"No, it is not possible." The Intourist rep in London was adamant. "You cannot cycle in the Ukranian countryside." "Why not?" "The roads are very bad and the drivers are very dangerous." "Can we walk in the mountains?" "No, it is very dangerous." "Why?" "There are bears and wolves."
She was wrong. We spent a fortnight cycling through the beech forests and high summer pastures of the Carpathian Mountains . In a country with a severe petrol shortage, motorists were not a problem. The roads, presumably built for the Soviet army, which used them to invade Hungary in '56 and Czechoslovakia in '68, were excellent. There was no food in the village shops, apart from one which had a collection of old tins of fish soup, but we ate in workers' canteens and cheap cafes. There were even hotels, although some were damp and dirty. We did not find any bears or wolves.
Apart from some appallingly wet weather, cycling in the Carparthians was pretty trouble free - until, coming back down the western side of the mountains, the rear wheel of my bike buckled. The chances of finding a bike shop where it could be repaired seemed remote. So we made our way towards the station in Solotvina. We would travel the last lap by train.
Solotvina used to be simply another stop on one of the lines linking the Russian rail network with the Hungarian frontier, but now, because of the way that the borders were drawn after the end of the Second World War, it is the end of a branch line, cut off from most of the rest of the Ukraine . In the cold and rain, its unfinished blocks of flats, its muddy pot-holed roads and empty shops made it a depressing place - somewhere to leave as quickly as possible.
Although no time-tables were displayed, it was easy to establish that there was a train for Cop on the Hungarian border at 3.20 p.m., some three hours away. The booking clerk produced fourteen tickets for two of us - the inflation, which meant that there were simultaneously one kupon and 20,000 kupon notes in circulation, meant that multiple tickets were necessary.
The small green, white and blue tiled waiting room cum ticket office was cold and damp. No one had lit the large stove in the corner and the door was wide open. Even so, several other people were already waiting for the only train to leave that afternoon. One old woman with a fat, almost round body and four or five gold teeth, was sitting opposite. She wore a head scarf and was dressed in a red jumper, a faded purple skirt, green stockings and dirty white shoes. Even with this garish colour combination, her overall appearance was grey. She spent some time intently putting dozens of small denomination kupon notes into piles, and then, with her lips moving, counted them. This task completed, and the notes stowed safely, deep inside her clothing, she emptied three canvass bags containing small unwrapped portions of meat onto the adjoining seats and proceeded to pick through the piles, carefully pulling off and throwing away small pieces of bone, before putting the meat back into her bags.
In a corner there were two pale faced young women, both dressed in greenish-grey trousers. One read a book out loud to the other until they were joined by two unshaven dark haired men. The women started shouting at their men because they had been drinking. The men were completely unperturbed. The women left, perhaps to have a drink themselves, and the men promptly fell asleep, snoring loudly. The altercation was observed, with obvious disapproval, by a slightly built middle-aged woman with two gold teeth. In her brown coat and grey headscarf, she looked like a stereotypical Soviet grand-mother - apparently prim and proper until she revealed the bottle of vodka in her shopping bag to the man who was sitting next to her.
The train, which arrived, as predicted around 3.20 p.m., had eight red coaches and was hauled by large diesel engines, still bearing CCCP emblems and small hammers and sickles. In its prime it must have been a fine train. It had been made in Budapest , to old Russian wide gauge specifications, probably during the late 1950s or early 1960s. Inside it was roomy, with finishes of wood and green formica. The seats were hard and wooden, but not uncomfortable. It had though been sadly neglected. All of the windows in our large compartment were jammed shut, apart from one, which was jammed open. The outer part of one double-glazed window had been broken by a stone thrown at the train. Splinters were lying between the two sheets of glass. There were three patches of dried vomit on one of the doors. Most of the luggage racks were broken, and screws had been removed from the walls of the compartment - not through vandalism, but because people had better uses for them.
Outside, there was a drunken fight between two men, who were throwing punches and shouting at each other. Eventually they were separated by the conductor. A few minutes later started kissing each other vigorously.
