Day 33: Przemyśl to Lviv – 97.9km
First thing in the morning I had to inspect the damage to the brakes. None of the bike shops in Przemysl opened until 11am so I had no option but the figure out the mess myself. The cables weren’t moving freely and the brakes themselves weren’t centred correctly. On top of this there was no fixing the lock ring on the rear brake lever, this meant that no matter what I tried the cable wouldn’t pull back correctly. I had no option here but to disconnect the brake fully. With the front brake I managed to get it operational but after pressing the lever the left brake would stay rubbing off the rim, thus stopping the wheel. If the centering screws were working correctly this would have been an easy fix, but they weren’t!
As the front brakes were my only way of stopping I tried to come up with a system to pull the lever back out manually from the handlebars. A few years ago back in college, a friend’s car had lost the ability to move the windscreen wipers. So instead of getting it fixed he tied a long piece of string through the wipers and put one end through the driver’s window and the other through the passenger’s window. When it was raining then he would pull on one end of the string to bring the wipers towards him and the passenger would pull on the other end of the string to bring them back! It worked like a charm! Inspired by this I tried to set up something similar from the brake to my handlebars. Unfortunately the angle wasn’t right and no matter how I set it up I couldn’t get the brake to pull back. It was an incredibly stupid idea on my part, I blamed my sleep deprived state! In the end I just gave up and decided that any time I pressed the front brake I would just have to stop the bike and pull it back manually.
A friend from back home is of the opinion “What do you need brakes for? They only slow you down!” When I set off this morning I decided to test out his theory as to how necessary they really were. I was going to try and get as far as I could without pulling the brakes. The cycle out of Przemyśl was a bit sketchy but I managed it brakeless to reach the road out of town.
I had thought I was quite close to the Ukrainian border so it came as quite a surprise that it actually lay 14km from where I started the day. Progress towards the border was very slow due to a huge headwind blowing in my face. I should also add that my gears were grinding pretty badly as well. Chain lube wasn’t fixing the problem so I just had to assume it was to do with chain/cassette wear which I couldn’t really do anything about at the moment. The combination of the headwind and this grinding chain meant that the cycle to the border felt like it was going by in slow motion. After 14 kilometres of this I finally arrived at the border post. I had made it the whole way without brakes somehow. Who really needs brakes after all!
This was my first real border crossing of the trip. The first 6 countries I’ve cycled through are all part of the Schengen Zone which meant the borders weren’t restricted. The crossings between Poland and Ukraine are usually quite strict so I was surprised to breeze through the Polish side no problem. I cycled along the fenced pedestrian walkway from here to the Ukrainian border post. Along the way I passed a few Babushkas who were smuggling what I presume were cigarettes. One was standing on the Ukrainian side of the walkway and the other two were standing on the Polish side. One of them had the contraband hidden inside her shoe and she was about to pass it through the fence as I passed. It was a pretty smooth operation in fairness!
When I arrived at the Ukrainian building I was surprised to breeze through this as well. A rather attractive Ukrainian guard gave my passport a quick glance and then she asked me to remove my glasses, unfortunately it didn’t go any further! Once she gave me the go ahead I arrived at customs which I was waved straight through. The whole process had taken 10 minutes, if only all border crossings were this straightforward.
It was now time for me to deploy my secret weapon, I had been learning Russian on and off for a good while before setting off on my trip. I didn’t put as much time and effort into it as I should have, I was learning it in short bursts and thus I couldn’t really hold a conversation but I knew the basics which I hoped would get me by. The reason I had learnt it was that I would be traveling through a lot of Russian speaking countries in Central Asia and of course Russia itself. This made it the most logical language to try and pick up for the first part of this journey. Although Ukrainian is the first language in western Ukraine, Russian is still widely spoken so I hoped I would be able to test it out here.
In the first shop I was met by a scowl when I tried speaking Russian. I had been to Ukraine on a backpacking trip last year and was told by friends here that people had no problem with you speaking Russian rather than Ukrainian. When I arrived in Lviv I found out from these friends that things had changed slightly since the war in the east had escalated and that Russian wasn’t as accepted as before. That would explain the scowl.
