Where are Ron and Ellen?
Summer 2002
19 September 2002
Afton, Virginia
Dear Family and Friends,
Here is Ron's report from Crimea, which sounds like a wonderful place to visit -- and to bicycle. This is a part of the trip I would have loved to have participated in. He'll be heading back to Odessa shortly, and from there plans to take a train back to Munich (routing as yet to be determined -- perhaps we should have a betting pool on which cities the train ride will take him through). He flies home from Munich on 30 September, and I am looking forward to his arrival! And I think our 19 year old cat, Lady Godiva, will also be here to greet him. Ron and I were both sure she wouldn't last the summer, but she still seems to be doing fine; she sleeps 95% of the time and pesters me to pet her the other 5%.
It is still very dry here, with most jurisdictions imposing strict regulations and restrictions on water usage. The long range weather forecast indicates unusually dry weather continuing for the next 6 months. We have been blessed with some cooler temperatures, with daytime highs only in the low 80sF/27-29C, a welcome change after what was our 3rd hottest summer on record (1938 and 1936 were hotter).
I've put a few new photos up on the family photo page, some of Steven that I took in Oregon in August, and a few new ones of Simon and Leo. They are at http://www.cfw.com/~renders/family_photos.html
Love to all,
Bakhchysaray is as interesting a place to visit as it is to pronounce. After taking the train from Odessa to Simferopol and checking into a hotel, I bought another train ticket (less than $2) for an afternoon excursion to Bakhchysaray, between Simferopol and Sevastopol, to get a feel of the roads, terrain and conditions in the Crimea before starting to bicycle in the area. The train wasn't scheduled to leave until around 3 o'clock, so I wandered down to the bus station and discovered a bus leaving that moment, so I got on.
As I was leaving "The Tatar rulers' palace (Khansky Palats) [which] was built by Russian and Ukrainian slaves in the 16th century under the direction of Persian, Ottoman and Italian master builders", I met a group of 8 bicyclists (5 men and 3 ladies) from Lithuania, who had taken the train to Simferopol where they started their bicycle trip through the Crimea. Most of them appeared to be Ph D candidates taking a vacation. It was so good to meet some other cyclists, even if I was on foot at the moment. I met them again as they pulled into Yalta, pedaling along the main beach front walking street. As they passed I gave them each a fresh fig from the bag I had just bought in the market. Small world, but still too big.
After wandering around in the Palace, exploring the cemetery, harem, Fountain of Tears, and various pieces of architecture and carved text, I thought I would walk up the road and see if the Uspensky Monastery, which is currently active, was as interesting. Along the way I passed the old Mosque of Tokhtala Dzhama with its 16 sided minaret, with a telephone pole right next to it with wires going in all directions. I took a picture of this to help explain how the Russians (under communism) demonstrated their sensibilities to religious building that they didn't tear down. And today it continues to demonstrate their tolerance and respect for other religions. (Tongue in cheek, if needed.)
Before arriving at the Monastery, the road for traffic ends, and there is a pedestrian road that continues up to the Monastery, and beyond. After looking up at the Monastery, I noticed the pedestrian road beyond had a lot of people walking on it, and was curious about what was down the road, so I continued on ... and on and on. Then up and up, until I found myself in the cave city I had read and forgotten about. Pleasant surprise. The day was growing late before I arrived at the far side of the cave city, but I had continued on anyway, returning as dusk was falling.
Everywhere there are little numbered van taxis, very useful if you know what number van goes where. There was supposed to be one near the end of the road but after waiting a few minutes, a guy talked me into taking a taxi for $1 to the train station, where the buses also arrive. As I pulled in to the station, the bus was leaving at that moment and I quickly hopped on. Reminded me of taking buses in Mexico, where there always appeared to be a bus taking off to where I wanted to go.
The night in Simferopol was uneventful, and the only place so far that I would recommend skipping. The town seemed poorly organized to me and had no clear center of activity. The walking street had some people but most of the businesses were closed.
The next day I took the world's longest trolleybus ride, 85K over the 2200+ feet mountain pass. It took three trolleybuses before I could manage to get me and the bicycle on. No one spoke English, and the little old lady in charge of boarding was a real b..... On the first trolleybus, I was there first because one pulled out just as I arrived. When it was loaded everyone moved in front of me to get on. Finally the lady pointed me to the ticket booth where I bought two tickets and got in line, again first for the next trolleybus. This time everyone kept going around me, and the B..... kept telling me to get out of the way, and when it was full it took off without me. On the third one I sort of blocked the way so that I had to be dealt with. Then people explained that I needed to load my bike at the back door, which was closed of course. So I moved to the back door and watched people enter the front door and move to the back filling up the seats. Finally with me knocking on the door, someone opened it, and I loaded the bike. Of course the floor was full of packages by that time, but there was a vacant seat so I pulled the bike into it, sitting the back wheel on some of the packages in the aisle. No one offered to help and I skinned up my knee trying to get the bike up the steps of the trolleybus. Frankly, as we climbed the mountain I wished I had biked this part instead of taking the trolleybus. It was a gradual climb and the road was wide. And it would have been a grand downhill ride.
