely not tropical. I looked at my clock – it was 6.45 am; while turning my head I realised that the sounds were coming from inside rather than out. It was someone’s crazy idea of a wake-up call which was being piped through all the speakers on the boat, including the one in my room that I’d turned up the previous day.
Having got out of bed to turn it down again, I tried in vain to go back to sleep for another half-hour. It was no good – obviously the bird noises had activated some primal instinct in my brain which had rendered it wide awake. Once dressed, I went out on deck to have a look at our now very much out-of-town surroundings. What I saw was to characterise about ninety percent of the trip – a very wide river, grassy banks with various trees and fields stretching away as far as the eye could see.
In between the industrial cities, the Ukraine remains a very agricultural place; grain is till grown in large quantities today, as well as fruit and vegetables. Along our river route, villages seemed to be few and far between, but perhaps were hidden from our view. It was at one of the Soviet style industrial cities that we were to make our first stop.
The stop wouldn’t be until the next day, however. Today we had to make do with watching the agriculture pass by and scrutinising the few inhabited areas that we did encounter. The highlights of the day were a fairly new red church, built in neo-Russian style, which everyone madly photographed, and a town whose name I never discovered. Here there were multiple attractions compared with the agriculture; for a start it actually had a beach that the locals were actively using. I watched one man take the plunge into the river – it was quite a warm day, but the river still appeared to be pretty cold, judging by the fact that he soon came out again with a blueish tint to his skin.
The boat stopped more or less at this point, as ahead there was a rail bridge with no apparent way for the boat to pass under it. We stared at the people on the beach and they more or less ignored us, having by now presumably got used to the passing tourist traffic. Immediately behind them was a mixture of houses and offices and quite a way further back the usual collection of whitish tower blocks rising into a hazy blue sky.
It was time for us to have lunch and it was quite strange looking out from our mid-river window while supping borsht onto this scene of fishing, swimming and children playing on the little beach. It was as though we were invisible, aliens on some sort of anthropological mission remaining undetectable by those we observed. Then the ship’s horn went making everyone in a 3 mile radius jump; my lunchtime reverie – and our invisibility – was destroyed.
After lunch we got back out on deck just in time to see the bridge reveal its secret. Now it was in action it was quite obvious. The central lower section was actually being winched upwards by a series of pulleys and cables on the central upper section. I hoped that they’d remembered to stop the trains. The resulting gap was just about high enough for us to sail under and our journey was resumed at a stately pace.
There wasn’t really much more of note on this part of the journey, except to say that at times, the river turned into reservoir – vast stretches of water created by deliberate flooding. In some parts you could barely see land, so it must have been several miles wide in places and it was more like being at sea. There were even a couple of small lighthouses to qualify this impression.
That evening, the Captain was having his ‘welcome dinner’. Before eating we all assembled into the function room and were plied with sparkling wine and some very uncomfortable chairs. We all sat in rows facing a little stage area and waited for the man to arrive. Eventually, a whole fleet of people trooped in and stood up on the stage; we knew immediately which one was the Captain as, from his appearance, he’d obviously been studying Birds Eye fish finger adverts very closely – the beard was spot on. His demeanour was rather less jolly than Captain Birds Eye though as he went sternly through the motions of introducing his crew.
This was prolonged considerably by the fact that it all had to be translated four times – apart from us, the Americans and the Germans there was also a handful of French and Spanish people on board. By the time we got to the ‘welcome aboard’ toast, most people had long finished their drinks and had to mime. Once this rather forced little ceremony was over, the Captain disappeared quickly back from whence he’d come, leaving us to file down to the restaurant to enjoy the dinner without him.
After the dinner I went to the larger of the two bars as quickly as I could before the Germans got all the tables. As with my Russian trip, there was live music from about 9pm onwards; the act this time was slightly better than the rather drunken combo that accompanied us to Moscow. We had a male keyboard player and female singer who actually had quite a nice voice. The main problem, as always, was the material which ranged from Roll Out the Barrel to various Ukrainian pop songs and ballads to the Beatles greatest hits. All the English lyrics were rendered with a heavy accent, so in the middle of Michelle we had a passionate I vont you, I vont you, I vont you, which does sound quite persuasive in the Kiev brogue.
After a pretty good night’s sleep, having made sure I’d disabled the tropical bird wake-up speaker, the boat was very nearly at the city of Zaporizhia which is about two thirds of the way between Kiev and Odessa and is famous for two things. Most importantly it was the home of the Cossacks who ruled the country from here for over 100 years in the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s also now home to a very large hydro electric dam which sprawls across most of the river’s width and dominates the riverscape from many points in the city.
Before we engaged with either of these, however, we were to embark on the usual tour of the city. It was hard to know what to expect of a place where current appearance would have been largely shaped by the Soviets. It was the first time I’d been to an Eastern European city that usually had the word ‘industrial’ associated with it in all the literature I’d seen, so quite frankly I expected something fairly grim.
From a coach window there was no way of telling what life is really like here, but I have to say that the city looked a great deal better than I’d anticipated. The shopping and civic areas were all constructed in grand Soviet style and meant to look impressive, if not imposing to the visitor. The main hotel still sported its Intourist logo, the USSR company that used to handle all tourism before the fall of the iron curtain, though we were assured that it was now in private hands.