The train pulled out of the station some time after four o'clock, and slowly made its way down the Tissa valley. Beyond the wide river on the left was Romania . The Ukrainian side of the border was still marked by a fence with fifteen or twenty strands of barbed wire, built in a "T" shape. It was generally rusty. Some sections were covered with old man's beard. From time to time there were tall watch towers, now unmanned. Periodically there were new marker posts with blue and yellow stripes, the colour of the Ukrainian flag.
We passed peasants working on small patches of land and horses and carts. The train seemed to stop every four or five kilometres, sometimes near villages, sometimes by road crossings, once by a quarry, twice to wait for trains coming in the opposite direction, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. During one long stretch, where there were defects to the line, it trundled along at little more than walking pace. Sometimes it picked up speed, but never much more than 40 kilometres per hour.
The carriages were crowded, often with people standing. Some were carrying baskets of fruit. One old man had three large blue plastic buckets. Several men had old bicycles. In Chust, the largest town on the line, which had some supplies in the shops, crowds of people boarded the train carrying large bags of food. Many of them stayed on the train for over forty kilometres. At Beregrovo, three women with large heavy bags climbed on board. They were heading for the Hungarian border. Later, as they chatted, a young Roma started rummaging through one of their bags. Its owner, without speaking, pushed him away, dug deeply into her bag, and triumphantly waved her purse at the would be thief. He left the train at the next station. No one paid any attention to the incident.
By the time that we reached the expansive plain which heralded the approach of the Hungarian border, it was dark. All the passengers seemed resigned to the painfully slow progress of the train. They sat, or stood, placidly in the gloom, shapes dimly visible from the glow given out by the only light bulb in the coach which worked. Even a two year old girl, being taken by her aunt back to her parents in Mukacevo, sat quietly throughout most of the journey, despite a complete lack of stimulation and absence of food. Only one person brought any life to the carriage. He was a middle-aged man wearing a large official cap, who treated those near him to a lively monologue, which included jokes about English men and bicycles, references to Stalin and Beria and birdsong imitations.
The train arrived at Batebo Junction, the end of the line, around half past nine. It had taken over five hours to travel less than one hundred and fifty kilometres. From Batebo, it was thirteen kilometres and twenty minutes on another train to Cop, the only border crossing for some four hundred kilometres to the east and almost fifty kilometres to the north. As the train was about to leave Cop, turning northwards for Uzgorod, a drunken man leaned against the last carriage and vomited. He fell over as the train pulled away.
Cop, with its extensive sidings, is at the south-western extremity of the rail network of the former Soviet Union . Through it pass the regular services from Moscow to Belgrade (the "Pushkin Express"), Prague and Budapest . Its modern concourse is dominated by huge murals of Soviet workers and soldiers. Just down the road there is still a statue of Lenin and a war memorial to the Red Army with a hammer and sickle and eternal flame.
At eleven o'clock at night the station hall was packed. Families, pausing in the middle of long journeys, were sitting around piles of belongings. One group was eating a picnic of bread, cooked meat and boiled eggs from a towel laid out on top of bags and bundles. A woman was quietly sewing amid the hubbub. Money changers were wandering around with thick wads of notes. Wheeler dealers were standing by large piles of cardboard boxes containing electrical goods. Young people were proudly carrying new ghetto-blasters which they had bought in Hungary .
Outside a Moscow bound express stopped, its bright lights revealing the interior of its "Soft Class" sleeping cars. Gypsy musicians played on fiddle, accordion and mouth organ. Taxi drivers, over-weight and wearing leather or denim jackets, waited for custom. Food stalls were doing a brisk trade. This must have been how central European stations were in the twenties and thirties, before the War and the Iron Curtain curtailed continental travel and cut off East and West Europe .
And over the border? The next morning the sun shone in Zahony, the small Hungarian frontier town. The apartment blocks were newly painted. Modern houses boasted satellite dishes. A small coffee shop, with white plastic tables and chairs outside, served wonderful expresso and chocolate patisseries. Children rode new mountain bikes. Stylishly dressed women walked to well stocked shops, which not only sold cheese and cooked meats,
delicacies virtually unobtainable around Solotvina, but also western brand names like Mars and Dannone. Only some of the cars, spluttering Ladas and Trabants, were outward signs that, until a few years ago, Zahony too had been within the eastern bloc. Now it is a different world.