Saying Goodbye

At 2 pm I glanced down the hall to the room they call the new big, in which I taught the teenagers of an evening. The language centre in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, was always growing, with a plan to convert the cellar into classrooms. The continual renovation made the term: new big. The room was decorated, with serviettes waiting to be cake-smeared and lollies for unwrapping. It was my last day.

Thinking of my camera, two blocks away at home, I slipped into hat and coat. All eyes were upon me as I exited the cloak room. I wasn’t supposed to know about the party. “I’ll be back for my lesson at 6 pm,” I said casually. Mouths dropped – I would miss my party – Marina realised first, of course, that I was joking.

But it was Lena who donated her weekend to my first days in Donetsk almost a year earlier. In the cupboard of the Soviet apartment they’d chosen for me she’d left a jar of homemade plum jam with fruit from her mother’s village garden. She pointed it out when we arrived on the first evening but didn’t say she’d made it – by the smile in her eye I understood. It’s a nice thing to have done for a total stranger. Meanwhile the institute had stocked the fridge with groceries and the receptionist Tanya had the jug boiled as I walked in the door.

I remember Lena at the airport – she had a 1960s hairdo and behind-the-iron-curtain clothes – feminine, becoming and quite different to western styles. I remember as we’d driven past the White House, the seat of city government, how Peter the driver said, “That’s where the thieves live.”

At lunch on the following afternoon, in a café by the Karlmeus, when I asked what Lena’s ex-husband did, she replied, embarrassed, in her suave, winter-coat-thick accent, “We don’t ask what people do in Ukraine.” It was my first lesson. “There are many Ukrainians,” she said, “who have money but are technically unemployed.”

She’s a mother of two but can never remember their ages. She started to explain how it was, life in and after the Soviet Union. “People should only create and not destroy,” she said, “This is our history.” She was worried about her children’s futures in an uncertain, capitalist Ukraine.

Lena was most insistent I phoned Australia to tell my family I was alright. She almost came all the way from her house to drag me to the institute to do that, in the first days. “You are always so calm about everything!” she said, with frustration. But it’s easy to be calm there.

Marina, meanwhile, was quiet until I discovered her sense of humour. We took to criticizing each other, for fun, as a sport. She used to say the most horrible things at meetings, about me, in front of the Director. And I loved it. Nor did she mind when I suggested she must’ve grown up in a circus and probably had circus elephants still living on her apartment’s veranda.

One day she came to work in a cardigan that fashionably featured a single button, where there might normally be two or three. I pulled her aside and said, straight-faced, “Don’t worry. I know teachers’ salaries aren’t much. I will ask the other teachers to donate a few kopeks and we’ll buy you a couple of extra buttons.” She was outraged! I was laughing.

She coined my nickname: the difficult Australian. When we returned from summer holidays Lena said to Marina that I’d missed her. “Yeah,” Marina replied, “Like a headache.” It was the cue to start up again.

Yet sometimes we’d sneak away to eat flatbread-rolled kebab-like zapykankas in the park or deluxe hot dogs, Donetsk-style. Such hours were precious.

Classes would end late evening but if I found energy it was a simple matter to phone Svetlana. “Shall I stop by?” I’d ask. “Sure,” she said, most often, “and why not bring a bottle of red?” We used to talk into the wee hours, and dance and sing. It’s a good thing Ukrainian neighbours don’t bother about noise.

Svetlana explained how living in Ukraine meant always having to consider how to earn money, with seemingly endless problems – a state of affairs Bangladeshis can perhaps relate to. “But in Ukraine,” she said, “people are still nice to each other. Nobody cares if their neighbour is having a nice life.” And I saw that.

Once I was buying a bottle of wine at a kiosk by the marshrutka taxi stand, and the woman behind the counter asked in Russian, “Sweet or dry?” I asked for dry and the woman looked me up and down before saying, “Is it for a girl?” On the way to Svetlana’s there was only one response: “Da”. “You’ll need a nice bottle then,” she said, before scouring her selection to find the best. She checked the chocolate situation too.

