Crimea

We drive 6 hours across flat farmland with rich-looking soil into Crimea.  This country with its fabulous soil could be a breadbasket for Europe but an American farm equipment manufacturer tells us that its very hard to get farmers to change their traditional ways.  Suddenly, the landscape changes and becomes hilly and quite beautiful as we approach the Black Sea.  In 1945, the sleepy seaside resort of Yalta played host to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin who carved up the world between their countries.  Today, Russian and Ukrainian tourists throng the boardwalk.  No English is spoken here, but with a little imagination, this could be any European seaside resort. The Black Sea coastline is dotted with magnificent summer homes used by the Russian and Soviet elite - see photo at left. The weather is pure Mediterranean although the beaches are hard rounded pebble.  There is zero sense of customer service; they haven’t yet figured out how to win friends and influence people – western style.  Every week a few cruise ships dock and well-heeled European tourists descend for a few hours only to evaporate a short time later.

 A few hours inland, we visit Bakchhysaray, (Turkish for garden palace) seat of the Crimean Tatars, the last western bastion of the golden horde of  Genghis Khan.  We see Pushkin’s fountain of tears and learn something of the history of the Tatars. Then, on to Sevastopol near Balaklava, where over 500,000 Russians, French and British lost their lives in the 1850s in one of the most unnecessary wars of all time, immortalized by the infamous “Charge of the Light Brigade". In Sevastopol, the killing and devastation happened all over again in 1941 when the Nazis laid siege for 250 days and flattened the city.  Four years later, the Red Army took it back.  An amazing 3 dimensional diorama depicts what that must have been like and we get the sense that we have stepped back into history and are part of that siege.

Then we actually become part of history by bribing our way onto one of the Russian warships in the harbor.  We get a harbor tour of Russia and Ukraine’s Black Sea fleet and an up close and personal tour of a 12-year old “submarine hunter” including a visit to the bridge and a look at the rocket launchers, depth charges and torpedoes.  It’s all a little surreal.  We surmise that for $25 we can get ourselves a trip out into the Black Sea and perhaps $100 will buy us a chance to start a nuclear war.  By the way, there is not a single computer on board!  We wonder about how easily some terrorist with nefarious intent could do some serious damage with these “toys”.

After a few days of pleasant R&R, visiting the locality, it is time to move on.  We head for Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea and catch our flight onto Tashkent in Uzbekistan.

Ukraine Home Page   Next