With the caves that we want to visit in the vicinity of Rožňava being closed on Mondays, we had another day to kill in Košice. Because we’d already seen most of what Košice had to offer, however, we spent only a couple of hours there before driving out to the eastern borderlands, where we hoped to find some picturesque landscapes and wooden churches.
It’s pretty rural out there, I have to say. The one wooden church that we tried to look at turned out to be made of stone. That’s odd; exactly the same thing happened to us the other day, near Bardejov.
With the border just ten or so kilometres east of us, the proximity proved irresitible (to me, at least), so we pulled out our passports and headed up to the border crossing with Україна (or should I say Ukraine?).
That proved to be biting off rather a lot to chew. To put it mildly, a lot of bureaucracy was involved in crossing that border. It took quite some time, involved lots of paperwork, much confusion, some consternation, and more than our fair share of stop-start-reverse driving. It’s not every day your name needs to transliterated, using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Ultimately, though, we made it across and headed for the nearby town of Ужгород (that’s Užhorod in Slovak and Uzhhorod [transliterated from Ukrainian] or Uzhgorod [transliterated from Russian] in English).
The heat was sweltering today; about 34°C. It was already about 15:00 by the time we got across the border and we were afraid of getting stuck on the way back (not to mention the fact that we had no гривня (Hryvnia) on us for lunch), so we basically drove through the town and then headed straight back to the border, without so much as getting out of the car and setting foot on Ukrainian soil.
Back at the border crossing, we were right to have been concerned. A mammoth convoy of lorries and cars was queued up into the distance, their occupants walking around in the sun, as nothing was going anywhere.
With Eloïse getting fidgety in the back of the car, I decided to drive around the queueing traffic and squeeze my way alongside it to the front. This rather surprised the Ukrainian border guards in army fatigues, but it had the desired effect. We were told to drive to the front of the queue, where we were stamped out of Ukraine. Then, we were told to drive to the front of the next queue, to be processed back into Slovakia.
Once at Slovak border control, I got talking to a very nice border guard with very good English. It turned out he wasn’t Slovakian at all, but German. He usually works at Munich Airport, but had been temporarily stationed here to keep an eye out for football hooligans trying to make their way to the World Cup via unlikely routes. Well, needless to say, he hadn’t spotted any so far, and he commented that hooligans tend to fly, not drive to Germany via Ukraine, Slovakia and Czechia. I think it was all one big holiday to him.
He explained to me that the slowness of the border crossing has a couple of causes. Firstly, they don’t yet distinguish between EU and non-EU residents, so everyone has to stand in the same queue.
Secondly, he told me that most of the Ukrainians coming across actually make the trip three times a day, carrying large numbers of cigarettes and a full tank of petrol (some 300 litres in a large vehicle). Once on the Slovakian side, they sell the cigarettes and petrol, syphoning it out of their tank. The queues we saw apparently remain long all through the night and, at their worst, can take eight to ten hours to process.
You can bet that I’m very glad I decided to be bold and drive around the commercial traffic. Otherwise, we might still be there now!
On the way back, we stopped off at the Tesco in Michalovce to stock up on supplies, then continued to our final destination of Rožňava, arriving there at about 18:15.
We’ll visit one or two caves tomorrow, then spend a second night here, before heading into Hungary Wednesday morning. Mercifully, our hotel room is rather cooler than the outside temperature.
And so it came to pass that Eloïse obtained the first stamp in her passport, on a rather pointless jaunt into Ukraine. A futile exercise, to be sure (blame Papa), but an interesting experience, nonetheless. Moral of this story: don’t lose sight of the fact that border crossings outside the EU are not necessarily one small step for those who would traverse them; especially land border crossings.
Thanks, by the way, to Nick and Onno for sending us their recommendations for Hungary.