On the weekends Svetlana and I would sometimes find a café to watch the afternoon pass, by tradition first meeting at our regular place: beside the left shoe of the Lenin statue in Lenin Square.

When it comes to Val – well, her kitchen is where I learnt much of what I came to know about Ukraine. She made sure I was well familiar with the cuisine.

It was through her I picked up additional classes with the three-year-old Senya. His mother wanted him to be bilingual. His classes were not stressful or rigid. The instruction was, “just play in English.” And we did. Senya was obsessed with Spiderman.

At the end he had tears in his eyes. “When are you leaving?” he asked. “After eight days,” I said, accurately.

“No,” he replied firmly, “After three days!” He had the concept of bargaining but lost the concept of numbers at crucial moments. He hoped to lengthen my stay.

I mention Senya because he discovered a new term I came to embrace. From confusing English pronouns with his country, he once told Val he lived in “Mykraine.” And that’s the thing of it – it became Mykraine.

The language connected: they enjoyed when I invented words, in the way that happens in any living language, what you can’t get in books. There was the Soviet washing machine I had, plastic, semi-manual, the size of a television set. You had to load the water by bucket before plugging it in. Lena chuckled when I called it the “electric bucket.” And in the park after rain, when I pointed to a small flow into a drain and called it a waterfall, and was rebuked because it wasn’t a waterfall, well, the English teachers took amusement when I said it was at least “waterfallish.”

With grammar: they knew the rules and I knew the answers. Team work: they could explain the former, which native speakers are not taught; while I helped apply the rules correctly.

The decoration and food in the new big: I’m not sure I wanted it. It represented such an enormous loss, about to come. On the other hand, as an Australian had once described my moving there as “throwing myself into a transcontinental abyss”, well it hadn’t been at all bad.  Surely I could do it again?

I’d been dreading that there might be cake restrictions, as there were on Teacher’s Day when each teacher had a single slice ration. I remembered those cucumber and parsley sandwiches with the bread cut so thinly they must’ve split grains of wheat in the process. The institute liked to save. But these things did not recur.

Instead both Lena and Marina gave speeches so full of praise I was convinced they were talking about somebody else; and Marina, in describing me, didn’t use a single bad Russian word.

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This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Saying Goodbye

Ukrainian Bethlehem

O little town of Bethlehem how still we see Thee lie,

Above Thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.

                                                - a familiar Christmas carol.

All the driver had to do was open the doors. Enter five thousand grandmothers, Russian-speaking and locally called babushkas, with their babushka trolleys, boxes and bags and grandchildren – three to a seat with barely room to exhale. The last Saturday evening bus to Pochayiv was vacuum packed.

It would have been alright except my foot got jammed in the rear door every time it opened to take on board yet another babushka, just when one might have guessed the bus was full. The foot-jamming and the likelihood of the bus tipping over each time we negotiated a bend to the left were of concern. All of the weightier individuals, it seemed, had chosen to sit on that side and the bus was about as level as a seesaw with nobody on it. I’d rather not say which side I sat on.

I kept trying to picture the map in my mind, hoping to see unfaltering bends to the right. Looking at the map in actuality was unfeasible on account of needing some arm movement, impossible in that space.

The countryside was unusually hilly and it was just as it was getting dark that my foot got jammed for the last time. When the doors opened there began a babushka flood of great proportions – with babushka trolleys, boxes and bags and grandchildren – spilling out of the bus onto the road shoulder. I guess we’d arrived.

It is said the Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, the second largest monastery in Ukraine, was founded by several runaway monks during the thirteenth century Mongol invasion. Legend says Theotokos, which is the Greek title meaning God-bearer that refers to Mary, mother of God, appeared to the monks in a column of fire, that she left her footprint in the rock she stood upon which has since been revered for its curative powers. Pochayiv itself is a small West Ukrainian town of 8,000 people.

Noble lady Anna Hojska is said to have donated her lands to the monastery in the sixteenth century, from when the current buildings date. She also gave a sacred icon of Theotokos which is believed to work miracles, and cured her brother’s blindness.

