By DPA
Yakivsko (Ukraine) : Spicy Hutsul sausages sizzle over our fire, ignored by placid cows and yapping shepherd dogs in the pasture nearby. Down in the valley, on a deserted road, a horse-drawn wagon clops homeward, carrying field workers and their scythes past pastoral haystacks, pumpkin patches, and split rail fences straight from the 19th century. Above, the blue-green Carpathian Mountains roll their way to the EU.
It took some effort to achieve this delightful East European tourist moment – not least en route to our picnic through the hamlet Polosko where at 1 p.m. on a work day, two out of three persons encountered on the village main street were intoxicated, including one man so drunk he was unable to stand, never mind engage a foreign reporter in conversation. (The chap tried, but toppled off his bench, ruining the interview.)
Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountain region in many ways is a hidden marvel, where cars are infrequent, the air is clean, the prices are low to dirt-cheap, tourism is in its infancy, and the wilderness paths are as the peasants made them, and often omitted from any map.
The problem is, those alluring selling points come in a real-life package: the former Soviet republic Ukraine’s three poorest provinces. Visitors to Ukrainian Carpathia ignore that socio-economic reality, at the peril of their vacation.
Collectively covering an area roughly the size of Belgium, Ukraine’s Zakarpatska, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk provinces occupy the Far Eastern bit of the Carpathian Mountain range, which also crosses Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. The region is a thick eastern European soup of ethnicities. In the city Chop, for instance, one out of five residents is Roma.
Much of Ukrainian Carpathia is rolling hills and hardwood forests, and tilled valleys similar to the American Blue Ridge. The higher districts offer evergreens and rocky streams, sweeping mountains, and even Alpine landscape inhabited by wolves, bears, eagles, and few people.
Zakarpatska, the flattest and most multi-ethnic of the three, is well known in Ukraine for health spas, mineral water and year-round tourism. Here there is choice: a traveller can rent a private room for as little as $10 a night or put up his feet in a newly-built apartment at the Krasna Poliana health resort for a cool $150 – roughly two months’ salary by local standards.
Smaller hotels abound. A mid-range option can place a family in a two-room suite in something outwardly similar to a Swiss chalet for $60 a night, but Ukrainian service inside. In accommodation inhabited by a DPA reporter, the towel rack came off the wall, the shower floor was a wooden grate with a few sharp nails projecting upwards, the toilet seat was broken from the commode – and that was only the bathroom.
Prices are similar and tourist accommodation is plentiful closer to the Slovak and Polish borders in the Lviv province, where proper mountains are to be found and, in the winter, a booming ski industry. Summer months offer hikers a trip back to the old days of European walking – trails are unmarked, rest huts do not exist, streams are clean except near villages where locals dump their trash, and generally one may build a fire wherever he wants.
Food and housing can be tricky, as tourist infrastructure is clustered around the ski valleys. Villages not lucky enough to have ski industry nearby are among the poorest in Europe, and can lack stores, indoor plumbing, visitor housing, any place to obtain a meal, or much transportation connection with the outside world save very irregular microbuses.
A region offering both highlands and lowlands is the Ivano-Frankivsk province, which in addition is home to a sub-tribe of mountaineers called the Hutsul, known for their spicy cuisine, handicrafts, and dialect frequently unintelligible to flatland Ukrainians supposedly speaking the same language.
The language residents of Ukrainian Carpathia use for outsiders is Russian, period. English, for practical purposes, is not spoken.
The practice of milking tourists, unfortunately, already has infected the more touristy portions of Carpathia. Practically all the scams are for petty amounts, but nonetheless irritating. A typical example was a Zakarpatska province hotel’s practice of charging guests $2 for a pair of green tea bags, as the power was out in the restaurant and so there was no hot water.
But in fairness, a cheap meal may be had in Ukrainian Carpathia for $5, and an excellent one with drinks for $15. The cuisine is jammed with hearty delicacies like stuffed peppers, potato pancakes and sour cream, pork and prune roulades, and forest mushroom soup, with spicing and local specialities varying from village to village, and according to the cook’s ethnicity.
Ukraine’s charming tradition of kindness to strangers, still, sometimes, manages to trump profit maximization and low service standards. A much-appreciated example came on the Uzhgorod-Kiev train when, during a station stop, a conductor invited a four-year-old child of a tourist into his compartment to distract the boy with a DVD movie, because it would be several minutes before the carriage bathroom would be unlocked.