My retirement was but a week old before I left the country. I had of course planned the trip some time earlier in anticipation of the final shift having taken place but even so it seemed as if I wasn’t going to hang around contemplating my free time for too long. The Retirement World Tour is of course an established thing which many people talk about and some of them actually do. That month in Australia, the cruise to the Galapagos Islands, the African safari, a fortnight in Bridlington, you know what I’m talking about. Nice as those would have been I wasn’t about to set off on a major adventure like that by myself and as Elaine is not retiring yet a different, shorter form of fun was sought. It was a You Tube video that gave me the idea. The destination was to be Ukraine.
Mother of the Motherland Statue, Kiev (Taken on my previous visit)
It was going to be my second visit to that country. The first took place a couple of years ago when I went with my kids. I must add here that if you are not aware, my kids are grown up, in age at least, and Ukraine is not really the best place to take your seven year olds when a Disney park would be easier to get to. No, eschewing theme parks and the seaside we went to a country embroiled in a civil war to visit the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. This seemed strange to some people but those people will never experience the abandoned town of Pripyat or the village of Zallisya, consumed by the forest. It was a fascinating few days. With Chernobyl ticked off the list what could possibly cause me to want to return though? That You Tube video showed that without much effort or indeed money, you could book a flight in an Antonov An-24 from Kiev to Lviv. Said aircraft was designed in the 1950s by the Soviet Antonov Design Bureau and as such it is one of the last remaining examples of a classic turboprop airliner. As an avgeek with a particular fondness for classic propliners it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Getting to Kiev meant a flight to Gatwick with British Airways, a train across London to the awful Luton Airport where the Hungarian low cost airline Wizz Air flew me to Kiev’s ‘other’ airport, Zhuliny landing at one o’clock in the morning. The return was even less direct. I booked a ticket with Air Baltic to Gatwick which meant a four hour connection in Riga but there was a good, solid reason for that. Well, for me, maybe not anyone else.
It will suffice to say that there are easier ways of getting to and from Kiev so don’t let my bizarre routing put you off. What will you find when you get there though? I didn’t see much of Kiev this time round but from my previous experience it is a city that’s worth visiting. It has plenty of history, interesting buildings, some nice parks and is ludicrously cheap. A decent hotel room can be had for the equivalent of thirty quid a night, a meal for three or four pounds, a trip of any length on the underground is about 15p and if you want to visit the excellent State Aviation Museum, and let’s face it who wouldn’t, you will still have change from £1.50. All at current exchange rates. It is also just a bit different from your normal large European city. Whilst it is slowly embracing western consumerism, it has yet to shake off all of its Soviet past, despite its relationship with former ‘mother’ Russia being at an all time low. Indeed, it is Russian backed rebels who are fighting the Ukrainians in the afore mentioned civil war. Thankfully this is many miles away in the east of the country and Kiev itself is immune to its effects, a few demonstrations aside. My hotel bore the hallmarks of its Soviet past. I chose it as it was close to the airport, a fact I was pleased about following the late arrival. A ten minute walk took me to lodging from a different era. A young lad, seemingly resenting the fact he was on a night shift, reluctantly checked me in and charged my credit card with the 1700 UAH that Booking.com said they would. That’s just £47 for the two nights. Somewhat bigger than I thought, I discovered via a lift that played elevator music (probably Richard Clayderman, wasn’t it always?) as one ascended, my room on the third floor. The room was a reasonable size and clean. There were two single quilt covers folded on the bed and two single quilts in the wardrobe. The decor was, shall re say, a bit retro. The bathroom lacked shelves on which to place your ablution paraphernalia but for £22 a night those bits and pieces can sit on the table in the bedroom. This was a hotel whose glory days were long since past but it had decent wifi so fitted the bill for me perfectly. On my previous visit I had inflicted on my children a bizarre floating hotel that basically turned out to be a knocking shop where you could call the concierge if you fancied a bit of ‘romance’. There was a fair bit of noisy ‘romance’ going on in the room above me which kept me awake I seem to remember. No such naughtiness was evident in the ironically named Royal Congress Hotel and two decent night’s sleep were had.
Kiev’s golden domes (Taken on my previous visit)
Good though that sleep was it didn’t last very long. Just five and a half hours after lights out my iphone alarm demanded that I woke up and as there was no bedside table I had to get out of bed anyway to turn the bloody thing off. My flight to Lviv departed at 10am and I wanted to get to the airport in good time. Unfortunately the Kiev weather had decided to take the equinox literally and a late summer heatwave before I had arrived had given way to the grey skies and rain of autumn. It didn’t dampen my spirit though; a classic Soviet airliner awaited me so dodging the puddles I made my way to Zhuliny’s small domestic terminal. Just two flights were showing on the departure screen, Odessa and Lviv, both by the airline Motor Sich. An offshoot of a Ukrainian aero engine company, Motor Sich operate a small fleet of aircraft from the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet era on scheduled and charter flights. They seemed to provide the only custom for the domestic terminal which, somewhat surprisingly, had a business lounge. I should state here that I bought a Priority Pass card in the summer and can access many business lounges. Some are good, others are not but I’ve paid the money so I’ll be damned if I’m not going to use them. (Yorkshire again, sorry) The lounge in the domestic terminal was the most bizarre one I’ve ever seen. A glass screen separated it from the rest of the terminal and it could seat about ten people. A continental breakfast buffet was available and if you were truly desperate there were bowls of what I assumed to be scrambled egg with sausage that you could bung in a microwave. I wasn’t so I didn’t stay long.