But I was slightly disoriented from the bus ride – where was the monastery?

In true medieval fashion, it was a matter of tilting my head upwards – you know, to see the church in all its glory. Perched on a hill in the twilight like a fantastic city of gold, the monastery looked its best. 

The last colours were draining from the sky as I followed a line of lamps along the pathway to the western gate. Behind me a sea of babushkas overburdened with their goods and offspring’s offspring followed like the tide of an ancient sea coming in. They like to sleep over at the monastery hotel to attend the 5:30 a.m. Sunday mass.

Sense would have led me directly to the hotel since I too needed a place to sleep, but the atmosphere of the place beckoned: the mosaics, the huge bell tower, the worshippers coming and going, with women wearing headscarves as they do upon entering a church or monastery in the Orthodox tradition, the gardens and rows of crops on the lower hillside, the black-robed long-bearded monks sitting under trees chatting to attractive, younger headscarf wearing women, the golden domes, the smell of incense, the light of the candles and most of all the twilight. I was drawn not to the hotel but, ultimately, to an empty bench beside the bishop’s house where there was time to imbibe the whole mesmerising scene.

A little too much time… Ten o’clock passed and I forced myself towards the hotel. People sat there in the long hallway with all their belongings on babushka trolleys, waiting for a bed to be found. Some were taking shelter on the floor of the hallway.

The smallest and possibly oldest babushka, covered in black, was the one to see, one of the pilgrims seemed to say. “Follow her,” I was sure she must’ve said, in Russian.

I did tail the smallest babushka for a while, up the hallway and back again, in one room, pausing at the doorway of another. I followed her, about two feet behind and I heard her saying to others, over and over, ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet!’ She was trying to sound authoritative and final but in her face was kindness and I knew she took no pleasure from the shortage of beds. I guessed if I’d really pressed the issue she would’ve eventually found somewhere for me.

But there were all the babushkas and babushka trolleys and boxes and bags and grandchildren. The idea of taking a bed from an old woman was not very appealing; and it was like a sauna inside in any case. Better to be outside – how long could a Ukrainian night possibly last? It was warm and delightfully summery.

So I left the smallest babushka and gave up on my one-dollar-dormitory-bed-food-included dream. I returned instead to the viewing bench beside the Bishop’s house.

With practicalities left in the hotel hallway my mind wandered as stars appeared, the buildings floodlight and fine. I couldn’t help but think the whole experience was slightly Joseph coming to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. The bus that evening was surely the equivalent of a small grey donkey and like Joseph I had been effectively turned away by the innkeeper. Admittedly there weren’t any barns to sleep in, there were no nasty Roman soldiers about and most importantly, I did not have with me the responsibility of a heavily pregnant mother of God.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light,

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.

Tired and hungry: these took turns as the hours passed. It was the pull of the latter that took me out through the eastern gate and down into the little dark town. I splurged on a four dollar three course meal in a café that was empty apart from a couple of old Ukrainian men polishing off a bottle of vodka. Outside local kids loitered and it seemed as though they hoped to find some alcohol of their own.

As I wandered back up through the narrow streets, dogs howling, towards the golden domes of the monastery, the image was once more medieval, of a troubled, evil little town versus a peaceful quiet church.

Perhaps as punishment for my random thoughts when I reached it the gate was closed. There remained a gap underneath through which I could have scrambled but it seemed a bit undignified. As I considered what to do a car drove up to the gate, a black Mercedes. It was perhaps the Bishop himself. All it took then was a word or two in English to the gateman who had appeared to let the Mercedes pass, and I was in.

Hours passed. I could tell that from the bell at the top of the bell tower that periodically rang. I must’ve dosed a bit but mostly I continued to absorb the atmosphere and admire the stars – through the night until the dawn.

Romania: Dracula's Jumpers

Moldova: The Dance of Lilliput

Belarus: In Search of the Zoobr

The Baltics: Articles in Amber







This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Ukrainian Bethlehem

Was There Any Chance of Wolves?