In Yalta I biked down from the bus station into town and along the beach road. The first hotel in the Lonely Planet guide was full, and the second, the Palace, was much more expensive than the amount listed, but I checked in anyway. My most expensive accommodations to date. Later I found out about "apartments" which rent for $10 to $20 a night. How to find them was still somewhat a mystery, especially with my lack of language abilities.
I enjoyed my time in Yalta, but it is really an international beach town, full of expensive restaurants and hotels, fancy discos, street musicians, artists. For hours I walked up and down Naberezhna Lenina the "vehicle-free waterfront promenade" with a large McDonald's having a prominent place and being one of the busiest restaurants I saw. I also loved the little back streets, where I found an Internet Cafe.
I tried the cafeteria listed in the guide book and had a full fish dinner for a couple of dollars. When I went back for seconds on the fish, they were sold out. On the second visit I ordered three pieces of excellent fish for about $1 a piece. I am sure I could find a good fish dinner in some of the very upscale restaurants, but that really seems extravagant in this country. So my quest for reasonably priced and properly cooked fish continues. I recalled my search for fish dinners as I went up the southern coast of India, and as I got closer to Goa the fish became more expensive and smaller.
One day I made a bus excursion to the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens which cover several square kilometers of hillside from high up down to the seashore. I was most impressed and enjoyed my walk down from the top to bottom. There was also a separate large greenhouse complex dedicated to desert plants which was very impressive, with lots of plants in bloom.
For my bicycle trip down the Crimea coast I decided to use the main mountain road, which runs parallel to the coast but way up the mountain side. The most difficult part was getting up to the road from sea level. While they tried to make a level road, it was not possible, and there were long grades up and down, but the grades were gradual and the views were spectacular. My Bluegrass music collection kept me going up the long hills. Good ole Doc Watson and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band! While there was some traffic it did not feel oppressive. It was light, mostly cars going fast, gut the surface was good and there were two lanes on the climbs up and one for the downhills, and the outside lane was very wide, providing plenty of space for comfort. Only as I got near Sevastopol did I experience "traffic".
The other bicyclists had taken roads through the center from Sevastopol to Yalta, and camped along the way, as well as in Yalta.
My first destination was Simeis. Bob, a NASA astronomer who commutes to work by bicycle, asked me to take a picture of the grave of the former Director of the Simeis Observatory during the 1930s and 40s, Grigorii Shain. Bob is also an astronomy historian, and said the only thing ever written on Shain in English was "...the translation of the memories of Iosif Shklovsky, FIVE BILLION VODKA BOTTLES TO THE MOON (W. W. Norton Co., 1991)." Bob said that he was interested in Shain because "He is remarkable in that he stood up to Stalin and the secret police (NKVD) when astronomers were being arrested and sent to the camps or to firing squads in the purge years of the late 1930s." Bob thought I might accept this task as a "side trip with a goal" and said he had heard that Simeis was "a beautiful spot." He was correct on both counts.
It was a short but pleasant trip. As I coasted down from the mountain into Simeis, I stopped at a restaurant and ordered chicken soup, tomato salad and hot tea. What I got was half a grilled chicken with a tomato salad on the side and an additional tomato salad, all in all costing about $10. Certainly one of my most expensive and disappointing meals. It is always an adventure in restaurants when I can not speak the local language! When I got into town, I was directed to the central hotel, and without going in, I decided to look for a cheaper accommodation. I asked a man on the corner if he knew of a place cheaper than the hotel. He seemed to understand my question and asked me to wait until his wife came out to the store. I understood that she spoke English. When she came out I think she spoke less English than him, but after they chatted back and forth a couple of minutes, he asked me to wait while he went across the street and disappeared in a store. A few minutes later he came back with a lady who couldn't speak much English, but was going to take me to a place to stay. So I just followed her back up the mountain to what turned out to be her house where she rented out rooms. She charged me $5 and provided dinner and breakfast, as well as a continuing supply of fruit from her garden and orchard: sweet black grapes, ripe figs, a jam from another fruit, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggs from her chickens.
I wanted to point out the contrast between the $10 "chicken soup" dinner and the $5 for room and board. The economy here continues to intrigue me, and I am surprised every day.
