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« on: December 03, 2024, 12:04:01 am »
Wednesday, September 28, 1994: I showered, shaved, changed clothes and ate breakfast by 8:00 that morning. Dema and I talked briefly before he left for work. He asked questions mostly. I would get half an answer out of my mouth when his mother would chime in with, “We know, we know, we know all this.” I thanked her and left that place for the unknown.
I walked the bike along sidewalks to the cafe where I savored a cup of coffee. Two women sat at a table there. We did not talk with one another. I pushed to the sidewalk cafe where I met the beautiful German woman the day before. I had 2 more cups of coffee and some good conversation with a delightful, very lively, beautiful, young Russian woman from Moscow. Her name was Helen. She was a singer. She had been living in this fantastic flat in Odessa for 1 month. After that, I pushed about 5 blocks to the top of Pushkin Square. There I sat and made entries to the journal dating from the 25th to the 28th.
At 1:30 p.m. I finished writing. I marched to where the bus was supposed to be, and there it was at 2:00 p.m. Of course, the driver looked me over, thumbed through my passport, and spoke the opposite of what was said the day before. There would be problems with getting a visa. He said I needed a $50.00 transit visa for crossing Moldavia, and another for Romania. This time their mish- mash was expected and ignored. They did not catch me off guard. It was a matter of being either forced off the bus at the border of Moldavia or paying a toll. No-one told anything straight, and if they had, it would probably have been a lie.
Maximov Tours Company owned the bus. It was one hell of a ride. A woman in the seat in front of me carried a puppy which she kept in a metal cage under her seat. When it needed to defecate and urinate, she carried it to the stairwell behind my seat and let it do its business on the floor, which reeked the entire bus. She also let it urinate in the aisle and underneath her seat. It nauseated and disgusted me. Was there no escaping these odors in this part of the world? Other passengers seemed not to notice it at all. What Pigs! In the seats across the aisle, a young woman and man had sexual intercourse.
Maximov Tours Company did get me inside the former Soviet republic of Moldavia. We stopped at the fenced border manned by armed guards. A man on the bus collected passports and handed them to a uniformed man seated at a table outside in the dark. In 30 minutes all the passports were returned, and the bus continued. Then, we stopped at the Moldavian border. This was attended by soldiers carrying automatic rifles slung across their backs the way Indians carried quivers of arrows. A voice from the front of the bus called, “Hey American.” A uniformed guard asserted that I would not be allowed to pass because my passport did not have a Moldavian visa. Looking in the passport, I saw that it had not been stamped. Mentioning the notice I saw at the American embassy in Kiev brought only a laugh. He insisted, no visa. “ You must travel to another town in Moldavia and pay $50.00” he said. I achieved some small measure of relief in calling them a bunch of Communist bastards. A tall, thin, pukey-looking Bulgarian fellow with incredibly foul breath insisted on acting as interpreter, and it was sad work he made of his new avocation, for when he finished I knew less than when the conversation began. The upshot was they admitted me without a visa and refused to let me exit without a visa, which probably made sense in the C.I.S. It was underhanded entrapment and I was angrier than ever. Slipping Ukraine brought some consolation, but what about this region? Was this going from the frying-pan into the fire? A terse, apt description of Moldavia was this. Apply everything you have already read about Eastern Europe, and the C.I.S. except it was poorer and dirtier. It was more important to escape Moldavia than it was to get away from Ukraine.
Repeated talks with the army men in the guard-shack who understood not a word of English brought no change of circumstances. At one juncture, it was agreed that if the border guard were to suddenly become $50.00 richer, and the puke on the bus were given the same, the American could continue traveling, visa or no visa. When I insisted on a receipt for the money, they made it clear no receipt would be forthcoming. At that I refused to go along with their scheme. It was a no win predicament. I off-loaded the bike and gear. I had to argue with the puke on the bus to get back the $20.00 for the bus ride to Bulgaria that never was. I yelled to him several times, “If you are not taking me to Varna as promised I want my $20.00 back.” He finally handed it over. The guard in the small shack called people on the phone. He said I must go to a town named Lay-oh-shin-ah to get a visa. I stayed at the border a while after the bus left. The soldiers were nice enough to help load the panniers back on the racks. However, when we were alone and it came time to leave, 1 officer stood blocking my path, and the other soldiers formed a circle around me. The one insisted on seeing my passport after he had already seen it 6 times. He kept pointing to the handlebar bag and saying something about seeing the big papers. I kept shaking my head from side to side and telling him no. I straddled the bike and inched forward as we talked. They made-way, and I cycled into the cool night air.
The night was dark as pitch. It was past midnight. The narrow, smooth road was bounded on both sides by steep drainage ditches, and large fields of corn that grew as far as the eye could see. A metal drop-gate across the road was easy to cycle around. Suddenly, a voice commanded, “Halt.” “Oh hell,” I thought. I should have known that back there was not the last of it. I stopped immediately. I noticed a small, gray, concrete shed next to the gate. A uniformed guard with an automatic weapon slung across his back walked out of the shack and over to me. “Passport,” was his only word. I fished it out of the handlebar-bag and handed it to him. He hardly looked at it. He returned it and walked back to his shed. It was getting cold by this time. My only desire was to get down the road. It was dark enough that the surface of the roadway was completely invisible. Thank God it was flawlessly smooth. My memory flashed a scene from the bus ride that turned my stomach.
Roughly 3 miles farther, a concrete bridge supported the roadway for about 200-feet across an irrigation canal. Extremely frustrated and tired, the most pressing immediate need was sleep. Perhaps underneath the bridge would be a good place for it. I propped the bike against the guard rail, and went below to inspect. The ground was sandy. Sand is not the best surface for sleeping because it tends to get into everything. A soft grassy surface is best for sleeping out. But far worse than sand, the odiferous smell of fecal matter wafted through the atmosphere. It repelled me immediately. I scrambled aloft and pushed to the other end of the bridge and went below and found the same thing there. Everywhere I pointed the light were small piles of human waste and tatters of used toilet paper. I went back aloft, mounted and pedaled away.
Three-hundred feet farther, a small, concrete, vacant house, about 12-feet by 20-feet, sat a few yards from the side of the road. Its small back-yard was a concrete slab that extended 15 feet to the verge of an irrigation ditch. Vast fields of corn lay on the other side. I was too tired to go any farther. I propped the bike against the wall away from the road, laid out the pad and the bag on the concrete slab, and stretched out. While lolling in reverie the scuffling of booted feet on concrete alerted me. I looked up in the direction of the sound. An old man in the garb of a peasant-farmer stepped to the edge of the slab, pulled down his pants, squatted and defecated. The bright blue sleeping bag must have caught his eye, for when he finished he came near and spoke. I spoke back in English and flashed the light on him. He walked away.
Whether in France, Germany, Czech or Ukraine, wherever I bedded down for the night, a dog or dogs began barking soon afterwards. Sometimes they were 100-feet away, sometimes at farm houses, and sometimes they were so far away as to be barely audible, but always came the sounds of the hounds, and this night was no exception to the rule. In fact, it was a greatly amplified affirmation of the rule. A long, low hill, the top of which was a ridge with a road upon it, stood about 200-yards away. Many small shacks were huddled together from the base of the hill all the way to the top for as far as the eye could see, and every one must have had at least one faithful watchdog. Maybe they got a long-distance whiff of me and sensed an alien. One dog started the racket about 10 minutes after I lay down. Then another dog started barking. Others joined the chorus until at least 100 were all howling, barking and baying simultaneously. This canine chorus went on for hours. It strangely echoed and reverberated from the hillside. I did not record mileage for this 53rd day.
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