Anonymity is a blessing in the short term. It’s true that it means you’re far from family and friends, but it also means never having to be anywhere at a particular time and doing exactly what you wish without consultation; it’s a bit like growing up and no longer being answerable to parents. Anonymity is a key component to the traveller’s freedom, the treasure of the road.

It was the first trip to Latvia, one week, and the day arrived for that fateful tour to Bauska. I’d taken up residence with newly met locals Dzintra and her daughters, Antra and Anta. Bauska was the plan for while they were busy with school, university and work.

The largely flat Latvian countryside has something in common with Bangladesh: there are a good number of palaces from the lord-and-peasant past, what in Bangladesh would be called a rajbari. Near Bauska is one such place, Rundales Pils, a baroque palace built for the Dukes of Courland from 1736. It was the goal.

Indeed the journey was completed easily and the palace was impressive. It was on the way home again to Riga when things went wrong.

With the blessing of anonymity there was nobody to ask whether it was a good idea to take a little walk in the countryside in the belief it would not be difficult to find a different way back to Bauska town for the bus. Besides, there was a footbridge over a small river made of oil drums tied together, floating and with planks on top, which really needed to be crossed.

Entirely without care I found myself of a picturesque stretch of dirt road, entirely straight, walking merrily. But it was a strange phenomenon for the road seemed to lengthen with each step. An hour passed, then two, and all the while there were open fields without a single house in sight. Could such a scene exist in a country as small as Latvia? More disturbingly, not a single car had passed by.

There are Latvian rivers with fishermen. I just didn't find any.

There comes that point when you wonder if turning back wouldn’t be more sensible, but the oil drum bridge already seemed distant and surely it wasn’t really possible to be lost in Latvia.

The road continued and so did I.

Early evening arrived and with the sun my confidence in direction gradually set. That point comes: ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ I started to contemplate sleeping in a field and waiting for morning. Was it dangerous to sleep in a Latvian field? It’s true the country was called the wild east back then, but surely that meant human society, in the cities. Was there any chance of wolves?

Okay: worst scenario, Latvian field, one night. I kept walking.

At about the stage where my legs felt they might refuse to go on, something exciting happened. I came to a road junction. There was no house or car, and only more fields, but for the first time in several hours I had a choice: left, right or straight ahead? On my first day in Latvia I’d made a choice for the left; this time I chose right. And I walked.

Lithuania wasn’t far to the south and with all that time for thinking I wondered how I would know if I accidentally crossed the border. Would unintelligible Latvian sound any different to unintelligible Lithuanian, in the event I met someone, somewhere?

There are houses in Latvian villages. I just didn't see any.

A few minutes later something more exciting happened. It was a sound: the oil and metal rumble of a car. Sure enough, it came along kicking up dust: a kind of red sports car. Normally it’d be courteous to stand to the side and politely flag down the vehicle, with acknowledgement it was a favour if they stopped. But the situation was not normal.

I stood road centre, hands out in a kind of ‘halt’, like a dacoit or a police officer. The car had no choice.

Inside was a couple. It was strange because when he decided to stop rather than run me down, she was rather angry about it. I’m not sure which language it was they spoke, but it sounded like Russian and there was clearly some kind of domestic dispute going on. ‘What are you stopping for you idiot!’ I imagined her yelling. She really was screaming at him.

‘What do you expect me to do, leave him here?’ I imagined him replying, marginally more calmly.

‘You never spend enough time with me! You are always with your wife!’ Or perhaps she was the wife. Whatever the specifics I was sure of one thing: I was getting in that car, whether the lady liked it or not. It’s not that I’m in the habit of interfering in other people’s domestic upheavals. It’s just that, at a minimum they could take me to a main road, wherever that might be, hopefully still in Latvia.  I could only say ‘Riga’.

Laugh if you will but after all that walking and after all her screaming the main road was but a few hundred yards further.  It was a very short ride indeed.  She was pleased I got out; the guy was nice about it. ‘Paldies,’ I said, Dzintra-taught, ‘Thanks.’