I stocked up on snacks and changed my money from Polish Zloty to Ukrainian Hryvnia. Once this was done I set off down the road into the first village. I managed another kilometre brakeless before I finally gave in and pressed the front brake. There was a church I wanted to photograph. If I didn’t stop for this and subsequent photos I could have made it 30 kilometres brakeless!
From the outset it looked like the road to Lviv was going to be quite nervy. The Ukrainians hadn’t cleared out the road shoulders of snow/ice unlike the Polish so I had to stick to the main lane of traffic. Snow and ice would sometimes spill out into this section of road as well meaning I would have to swerve around it. Of course trucks would sometimes speed by when one of these sections came up so I would have no option to plough through it with a truck speeding by alongside me. On top of this the oncoming overtake move that was popular with Polish drivers was even more popular over here. I lost count of how many times I had to bail. Bailing into the shoulder/verge in Poland wasn’t too bad as there was usually enough room but here the shoulder was made of snow and ice which meant when I veered into this at speed to avoid an oncoming car/truck that the bike was very hard to control.
These close overtakes by trucks and the oncoming cars/vans speeding towards me made it very tough going. On top of this the headwind and grinding gears meant I was making horribly slow progress along this road. I had remembered reading that this road was flat so I was surprised to be met with constant rolling hills. On these I would lose all my speed on the downhill section due to the headwind which meant I was starting the climb at the bottom with zero momentum. Maybe on a normal day it wouldn’t have seemed that hilly. As well as this the cold headwind was bringing the temperature well below freezing meaning my hands were constantly going numb and my water bottles were actually freezing solid. The combination of all these close calls, the numb hands and the amount of effort I had to produce to make any progress along the road made for an incredibly mentally and physically draining day.
The Ukrainian drivers were absolutely nuts, they didn’t seem to fear death at all. After bailing from an oncoming car I would sometimes look at the driver, most of the time they were on the fecking phone with only one hand on the wheel, these people just didn’t seem to give a shit. My last trip to Ukraine had been such a positive experience and I had left the place thinking it was one of the top countries I had ever visited. I wondered now if I had made a mistake coming back here by bicycle. From my perspective at the moment I was viewing the country through completely different eyes.
The road got busier the closer I got to Lviv meaning that the number of close calls and the amount of times I had to bail into the snow was increasing. I was starting to lose it, with every oncoming car I was shouting and cursing Ukraine, it’s drivers and myself for coming here in winter, what the hell was I thinking. I couldn’t really take it any more, I was mentally starting to crack. But I didn’t have any option, I just had to keep cycling and just keep as alert as I could so that I wouldn’t be taken out.
I finally got onto the last 20km stretch to Lviv. The road was even narrower here with snow and ice constantly spilling out onto it. This of course was the busiest stretch of road with a constant stream of trucks always behind me. As there was a constant stream of traffic in both directions the passes were exceedingly close. I was on my last nerves as I tried to keep the bike perfectly straight with snow/ice just inches to the right of my wheels and speeding traffic zooming right by my left shoulder. It got too much in the end, I had a few too many close calls with trucks passing and sucking me in towards them that I just stopped in the snow and tried to think about what to do next.
Of course it was starting to get dark now so I couldn’t guarantee that the traffic would even be able to see me. My only option now as to wait for gaps in traffic, cycle as fast as I could and then pull in when the traffic came up behind me. This meant for some very slow progress, especially when these gaps in traffic welcomed oncoming cars to overtake. Again, I was constantly bailing into the snow. Progress was awfully slow due to this. Sometimes I tried cycling in the snow and ice but this made for even slower progress.
After several kilometres of this nervy cycling I finally reached a snow free hard shoulder on the outskirts of Lviv. It was now dark and I was about to begin a cycle into one of Ukraine’s largest cities, lovely! In the end I made it into the city without too much trouble although there were again some very close calls. Once I got close to the city centre the road turned to cobbles which were slick from ice meaning that they were pretty much uncyclable. From here I just had to give up and walk on the pavements all the way to the hostel I had booked. It was a 30 minute walk through freezing temperatures with my hands really suffering as usual. When I finally arrived at the hostel I had to squeeze my loaded bike through the tight doors and carry the 45kg bike up a large staircase. When I finally got through the door to my room in the hostel I was completely and utterly spent. The whole day from crossing the border had been spent entirely on edge, it was a bloody awful day and one I did not want to repeat. I would have to hope that the rest of Ukraine would make for some better cycling.