Tatyana, Ellen's friend in Odessa, who is an astronomer and librarian, gave me a name and telephone number for a contact at the Observatory in Simeis (Dr. Nesteron Nikolay Semenovich), but I got no answer from the restaurant or the home where I was staying, so I decided to just wait until the next day to try again, and if I got no answer I would just bicycle up to the Observatory. However, that night I discovered that the radio telescope was built on the sea coast while the optical telescope was built up high on the mountain. Mariya, my host, the next morning called around and discovered I was using the wrong prefix for the number, and I finally spoke to Dr. Semenovich who agreed to meet me at the radio telescope in the afternoon. It turned out that he was in town only because he did not go to a conference with the others since it was his birthday, and he arranged for another astronomer to meet me, Alexandra Volvach, who was also in town because he was leaving the next day for a conference in Italy. He toured me around the observatory and pointed out some of the equipment with official US Property tags on them. Then he took me up the mountain to the cemetery where I photographed the grave of Grigorii Shain. The road to the cemetery was closed because it went through a large vineyard that surrounds the cemetery and there was a uniformed guard protecting the grapes which were being harvested. Later we toured the optical observatory and I also photographed the home where Grigorii Shain lived when he was director.
Bob will be interested in knowing that on the tombstone it says (translated by Alexandra): "All your life has been given to science." I also noticed that the gravestone of his wife had been recently cleaned and there were some fresh evergreen limbs placed on the stone. There were some dried flowers on his gravestone, but not as recent as hers.
It turned out that Vladimir, an engineer working for the TV station, the husband of my host, Mariya, helped build the radio telescope. I spend a couple of pleasant evenings with them and their son, who works at a brokerage in Moscow, and their daughter-in-law. The first night I had wandered down to the strip along the beach and then back up into town where I had found a couple from Moscow with their bicycles in an outside cafe, and around 10 pm Mariya and one of her guests came to find me because they were worried I might not be able to find my way back to the house. I continue to be amazed at the kindness and concern I receive from strangers.
The morning I decided to bicycle on to Sevastopol, it rained all morning. But in the afternoon it cleared up, so I climbed the mountain up to below the beautiful church perched on a tip of rock hanging off the mountain, and then followed the main road west to Foros, the last town before the road goes inland from the coast. It was another short but beautiful bicycling day.
In Foros I was bicycling around looking for a place to stay. I ran into a dead end and as I was turning around and heading back up the hill an older lady said something to me and I responded that I didn't understand. She turned out to be from Moscow and came to Foros because there was an excellent therapeutic masseuse who she liked very much. She was on her way to her second massage of the day. I asked her if she knew where I could rent an apartment, and she led me to what appeared to be the last building on the way (east) out of town along the coast, which turned out to be the home of a couple who worked in the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC before the split of Russia and Ukraine. I am guessing that this was their summer home, but now they live here full time and rent out rooms to make ends meet.
Among their guests was another family from Moscow (grandmother, daughter, and grandson) and all three could speak English and wanted to talk, which we did for hours, while I was also provided with a fish dinner and several rounds of tea.
The trip inland from Foros to Sevastopol was beautiful and different from riding along the coast, and while it was longer than I had anticipated, it was also easier. My guide book had no map of Sevastopol, and the map of Crimea gave a rough outline but was not detailed enough to help me very much. I just followed the main road and signs into town. I could see water and knew that I was on one of the fingers reaching towards the sea, and I just kept going, much farther than I expected. Finally I came to a park-like area and noticed a large building up the main path, so I went to see what it was. It turned out to be the "painted panorama" that housed a circular painting of the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Much like the civil war panorama in Atlanta Georgia. This one may be larger.
There were a few tourist souvenir stalls, and I stopped at one to ask directions to a hotel. The guy I was talking to was quite unique: bandana, leather coat, ear rings - his whole appearance spoke of individuality. He turned out to be an artist who was sketching people for some income. He wanted to draw a picture of me, which he did in about 10 minutes, and gave it to me as a gift. I think he must have found me to be as unique as I found him to be. There was a young lady also running the stall, who was also an art student, and she also drew a sketch of me, and gave it to me as a gift. It turned out that the stall belongs to her mother-in-law and on other days she runs a computer training center that her mother had started several years ago in the beginning of peristroika.
So I made my first friends on arrival in Sevastopol, a city that was closed for so many years and completely destroyed in its defense, according to a quote I read from Mark Twain. But you will have to wait for the next chapter, since I am still in Sevastopol, adding an additional day each day.
Now that I have done a limited amount of bicycling in the Crimea, I wish I had planned this part of the trip better. The Crimea appears to be an excellent place to bicycle with lots of possible coastal and inland trips. Accommodations are much cheaper and easier to find than I thought they would be. The terrain is much more interesting and bicycle friendly than I thought it would be. It would make a wonderful group trip with someone scouting ahead for accommodations. Camping is also possible. I could easily have spent three or four weeks here and done a lot more bicycling. Aah...experience provides such useful information after the fact.
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Last updated: 11 October 2002