It was dark when I stood on the side of the highway.  There were cars but nobody was stopping; who could blame them?  So I walked a bit, and I’d been sure to get the sports car driver to indicate the Riga-direction of the road when he’d dropped me off.  After some time there was a bus shelter and I thought, ‘Would it be safe to stay one night in a Latvian bus shelter?’ It seemed unlikely anybody would stop before morning.  Personally I would’ve favoured the field with whatever risk of wolves there was.

Well fortunately there’s this little thing called public transport, and fortunately the international express services between Riga and Lithuania used that route.  They don’t officially stop except in major towns, except that, fortunately and like in Bangladesh, they do. They will pick up the odd stray like me for a small fee. A bus stopped and I was saved.  I was so relieved that I’d be making it back to the city that from my pocket I pulled out a few coins at random and proudly presented them to the driver.

This would have been a better road to get lost on, on account of the passerby and the house.

Latvia was using lats then, and it would have to have been one of the world’s strangest currencies, because the exchange rates gave it a huge value, with one lat worth more than one British pound I believe. The consequence was that travelling in Latvia was a tiny brown coin affair with everything seeming to cost umpteen centimes; with a whole lat it felt like you could purchase a small condominium, perhaps off the plan. 

The bus driver was a good fellow, for I hadn’t even counted what I’d dumped into his hand, so grateful I was at having been saved. There’d been a few too many tiny brown coins involved; he gave some back.

If the moss grows on the north side, Lithuania is to the south.

It was funny, that first week in Latvia. It was odd to be far from home, where I should have enjoyed the full benefit of anonymity, to have had that plaguing thought the whole time: Dzintra would be worried. By the time I reached the apartment it was approaching midnight. I rang the bell.

Well, the door swung open and there was an enormous hug. ‘I was so worried about you!’ she said, ‘If something happened… I don’t even know your surname! What would I tell your family and how would I find them?’ After that, I wrote my full name and address on a piece of paper. Needed. Multiple Lives. Latvia gets one.

Post Latvian apartment, you can take accommodation in a construction site, an Arctic cupboard or alternatively, set up your own guest house...


For the start of the Latvian story, you'll need to visit The Latvian National Academy of Science


Or follow the Baltic Way, along the sea on a trail of amber...

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: Was There Any Chance of Wolves?

The Latvian National Academy of Science

Be free. Align yourself with the rhythm of the world to go far. Be as the jajabor, the nomad. Arrive somewhere from the soul, due to the appealing curl of its name or because it feels right or because we know nothing. Go because the time has arrived, sense it.

The Baltic States beckoned in such a way. I went because the idea surfaced. I went because it was there. Other than that, the reason for the journey was left to present itself as a revelation of yes – that must be why I came. Intuition would make the arrangements.

Due to the circumstances that had led to the meeting of a Latvian folk musician on an Estonian road, I had a private apartment in Riga, the Latvian capital, from the first evening. My pocket had keys. It gave perhaps a stronger sense that the brand new city was mine to explore; but it wasn’t the being somewhere new that brought meaning – it was a basic decision between old and older.

On that first morning, I’d locked the door of the apartment I was unexpectedly borrowing. I set off on foot down the busy street that judging by the traffic must lead somewhere; and it wasn’t long until the distinctive roofs and church towers caught sight of me. The famed old town was away to the mercantile right. Yet to the left a different type of building caught my eye: a stark, stalwart tower in brown, which seemed the very essence of the Soviet Union days. It was intriguing.

I knew I would see both pasts. I had the time. The question was which to go to first and on the thought that at the top of the tower I could take photographs over the old town I was inclined towards the left. In this way the communists won the moment. Yet, as it turned out, it was a decision that would bring me right to my sentimental Latvia.

I heaved those enormous doors, of the heavy wooden kind, and inside was an enormous Spartan lobby with proletariat looking lifts to the front, and to the left was a functional-looking booth with a sign that read ‘Enquiries Counter.’ In it was an equally functional-looking Russian woman, elderly and overweight. It was as though I had walked into one of those Hollywood films designed to promote a view of life in the Soviet Union that made one pleased to live in the ‘free world’. It was behind-the-iron-curtain in a clichéd way and I was excited.

