A travel to the end of the old world (Part V, Bordering insanity or how to enter Ukraine)

Borders are interesting concepts. Like a magnetic field they push or pull and ensure some order to what else could have been conceived as chaos. Unlike a magnetic field it is, however, people and not poles that are being either kept in or pushed out. Further, while the magnetic field uses invisible forces to exercise its influence the power of a border is ultimately the force of violence. The reason why we wait in line to be allowed into a country is essentially the knowledge that one group of people (known as the citizens) has decided to use force against anyone who does not comply with the admission rules. This system of controlled violence has through times safeguarded tribes, countries, cities, packs and other coherent social units against intruders who would take away their territory. Anyone who has owned a male dog would probably agree that a border is not something that was conceptually drawn up in the study of a European renaissance philosopher. The desire to protect the pack’s territory seems quite well entrenched into the nature of animals as well as human beings. Right now the national state is how we on a macro level define a legitimate human pack, cases of illegitimate packs are drug dealers, rebels, terrorists and other groups that want to make a territory which conflicts with that of the national state.
As such I understand borders; if Djenghis Khan and his men could only have been rejected in the visa application process much suffering would have been spared. However, in these modern times where a great many people actually cross borders with the best of intentions and pockets full of hard currency the level of preparations needed to enter some countries seems a little paranoid. In fact I think it can backfire on countries when tourists and business people deselect overly bureaucratic countries. I suspect though that Belarus was quite content that their archaic visa regime in this unique case deterred two Danish bumpkins in a Ford Sierra from going there and picked the more liberal Ukraine instead.

The line inched slowly ahead like a caterpillar. People walked in and out of their cars in the drizzle. It was understood that the process of getting from Poland to Ukraine was time consuming and most people seemed to be at peace with this premise whether they saw the reasons for it or not. The patience these people exposed made sense. Years of practice now paid off and they did not have to expose their health to stressing out over something they were in no position to change anyway. In a cosmic perspective three hours are insignificant. Utterly insignificant. But when you wait 3 hours in line to cross a border which could have taken 30 minutes it is, however, difficult to keep the same perspective. In fact, the urge to tear your hair out to temporarily remove focus from the feeling of your head exploding with frustration is a reaction you feel long before moving into zen mode. I guess people’s perspective on patience differs. In the car we theorized that there seems to be three kinds of patience:

1) no patience, you have ADHD and get frustrated when things are not changing every 2 minutes
2) expectational patience, you are patient as long as things are evolving as fast as physically possible
3) influential patience, you are patient if you recognize that your impatience will not change the pace of events in the given situation.

I think I belong to category 2. While I can wait for Christmas because there is no physical way to rush the calendar, then I do get impatient when things are happening in an overly cumbersome manner “just because”. Admittedly it is a little irrational, because when you stand in the situation there’s nothing you can do to change it. If I should try to defend its rationality then it is this impatience with stupidity that causes revolutions. The desire to have things the way they were supposed to be instead of accepting the way they are. But like with everything else it is of course a balance. Cases in point; the south American system of semiannual political revolutions seems to be just as disturbing to building up a desirable society as the other extreme, e.g. the Soviet Union, where a social order that most people are discontent with is allowed to survive for many decades.

After a little more than three hours we were suddenly the first car in the line. The rain fell hard, and with the antiquated fan system of the Sierra the cabin was seriously fogged up, our visibility was zero. The final stretch up to the covered passport control mostly felt like being a 90 year old attempting to drive through the Niagara Falls.
After having succeeded to get the car up to the inspection area without any fatalities we triumphantly handed over the immigration forms to the police officer. A cheerful “dobry dzien” was added, or at least as cheerful as one can after a night on bumpy roads and Red Bull. We were friends of the Ukraine, there was no doubt.
The officer was a sturdy man in his late 40’s, a man who clearly possessed the authority and perseverance to keep Ukraine free from banditsky.
His trained glance methodically ran through the documents.
“Kak madyel?” he inquired. Unaware of whether his question was a trick or simply a result of unfamiliarity with the latin letters that clearly stated which model our car was we quickly responded “Ford Sierra”.
“Where are you going?”
“Lviv” it had gotten too late now to reach Kiev so we went for plan B.
“You need a hotel reservation to enter the country”. He said it in a matter of factual tone, returned our passports and looked down into his other papers as if to signal that this was the end of the road. Our vision blackened, this was too much. Our thoughts circled around in the unstructured fashion that characterizes the state of sleep deprivation. I went to the car and dug out the business card of my Ukrainian colleague. We fumblingly explained to the officer in a pitiful combination of Russian, English and German that we were going to visit my colleague in Lviv and that we would stay with him. He refused. The situation was critical as we no longer had the opportunity of just writing a random hotel name down without admitting that we had lied to him at least once.

A feeling of despair emerged. The rainfall had now taken on an apocalyptic character and it looked like the border was being closed due to this. We were the last car at the checkpoint. If we could not enter by this border crossing we would for one have to take a major detour. Secondly our plans of driving into Ukraine would probably be reduced to a naive hope. Had circumstances been different I would not rule out that we would have uttered our discontent with his service level in quite clear tones. To our great luck we were both too tired to feel true hatred towards this uncooperative buffoon though and fell into a state of puppy-like submissiveness. He had cracked us. I still ponder if his newly gained victory was what finally enabled him to see through all the bureaucratic nonsense and view this as a case of two curious guys who simply wanted to see and feel Ukraine. He gave us the forms, pointed to the blank field and said “put ‘Hotel Ukraina’ there”.

