Travel in former Soviet lands has a special place in my heart. When I first began to travel a little off the beaten path, in the late 80's and early 90's, the lands from the Arctic east of Finland to the Adriatic east of Italy, and all the way east to the Pacific Ocean, were in greater or lesser spasms of turmoil. Some of my fondest travel memories include wicked cold, gloomy trains and bad sausage - all part of the experience of travel in the dying Soviet Union.
With my own personal souvenir pieces of the Berlin Wall in my bags (that I had proudly chiseled from the wall myself), I spent the night on the floor of East Berlin's Lichtenberg Station in the first days of 1990, having missed the late train to Prague, where the revolution still surged ahead. From Tallin, Estonia, we watched Finnish TV with considerable alarm (and couldn't understand a thing they said) as they displayed maps of the nearby Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant's leak on 25 March, 1992. Once on a train bound for Moscow, I woke up with a bag of potatoes at my feet where my camera should have been. I found the camera several compartments down the aisle. I've forgotten what happened to the potatoes.
Here are a couple of new articles about trips around the former Soviet Union's still unkempt borders that you can take today:
- A few years ago we sailed across the Black Sea on a working ferry (not a luxury cruise liner), the M/V "Yuzhnaya Palmyra," from UKR Ferry shipping company, Istanbul to Odessa, Ukraine. This same company puts on what is probably a little more adventurous travel experience elsewhere across the Black Sea, from the Georgian port of Poti to the Ukranian port of Ilychevsk.
Read about it in the article The Ukraine-Georgia Black Sea Ferry is no package tour from georgiandaily.com, which starts like this: "The ferry connecting Ukraine and Georgia across the Black Sea is, depending on one's point of view, either a tourist experience from Hell, or one of the world's last properly adventurous sea voyages."
I'm in.
- This morning comes the BBC article Belgrade-Sarajevo railway reopens after 17 years. The former Yugoslavia wasn't part of the old Soviet Union. But when Russia's dominion collapsed, the former Yugoslavia was thrown into much worse paroxysms than much of the former Soviet space.
As the article puts it, in the 1970's & 80's "Golden Era" of Yugoslavia, "People could start the day in an Ottoman-style cafe in the Bosnian capital before taking an easy six-hour ride in comfortable carriages to party in Belgrade."
Put me down for that one, too.
*****
The book to read is Murderers in Mausoleums, Jeffrey Tayler's Moscow to Beijing adventure around the old Soviet rim.
(Top photo, of the UKR Ferry Shipping Company's M/V Yuzhnaya Palmyra at dock in Istanbul, from the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the related Ukraine Gallery and Georgia Gallery. Bottom photo, of a pedestrian street in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, from the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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