Tue 4 Aug, Leaving Ukraine

I usually walk straight past tourist markets, but on my last morning, I spotted a rack of sauna caps and went to investigate. Gold! One of them had my favourite Cyrillic word – шапка (shapka, meaning hat). Yeah, it’s probably a boy thing. Fortunately the same in Ukrainian and Russian, it turns out, шапка невидимка (hat of invisibility) is a folklore reference. Like the western European invisibility cloak, heroes would wear it to eavesdrop on evil queens. Maybe English sauna queens would mistake me for a foreigner and assume it was safe to bitch.

Booking a train to Moldova proved impossible on the app, but it showed one berth still available, so I dashed over to the station. Incredibly, the ticket office was empty. 90 minutes and two booking clerks later (nowhere near my record of three hours and five clerks to rebook a missed connection), we established that because I didn’t have the official Ukrainian state app, they would have to scan my passport and make a special request to Kyiv, which could take hours. My heart sank – not another overnight bus! But five minutes later some angel in Kyiv messaged me to say I was now authorised. I pounced on a ticket from the border. 

The Kyiv-Chisinau train crossed the border at Mohyliv, 60 miles east, but there was no bus. I had to to go almost halfway to Kyiv to pick up the train, in Vinnytsia. I pounced on the first suggested berth to the border, then noticed my berth from Mohyliv was free so I booked that too, then felt decadent, just discarding the first with my western privilege. Guiltily, I made a donation to Iron Families, a charity supporting railway workers who rescue civilians near the front line. The bus crawled along for hours and I resigned myself to another overnight bus … then all of a sudden the cratered track turned into Silverstone and I found myself with time to shovel down a meal in Green Shop, Vinnytsia’s vegan cafe, including a takeaway dessert. Bless them, they even slipped in a complimentary sandwich for the train. 

I shared a compartment with a family from Kyiv. Mum was a dentist, and chatty. Dad didn’t seem to speak English; I guessed businessman. Daughter quietly put in a working day of data entry for Zuckerberg. Although travelling south, they were on their way to visit Son in Germany. You could spend half a day at the Polish border, so it was quicker to fly from Moldova. It hadn’t even occurred to me, there are no civilian flights in Ukrainian air space. At 10pm, she asked whether I’d mind if we turned the lights out. They hadn’t slept the previous night because of all the explosions in Kyiv! I hadn’t once mentioned the war. The hikers I’d met probably just wanted a holiday in the mountains where they could forget about it. I felt selfishly relieved, someone had finally spilt a couple of beans. Then I couldn’t stop thinking: Putin was targeting the railways now.

I was heading home for a week, then due to take my son for a bit of walking in the Polish mountains. After lights-out, I worked out that you can do London to Budapest in 24 hours, have 12 hours to put in a shift in Szeczenyi baths (a Hapsburg extravaganza) and take in a few sights, then take another night train to Ukraine. The Polish mountains could wait. Sacha immediately agreed.