That night I met up with two friends from the city for some food and drinks and to see the city. I was really glad of this as I was able to take my mind off the day and just relax in some good company.
Day 34: Rest day in Lviv
The reason I had aimed to arrive in Lviv on a Friday was so that I could have the Saturday off to catch up with the friends I had met here on a previous trip. In the morning I met up with Stepan, my main contact in the city and 3 others. We decided to head out of the city and into the countryside to the largest lake in the region. It ended up taking three separate buses to get there but we finally made it.
We did a bit of sight seeing around here and lit up our stove by the lake having some tea, coffee and food. There was a Ukrainian military training ground near the lake which meant that there were constantly shells going off only a few kilometres away which made the whole scene very eerie.
On the way back from the lake I looked out the front window of the bus to see what the drivers of oncoming cars were doing. I was surprised to see that most of them were actually on the phone, others were looking to their passengers and chatting, others were smoking, it seemed very few were actually concentrated on the road. In retrospect this made yesterday even more frightening.
When we arrived back in the city we got some more food in one of the many bistros around the city. You order as much as you want here and they weigh the food. Usually a full plate of food ends up costing €2 which is insanely good value. Both last night and today I ordered two full plates of food, my appetite from all of this cycling was slightly out of control.
The fact that it only cost €2 was largely due to the exchange rate of the Ukrainian Hryvnia against the Euro. When I had entered the country the exchange rate to the euro was 22.50, by the time I had got to Lviv later that night it had gone to somewhere between 25 and 28. The currency was crashing worryingly fast. I was annoyed at having lost a good chunk of money due to changing my money earlier in the day and mentioned it to the lads in Lviv but looking back at this it probably came across as a bit insensitive as I hadn’t considered how badly this affected everyone in Ukraine who’s wages and lives depended on the strength of the currency. The economy really was in a difficult place in Ukraine since the revolution and was making things quite difficult for everyone living here.
After the food I went to pick up my bike which I had left in for a service earlier in the day. The mechanic was surprised that it was in such a bad state after only 2,700km. He said that it had been badly put together in Britain. By this I think he was referring to the mudguards which had long had several screws shaken loose and were barely hanging on and also the brake levers where the lockrings had been damaged and lost their threads so easily. His comment really reminded me of the “Made in Britain” joke in the IT Crowd. I like to think that after inspecting the bike he saw the British sticker on the bike and said “Ahhh!”
The damage to the chain and cassette though was no doubt due to the constant grit and slush on these snowy roads which I couldn’t do too much about so I assumed this was par for the course with this type of winter cycling. In the end the mechanic ended up replacing the chain, some of the worn parts of the cassette and one of the cogs on the derailleurs for a very good price. I thanked him for getting the bike back in working order again and set off to drop it back to the hostel before heading out for a bit of heavy drinking!
I met up with Stepan again and around 10 others in a pub in the centre of Lviv. The drinks started flowing and we had a good session going. The pub we were in had local craft beers on draught for 50 cent for half a litre (which tasted insanely good) so of course we partook in a couple of these.
As it was getting late and we were starting to feel the effects we all decided a trip to a nearby rooftop was in order to take in one of the best views over Lviv. The guys I were with knew all of the best hidden spots in Lviv and this was definitely right up there. Getting to the rooftop was slightly tricky involving a step off the edge of a balcony onto a ledge but the reward was well worth it as we climbed a fire escape ladder and scrambled up the final part of the roof to be met with a full moon and the domed roofs of the many churches of Lviv lit up right in front of us.
We chilled out here for a while relaxing and taking in the awesome view before starting the tricky descent back down. We met up with a few more people once back on the ground and headed to another pub where the drinking continued until the early hours of the morning. I was really glad that I had some friends to meet up with here as it really helped take my mind off the difficult cycling I had gone through over the last few days.
After my harsh reintroduction to Ukraine I was remembering why I had liked this country so much during my previous visit. The brilliant company, the pubs here, the wonderful city of Lviv, it all made for a fantastic experience and helped wipe away the memories of what I had gone through yesterday.
Irregular Adventures 