Saturday-Sunday, Days 7-8: Kiev - HUNGARY - Debrecen - Miskolc - SLOVAKIA - Poprad

The most grueling part of our road trip. Total of 1 200 km's to be driven before reaching our next hostel in Poprad, Slovakia. It was too tough to try to reach our destination before evening, so we decided to tour Kiev for a while and start driving at 2 pm. After walking around in a really hot 30 celcius city it was time to go and wreck nerves again in Ukrainian traffic. As a pleasant surprise, we got out of the city without any traffic jams and roads were either in almost good or even in excellent conditions and we were able to drive much faster than we thought.

Last photo of Kiev: Main road

As the sun was setting down, Aleksi's stint was done and JP got behind the wheel. Or maybe I should say Mr. Bad Karma. We were driving somewhere between L'viv and the border town Chop, when for the second time we got pulled over by the always awesome and fair militia. So JP had to once again sit into the militia's Lada to solve out with a huge language barrier what was going on. Apparently we changed lane in a place where we shouldn't have. This time the officer gave JP a paper and a pen to write down what he thought the correct penalty would be, in US dollars. JP wrote $30, to which the officer laughed and after a while wrote and circled $80. So there it was, freakin' 80 smackers for changing lanes! I have probably never seen one being so pissed off like JP was after he had to throw all that money to the floor of militia's Lada. Boy, the border wasn't coming quickly enough...

At this point we all can give an advise for you. If you're planning to do a road trip to Ukraine, don't. Fly to Kiev and be happy. Thanks.

Anyhow, I jumped behind the wheel after the incident and drove as careful as someone can drive. Obeying all the traffic rules in Ukraine is mostly about pure luck, because there aren't speed limit signs, but you have to figure out are you in a built-up area or not. If example a truck drives the other way during dark hours, you more than easily can miss a sign and drive wrong speeds. Before reaching the border the road started to elevate through a mountain of some sort and I was driving slower than ever, couple of cars passed us by in dangerous areas. It didn't take long when a militia car zoomed by us and a while after that they had stopped the duo. They concentrate their all efforts to penalize people on the road and civilians despise them. Than can easily be seen as all the oncoming traffic will flash their headlights to warn fellow drivers from a militia radar zone - and there seems to be thousands of them.

JP posing with a IS-2 tank near Rivne, Ukraine

Eventually we got to the Ukraine-Hungary border and for our surprise Ukrainian border official had a good sense of humor and we got by their side of the border much quicker than when entering the country. As Hungary is an EU country, entering was also pretty effortless. We drove through the night to Debrecen, the 2nd biggest city in Hungary. The original plan was to get there in the morning, but we were way ahead of our schedule (we forgot change of timezones as well), so no eatery was open. We only saw a lot of drunken people going home from the city clubs, filled our tank to full in a gas station and continued north towards Slovakia.

Night time driving, finally over...

Driving through a small Slovakian village

In the next city, Miskolc we tried to get some food but once again everything was closed. But we were finished as well, after being awake for 21 hours and driven for 17 hours of it. Just after Miskolc we parked our car to a roadside parking spot and slept in our car for and hour or so. It's amazing what a proper power nap can do, so we were once again able to continue towards Poprad. Hungary-Slovakia border station had apparently been closed for years, so we just drove straight into the country and had only a short journey left.

We didn't look too closely how the roads were in Slovakia, so we found ourselves driving very twisty crossing of a mountain, which was an excellent surprise. But the biggest surprise was in the end as we finally were able to check in to our hostel. I made a reservation for "2 bedroom apartment" for 65 euros, but my jaw dropped couple of inches when opening the door. It was an amazing about 120 square meters completely new apartment and suddenly we didn't feel tired anymore. So here we are now, enjoying beers, listening music and writing this blog. Life's good again!

The living room of a cheap apartment booked from Hostelbookers. Sometimes you get real lucky!