With the Odessa bound passengers whisked away to their waiting Antonov, a bus pitched up to take we Lviv passengers to ours. As it honed into view my excitement level was reaching fever pitch. This may well sound odd to you and virtually everyone else in the world for that matter but that Antonov An-24 ticked so many boxes for an avgeek like me. It was an old, classic Soviet airliner, a world away from the Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s that make up the majority of the world’s airline fleets. It smelled like a museum exhibit, had huge round windows, made some strange noises and bits of seat trim hanging off. It had been originally delivered to Aeroflot in 1972 making it 46 years old and it looked, felt and smelled like it. I was sat in the front row. Not a great row to be honest. It was up against the bulkhead which restricted leg room and the window was behind you which meant a strained neck by the end of the flight. Not to worry, this was a rare, possibly the only chance I would get to fly in this type of aircraft and I’d be damned if was wasn’t going to enjoy it. There was a hostess on board who served us a cup of water, a sandwich and some lemon tea for nothing which is more than I got on British Airways, Wizz Air, Air Baltic and EasyJet, the other airlines I used on this trip. All too soon we were on the ground in Lviv but I did have the return flight to look forward to some six hours hence.
46 year young, my Antonov An-24 on the ground at Lviv
Whilst the point of the trip was the flight there was no reason to sit around Lviv’s airport for that time so I made my way into the city by trolleybus. For some strange reason, I quite like electrically powered urban transport systems and whilst that normally means trams, trolleybuses fit the bill too. Don’t ask me why, they are generally a bit tatty, not very comfortable and, on this occasion, cold but they offer something a normal bus doesn’t. Don’t forget to validate your ticket though, you don’t want a ticket inspector to think you are trying to dodge the 15p fare as he might give you an on the spot fine of a fiver. Riding the trolleybus does, however, give you a sense of doing what the locals do in a way that jumping in a taxi does not. The number nine route terminated near the centre of Lviv and soon I was experiencing Ukraine’s seventh largest city. It seemed pleasant enough but I was at something of a loss of how to fill my time when I saw a wallybus tour about to start. A wallybus by the way is our family’s pet name for those land train things that carry tourists around cities and seaside resorts. I’ll explain why some other time. This cost 100 UAH, about three pounds or less if you didn’t require earphones. Splash out, the tour makes no sense whatsoever without them. I learnt lots of things about Lviv, none of which I can remember of course, but it was a pleasant if a rather bouncy experience that took up an hour of my time. I was back at the airport a couple of hours prior to departure and had to wait for the check-in desk to open. Once it did I asked the girl for a window seat near the back. She gave me 9D which I hoped was a bit better than 1D.
Lviv Opera House
Lviv’s airport terminal was built for the Euro 2012 football tournament and is, perhaps, a bit grander than a city like Lviv would otherwise expect. It too had a business lounge for domestic passengers only this one was huge. I had it to myself which felt a bit weird. Still, I drank half the beer that was on offer (one of two bottles of Stella) and consumed some of the snacks before leaving the bored girl on the desk in peace. It was another bus transfer to the aircraft which was exactly the same An-24 that had brought me. I don’t think it had moved in the meantime. Finding seat 9D, the check in girl had done me proud. It was perfectly aligned with the window and I couldn’t have been happier. The same hostie as before served not a sandwich this time but a large jam tart, I wasn’t complaining – it was very a very nice jam tart – and enjoyed every one of the 85 minutes I was airborne in that venerable Russian (Ukrainian more likely) classic airliner. I was back in the hotel by half past seven. The kitchen was closed. Just as well it had been a big jam tart.
Perfect view from 9D
It was an early start the next morning. My flight departed at 9:40 but rather inconveniently it departed from Boryspil, Kiev’s main airport and quite a few miles out of town. That meant an early trolleybus to Kiev railway station where the airport bus goes from. Everything went to plan and after spending some time in a rather poor business lounge I found myself on another airside bus which transported us to a remote – very remote – stand where an Air Baltic Dash 8 aircraft was waiting. This made the 1 hr 50 minute journey across Belarus to Riga in Latvia where I was to transfer to Air Baltic’s Gatwick flight some four hours later. Not a good idea, then, to go straight to the gate in the non-Schengen area when the business lounge is by the Schengen gates. Having discovered this I had to pass the wrong way through the transfer security point, pass through passport control and customs, head upstairs to departures and pass through security again. That’s a lot of passing. It might not seem worth the hassle but it had two advantages – the lounge, once I’d got there, was excellent, and I can now say with total accuracy that I’ve been to Latvia. We all make silly rules up and one of mine is that if you transfer through an airport but stay airside that doesn’t count as a visit to the country in which the airport is situated. Once I’d stepped out into the arrivals hall at Latvia I could tick another country off the list. The flight to Gatwick was on board one of Air Baltic’s Airbus A220-300s, an aircraft that until recently was called a Bombardier CS300. A trade spat between Canada and the USA led to Airbus taking over the programme and renaming the aircraft. All of which would be a bit dull were it not for the fact that I’d never flown in one before. This was the reason that I had chosen this indirect routing to get back to Blighty. In contrast to the Antonov, the A220 was brand new having only been delivered a month earlier. I was impressed. Not as much as with the Antonov of course but it was certainly a very nice aircraft from a passenger perspective. Well, an extra lavatory for the steerage passengers wouldn’t have gone amiss, especially when the bloke in front spent fifteen minutes in the cubicle. What on earth (above earth to be precise) was he doing in there? Come to think of it, don’t answer that question. EasyJet completed the journey by flying me back to Glasgow and whisper this quietly, they were twenty minutes ahead of schedule. I feel as though I should maybe return a bit of my latest EU261 claim.
One month old, my Airbus A220-300 at a damp Riga Airport
So that was the Retirement World Tour of Ukraine all done and dusted. I loved it.
Me loving it
Glad to be Grey 