Thursday, Day 5: Warsaw - UKRAINE - Rivne - Kiev

We woke up very early in the morning for this drive, mostly because after watching the deciding NHL final it was impossible to get sleep enough in a room without air-con and no chance to open windows because of an airport nearby. All the better anyways, we avoided Warsaw morning traffic and got out of the city vicinity by 7 am. Our planned route was 765 km long and first Poland part of it was as easy as it gets.

When entering Ukraine side of the border, it all changed. First we got stuck to the border for 45 minutes, as we had to completely empty our trunk and JP had to unpack his bag and show what medicines he had. At the end we had five border employees and a drug dog checking our bags, but finally got the clearance and off we drove.

This road was in good condition compared to the bad ones...

But then the real nightmare started. The road was simply undriveable. And I don't mean some grooves here and there, but at some points it felt that THERE WAS NO ROAD! Our car had to endure a hole after a hole and it seemed that it would break soon if that was going to last long. And it did. After more than 60 km of pure horror we decided to try another road going to Kiev, but first we had to drive a small unpaved village roads, but even those felt better than the M06 road...

JP bribing the officials

Things got better as we got to the next big road and even though by our standards the road was still really, really bad, it was way better than the previous one. So we settled in for a cruise mode as there was still a long way to go. But soon, the drive became even longer. After a four-lane motorway the road narrowed to a normal highway, militia waved us beside the road and showed a reading of 85 km/h in his radar. Well, that didn't tell us anything since we were driving the same speed than others and anyways there was no speed limit signs available. JP was still the driver and was told to enter militia's car (Lada, surprisingly) for a ticket write-up. And it took a long time, since militia didn't speak English and JP didn't speak Ukrainian. Ticket was 580 Hryvnas, about 50 euros and to pay it we had to follow militia to a local bank. When we got there, it was surprisingly closed for the day. For us, it looked that it was closed back in the 80's. They told JP to get back into their car and finally both found the same page - If we wanted to get out of there without more hassle, they gave us a 50% discount if JP dropped the money to the car and didn't ask for a receipt of it. So in other words, it was not hard to guess, but bribing a militia officer was just what this thing was about. And we had been in the country for about 2-3 hours...

We changed drivers at that point and I jumped behind the wheel. The rest of the way was uneventful comparing to what had happened earlier, but we didn't really need anything more than just to get to our Kiev hostel and get some sleep. After 15 hours, we finally arrived to the capital city after more than 800 km and found our place to stay pretty quickly. It didn't take long for us to fall to sleep!

Every city has it's Soviet style monument. Here, we arrive to Rivne.

These are the cars of Ukraine