Field note 07 The Hard Roads
There were no tourists. There was just me.
Turkey turned me back over paperwork, so the route was rebuilt through countries I did not know. In October 2024 that took Jacko and me across Ukraine, from Chernivtsi to Odesa, Kyiv and out through Lviv.From Rodrigo's road archive
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The Hard Roads
There were no tourists. There was just me.
Turkey turned me back over paperwork, so the route was rebuilt through countries I did not know. In October 2024 that took Jacko and me across Ukraine, from Chernivtsi to Odesa, Kyiv and out through Lviv.
- 10 daysAcross Ukraine
- 2024The third year of the war
- 0Other tourists seen
07.1Spent rocket casings stacked in a field. Ukraine collects and sorts what has been fired at it; scrap like this ends up in yards outside the towns.07.2Among the casings. I have visited war museums all over the world, and found it hard to accept that this was not a museum but 2024.
07.3A house with its roof gone. Away from the front line the damage is scattered rather than total: one building destroyed, the next one lived in.
07.4The sign to Kherson and Mykolaiv. Kherson is a strategic Black Sea port; I got close but was not allowed in.
07.5Ukrainian soldiers. I rode with permission, checkpoint by checkpoint, and the conversations were friendlier than I expected.
07.6A bombed building still standing. People live and trade around it, because there is nowhere else to go.
07.7The opera house in Odesa. The city was hit by rockets, the raid sirens sounded several times a day, and the theatre kept its season.
07.8Kyiv. The capital was the turning point of the ride: from here I started back west towards Frankfurt.
07.9A bullet hole through a shop window, taped over and left. It is the kind of detail that stops being remarkable when it is everywhere.
07.0
07.0
07.0Turkey turned me back over paperwork, so the route was rebuilt through countries I did not know. In October 2024 that took Jacko and me across Ukraine, from Chernivtsi to Odesa, Kyiv and out through Lviv.
Moldova said no three times. Ukraine waved me straight through.
It was not the plan. The plan had been Turkey, and Turkey had turned me back at the border over paperwork. I tried Moldova instead and was refused three separate times. Then, with no expectation at all, Ukraine let me in on the first attempt.
If the destination was not going to be Turkey, I wrote, it had to be somewhere with a bit of risk and adrenaline mixed into a culture I did not know. I got that.
The first thing I noticed after the southwestern border was the road itself: a main route, in poor condition, and almost completely empty. Then forest, then Orthodox churches in blue and gold with the national flag beside them, and then Chernivtsi, a large city apparently working as normal.
What struck me first was that there were almost no men on the streets. Bus stops with only women and children, and the few men you could see were elderly.
What the road kept
It is not far away. That is the whole point.
Ukraine is not a distant country in a headline. It is a day's ride from places people visit on holiday, and the people there are getting on with life inside it. Seeing that at ground level is worth more than any museum.A cigarette light, and then the whole unit came over.
I stopped at Uman on the way to Odessa, four in the afternoon and nothing eaten all day, and sat down with a kebab while a group of soldiers settled in across from me. Their friends were in the shop next door buying drink for the group.
I asked one of them for a light. When I explained I was Chilean and travelling by motorcycle with my dog, the soldier called the rest over. They came across offering me something to drink. None of them spoke a word of English, so the conversation happened through a voice translator.
Some of them followed me on Instagram. The most serious of the group showed me an app with the Ukrainian and Russian positions in real time, pointed at the screen and told me where I could go and where I could not, and said Odessa was no longer dangerous. At five they said goodbye, and one of them gave me my unit patch: a wolf. I kept it as a trophy.
The only road south to Odessa from there is a single straight line of three hundred kilometres. Loaded, the motorcycle does two hundred to two hundred and thirty on a tank, which meant arriving in the dark and hoping for a fuel station on a road that looked very empty.
07.10A burnt out car in the grass. Vehicles like this are moved off the roads and left where there is room.
07.11The motorcycle above the Dniester. The far west of the country is quiet, green and almost untouched.
07.12A unit patch, given as a gift. Soldiers wanted photographs with the dog more than anything else.
07.13A night's shelter. Beds were offered constantly, and refused payment just as constantly.
07.14The ballet, still running. Culture did not stop; it moved to the hours between the alarms.As close to the front as they would let me get.
I tried to get into Kherson to see the front line closer. That did not work, and once it was clear it was not going to, I turned north for Mykolaiv, an hour away, to find somewhere to sleep.
There were military checkpoints the whole way, and they got less strict the further I rode from the fighting. The soldiers were friendly with me: a loaded foreign motorcycle is obvious at a glance, and it did not cause them much difficulty. Between the checkpoints there was nothing but farmland and the people working it.
The hostel in Mykolaiv nearly refused me over the dog, and the deal in the end was that I would sleep outside with Jacko and go and buy toilet paper for a group of Poles who were arriving. I accepted immediately. The room turned out to open straight onto the street, so reception was never a problem. It was a Saturday, and the whole area was still under a midnight curfew.
07.15A table outside a bar. Life goes on in between the sirens, deliberately.
07.16On the road south. Traffic is thin, fuel is available, and every few kilometres there is a checkpoint.
07.17A building shelled and abandoned, with its windows gone.
07.18Two glasses on a bar. Ordinary evenings, in a country where nothing is ordinary.The field archive
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