We scribbled down “Hotel Ukraina” on the visa form, and handed it nervously over to him as if it was our final answer to the Jeopardy grand finale. It was our final answer, our last chance to read the police officer’s mind correctly and fill in the form in accordance with these to us unknown internal procedures.
He studied the forms a last time, found the right stamp and slammed it down into our passports – approved. In this moment everything was illuminated in the light of the past: the wait, the forms, the government’s wish for control, the fact that we were in a way all prisoners of these mindless procedures and forms which some anonymous bureaucrat in a ministry had come up with 70 years ago and nobody had questioned since.

But above all, WE WERE NOW IN UKRAINE!

A travel to the end of the old world (Part IV, the good Samaritan)

Apparently our rush to make it to the ferry boat had increased the already high fuel consumption and meant that we could in fact not make it to the fuel station that was lying 10 kilometres further down the road. Yes, we were stuck on the autobahn, with no daylight and even less fuel. Travelling on a shoestring also means not spending money on emergency road service, so our only remaining means of transportation was our feet. With the car unsafely parked by the side of the road with the emergency lights on and equipped with an empty fuel cannister and high hopes we started to walk in the direction of the fuel station. After a while there was a small bridge, not an exit, simply a bridge. We climbed up. As we stood on the bridge it was apparent that both sides actually looked an awfully lot like dark forests. We picked the direction that looked least deserted in the moonlight, and started walking. Instead of being on the brink of a nervous break down the spirit had reached an all time high as we walked along the road not knowing whether we would have to march to the end of the world and back to get some fuel. It is difficult to describe, but I guess these weird incidents are what makes the road trips so great; the struggle, the unexpected adventure, the feeling that there is a direct link between cause and effect, something that modern man often lacks in his every day life. Accepting that you do not have a schedule but are entirely at the mercy of destiny is refreshing, that's how vacation should be. The whinnying of horses suddenly put an end to our musings. As we walked in the direction of the sound an odd house surrounded by paddocks appeared in the middle of the forest. A dog started barking vigorously from the house. One window on the top floor was lit, we could be in luck.

After having walked back and forth a few times we started knocking on the door. We knocked on the door for 5 minutes without any response barring the dog's increasingly hysterical barking; if somebody was in the house he would know that visitors were trying to get in contact with him. Had we been accompanied by a person familiar with at least the bare essentials within social convention we would probably have gotten the hint that if there was someone in there he did not want visitors and stopped knocking on the door. Instead stubbornness persevered and we continued until suddenly more windows were lit. We were not entirely sure what to expect. The situation could have been taken out of the quintessential Stephen King novel; two young lads broken down on the highway at night wander into a thick forest, find a house and are tortured to death by an inbred family.

“Guten Abend”. A normal looking but not particularly welcoming person greeted us as the door opened.
“Excuse we, we have out of gasoline in the highway”. While our German was far from perfect, it served the aim everybody seemed to be looking for - to communicate what he should do to make us go away without sticking a gun to our face. He was lost in thoughts for a second, then started walking towards the garage. We politely petted his dog to show our good intentions, dog owners usually like this.
“So, what is the history of this house?”
“It's an old Jagd Schloss (hunting castle), I bought it a year ago and am in the process of renovating it”. My attempt to fill the silence was short lived and hampered by a somewhat rusty German vocabulary. Though I actually did have an interest in buying decaying historical property in the former DDR I guess all thoughts really evolved around petrochemicals this moment. If he could have read our minds as he switched on the light in the garage he would probably have seen Golum from Lord of the Rings dancing around trying to spot “precious”, in this case any sort of fluid capable of combustion in a Ford Sierra 2.0 engine.
The atmosphere got almost electric as he pulled out a cannister. Without much hesitation he started pouring the fuel into our tank, with every gulp our smiles increased until it looked like the gates of heaven had opened before us. As he finished the operation the delicate though until now overlooked issue of payment came to mind. In all but a selected few European countries the euro is the legal tender, just not in Denmark. Unsurprisingly we Danes usually don't habitually carry large sums of euros on us, in fact Kristian and I had expected to do all payments with visa card anticipating that our fuel purchases would be done under more organised conditions. But here we were. I feverishly dug out all the euros I could find in my wallet. It totalled to 7, too little for 5 litres of fuel no matter where you bought it. I humbly handed him the money.
“Is this enough?”
He counted the money.
“Barely”
Had he been in less of a rush to get us out of his property he would probably have poured some fuel out of our tank, but this night he, albeit clearly forced by circumstances, took on the role as the good Samaritan and handed us our full spare tank. We thanked him of a full heart and headed off.
As we returned to the car Kristian poured the gas in, we spun the starter engine a few times and zoomed away. It was nothing short of a miracle and if I pass by his house one day I will give him a bottle of wine. Though had I known we could buy 5 litres of fuel for 7 Euro I would have brought two tanks.

Unauthorised pit stop on zee Autobahn

It was relieving to be back in the car. We had drinks, could put on music, drive or stop as we pleased, we were sheltered from the elements and could lock the doors at will. Control had been regained and we were out of the darkness and uncertainty that since the beginning of times has been a premise of human life. It is however noteworthy that the feeling of risk and uncertainty is what makes control something relieving rather than the ultimate representation of boredom.
Soon we cruised on the Berliner Autobahnring bathed in its cold projector lights deeply emerged in philosophical discussions and Depeche Mode.
As we drove through Poland the hours got longer and longer and due to the smaller roads our progress slowed down.

We grabbed breakfast at McDonald's on a rainy grey Lublin morning while checking out on the map how to get into Ukraine. We quickly moved on, through big forests and rolling hills. And suddenly, there she was, the Ukraine! Despite delays our plans to meet one of my colleagues in Kiev for some partying that same night were still intact. But then we saw the queue to cross the border. “Shit” even the most patient of men would agree with Kristian's verdict, this could take while.