Back in the UK
For future reference, having flight A arrive at 11pm when you need to check in for flight B at 7am is probably sensible at some major first-world airports: where you can be sure there's a hotel with spare rooms on-site, and speak the language enough to be confident of finding it, and are sure it will accept a waved credit-card. I'd do it at Heathrow or JFK if there were no choice.
I cannot recommend the domestic waiting-room at Borispol airport as a place of restful sleep.
The last few days in Ukraine were good; on Thursday I walked for a few hours in the hills around Balaclava, up to a WW2 German fortress set into the top of the sea-cliff with one cast-iron sentry-box cantilevered right over the drop - some brave local has written 'I love Tanya' on the outside of the box. This Google picture shows the sentry-box as a small brown blob in the very centre; I left my camera at the hostel for ease of clambering. Silent, acre after acre of vineyards, not a soul around, the smell of spring and the sea far below.
Also Yalta: the Livadia Palace seems shut for reconstruction. I gather from the guide that the reconstruction would involve putting up a statue of the three leaders of the Yalta conference, and that the local Crimean Tatars, returned during the nineties from their mass exile to Siberia by Stalin in 1944, are adamant that the one thing Crimea does not need is a new statue of Stalin, so the reconstruction may take some time. Yalta is a marvellous setting, among colossal crags, for the kind of seafront promenade that I've assiduously avoided going to in Blackpool; the road from Sevastopol runs right along the top of the cliffs and is clearly one of the great scenic roads of the world.
I don't think I'd recommend Ukraine as whole-heartedly as I recommend Romania and Poland: the hostels aren't quite there (though the Kosmonaut Hostel in Lviv is excellent; anyone backpacking in Krakow should consider the nine-hour train trip east, and it's probably worth the fifteen hours from Warsaw), the transport infrastructure is just slightly too ropey to be fun - I twice had public transport fail and had to take a forty-pound taxi trip - and the opening hours for the major attractions are weird enough that I didn't manage to get to the Chernobyl museum or the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet, both of which I was rather looking forward to.
You would have thought that any of a total lack of knowledge of the Ukrainian language, a strong dislike of Slavs and a nasty temper would make one consider a job other than hostel manager in Kiev, but this hasn't disqualified the man who owns and runs Kievsky Backpacker.
I cannot recommend the domestic waiting-room at Borispol airport as a place of restful sleep.
The last few days in Ukraine were good; on Thursday I walked for a few hours in the hills around Balaclava, up to a WW2 German fortress set into the top of the sea-cliff with one cast-iron sentry-box cantilevered right over the drop - some brave local has written 'I love Tanya' on the outside of the box. This Google picture shows the sentry-box as a small brown blob in the very centre; I left my camera at the hostel for ease of clambering. Silent, acre after acre of vineyards, not a soul around, the smell of spring and the sea far below.
Also Yalta: the Livadia Palace seems shut for reconstruction. I gather from the guide that the reconstruction would involve putting up a statue of the three leaders of the Yalta conference, and that the local Crimean Tatars, returned during the nineties from their mass exile to Siberia by Stalin in 1944, are adamant that the one thing Crimea does not need is a new statue of Stalin, so the reconstruction may take some time. Yalta is a marvellous setting, among colossal crags, for the kind of seafront promenade that I've assiduously avoided going to in Blackpool; the road from Sevastopol runs right along the top of the cliffs and is clearly one of the great scenic roads of the world.
I don't think I'd recommend Ukraine as whole-heartedly as I recommend Romania and Poland: the hostels aren't quite there (though the Kosmonaut Hostel in Lviv is excellent; anyone backpacking in Krakow should consider the nine-hour train trip east, and it's probably worth the fifteen hours from Warsaw), the transport infrastructure is just slightly too ropey to be fun - I twice had public transport fail and had to take a forty-pound taxi trip - and the opening hours for the major attractions are weird enough that I didn't manage to get to the Chernobyl museum or the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet, both of which I was rather looking forward to.
You would have thought that any of a total lack of knowledge of the Ukrainian language, a strong dislike of Slavs and a nasty temper would make one consider a job other than hostel manager in Kiev, but this hasn't disqualified the man who owns and runs Kievsky Backpacker.