We were assured, actually, by out local guide, Maria, who had lived in Zaporizhia all her life – not that she was very old, probably early twenties. She also told us that the industry was in decline now, and that the city had been cleaned up a lot and the air was much better than it used to be, so it probably had been fairly unpleasant when she was a small girl. As we drove around we saw lots of trees lining the streets and most of the buildings seemed to be in good shape. When we touched on the suburbs, the apartments seemed reasonable and the people well clothed. The impression I got was that now days, it’s probably not a bad place to live at all, providing that you have a job. What it’s like if you’re unemployed and stuck in one of the ubiquitous tower blocks that we only saw from a distance is probably a different matter entirely.
The dam is without doubt an impressive, if not terribly pleasing sight. Having said that, it does at least weave its way across the river in an S shape, which is only properly visible from the high point at which we began the descent from the city to cross it. It was started in 1932 employing the usual hard labour typical of the Soviet era on such projects, so I hate to think how many lives were expended in the process. During WW2 it was bombed before completion and so they had to start all over again when the war had finished.
We were crossing the river in order to get to the Cossack museum, which is situated on the large island of Khortytsya which used to be the headquarters of the Zaporizhian Cossacks. The coach drove us so far – the road eventually ran out – then we had to walk the final half-mile to reach the museum which stands proudly on a rocky outcrop overlooking the river. We all went into the entrance hall and stood waiting, and I wondered exactly what might be in a Cossack museum - pairs of over-large trousers and old vodka bottles perhaps.
So far we’d been shown the ropes, so to speak, by Neela, our tour guide, and Maria, the local guide. Now we were to have a museum guide thrown in for good measure. Actually this proved to be the most entertaining aspect for me of the museum tour. For starters, the museum guide was in his early twenties and looked like something out of the beatnik era with a thin goatee beard and thick black-framed glasses. He would start speaking, I believe in Russian rather than Ukrainian; this would then be translated by Maria who looked at him warily as she added a few embellishments of her own; Neela would interrupt at fairly frequent intervals to either dispute the interpretation or add her own embellishments. All of this was quite chaotic and a real picture in body language and facial expressions, especially from the beatnik, who clearly and probably fortunately didn’t understand any English, but sensed that his word wasn’t being taken as gospel.
As for the exhibits, they ranged from various prehistoric bones and tools that had been found on the island to Cossack boats, books, weapons and yes – pairs of over-large trousers and old vodka bottles.
The most interesting thing was the commentary about the Cossacks themselves, rather than their relics. We learned that firstly they were not an ethnic group in any shape or form. They were composed of people who had become fed up with constant invasion from Tatars and Turks and had turned into warriors to defend their farms and families. Gradually they banded together to form their own army and had their own code of conduct and a loose democracy to decide their leaders. Individual foreigners who wandered through frequently joined them, mainly to settle and farm with them in peace. But when conflict arose they became renowned as a collection of brave and skilled horsemen who were a force to be reckoned with for well over a hundred years. Their legacy, particularly of costume and music, still remains strongly in present day Ukrainian culture.
After this experience we had time to wander about outside for a while, and I took the opportunity to get some photos across a very hazy river valley of the dam. I wondered what the Cossacks would have made of this feat of engineering to control a river that they’d tamed only with boats and horses.
We then returned to the ship for a short break during which I tried to buy a coffee at an open air quayside café, but failed miserably as the waitress couldn’t understand me, and if she ever did return with help it was too late as I’d had to board our next coach.This took us to the countryside outside the city where we disembarked at a little collection of buildings all surrounded by fences constructed of logs. Here we were to see a Cossack show and we all filed through a gateway and sat on benches also made of logs. The show was very much an open air one, by now the haze had cleared and the sun had come out quite strongly. The ‘stage’ for the show was mostly a long runway by which our Cossacks would enter at speed on horseback at one end, perform some sort of horse-riding trickery, and then disappear off at the other end. In the middle and in front of the runway there was a more conventional performing area where the leader of this little group spent most of his time. His main contribution was a display of whipmanship, if that’s the right word, which mostly involved whipping bits of twig out of his colleagues’ hands and mouths. Inevitably he also called for volunteers from the audience to have twigs whipped from their hands; he came dangerously close to calling me up at one point, but I kept my eye firmly pressed to my camera lens and he went away. He was good, but I’m sure one or two people must have lost fingers, noses etc. at sometime during his career. I didn’t want to become the latest victim.
The show finished with those who wanted to having a trot around on the horses (who seemed quite happy I might add) while the rest of us went off behind the arena for a spot of Cossack style lunch. This consisted of some savoury rice (which they insisted on calling porridge) and the inevitable, but quite welcome shot of vodka. We also had a chance to browse the equally inevitable souvenir stalls, the best of which was one in front of a little forge where a blacksmith was making and selling miniature horseshoes. One of these now hangs, upside down of course, in my hallway ready to fend off any invading Tatars or Turks.
The show was quite predictable in many ways, but fun, and there were Ukrainian people among the audience, so it hadn’t been laid on just for us. Indeed, there was some jokey dialogue included in the performance which the locals did find funny – I never did ask Neela for a translation. Eventually we made our way back to the coach, where it became clear that some had partaken of more than one shot of vodka, and returned to the boat quite happy with the day’s experiences and the 23 degrees centigrade sunshine. We set sail again soon after, waving the Cossacks of the Zaporizhian past goodbye, their historic river island disappearing as we rounded a bend and headed towards the Dnepr delta.
Kiev | Zaporizhia | Odessa | Sevastopol | Yalta | The Dnepr | Return to Kiev