I imagined Soviet citizens in the film, stooping to speak through the slot at the window of the booth, to make enquiries that ended in an inevitably firm ‘Nyet!’ I thought to try it out.

‘Excuse me, what is this building?’ I asked as prelude to my planned request to reach the roof.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’ she said, do you speak German?

‘Nein,’ I replied, in German, and for some unknown reason tried again in English.

‘Sprechen Zie Deutsch?’

‘Still Nein.’

We stood smiling at each other, at a loss, and she certainly seemed too friendly to play the role of Soviet receptionist in the movie. She would have been very helpful to a German.

With a dash of disappointment I headed back across the lobby to those gargantuan doors. I heaved one of them open again, wondering if the inevitable door-people in the Soviet era had developed shoulder injuries from the task. I was thinking I might never know what that building was, when a woman came in the door I’d just opened. On the off chance…

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

‘A little,’ she said in an accent delightful enough to flavour ice cream. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

‘Australia.’

‘It’s my favourite country,’ she said, ‘I lived in Melbourne for six months!’

We stood chatting in the doorway for a minute or two. The building was the Latvian National Academy of Science, her name was Dzintra and she worked there as secretary to a senior official.

I didn’t know then about the strength of her intuition. Nor was it clear I had met a Latvian jajabor; and yet the initial connection seemed unusually strong.

‘I finish work at seven,’ she said, ‘I want to show you some nice buildings in Riga that you won’t find on your own. Come back then.’

We must have spoken seven sentences but it felt as though we’d known each other for seven months. Latvian time was speedy, I was learning, Dzintra was teaching me. She continued into the building and I went out; and as I walked up the street I felt certain it was for that moment in the doorway that life’s course had brought me to the Baltic. I’d come to meet her.

On the Daugava River not long before it reaches the sea, the Latvian capital is the big city of the Baltic States. Of course its old town is well-endowed with cobblestone squares, churches and secret laneways; with faces, with golden roosters four floors up watching the sky; and a black cat, back arched in protest at being left out there on the peak of a roof. Of course there are streams through parks and on the railings of the little bridges are the permanent padlocks the Russians affix as a symbol of binding love; there’s a small castle and crowds on the streets, hopping on and off the sky blue trams that cross the Daugava bridge like scuttling insects. 

After a few hours with the usual trappings of Rigan life, wandering around, I made my way back towards the Academy. I was early by two hours and thought it’d be a bit boring to wait, although there was the Soviet-style market to look through, on the left side of things, where they still sold milk scooped up by apron wearing women, with ladles from big metallic urns. Nor was I entirely sure where my apartment was, so to go and wait there would have been a gamble. I only hoped I’d find it later. I had the keys.

I met Dzintra before I got to the Academy, under the railway bridge. ‘I left work early,’ she said. I suppose she’d felt I was on my way, I can say now. It was our second chance meeting.

True to her word she showed me beautiful streets of grand old buildings that I wouldn’t have found, up around Elizabetes iela to the north of the old town.

Now, when she tells people how we met they say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that! It might be dangerous!’ I’ve told her I agree and she shouldn’t do it again. But what people don’t properly imagine is how well we knew each other by then. If the first seven sentences were seven months, by the time we’d seen the best of the buildings at least three years had passed in speedy Latvian time. We were not strangers when she issued the invitation to stay at her house, as long as I didn’t mind if it was small and Soviet and featured a marginally malfunctioning bathroom.

It was a tempting offer but I had keys in my pocket and it’s not every day a private apartment for ‘whenever you are in Riga’ finds you. It was not something I wanted to quit, so I said ‘No’.

But of course, if you let it the world has ways to correct the decisions you get wrong. Wilful interference of the human-brain kind can only destroy the far better plans. Especially in Latvia, let the season take you by the hand.

This story continues here: Potato and Toothpaste Travel




The meeting at the Latvian National Academy of Science can be a nice precursor to finding memories in a waterfall, sort of eating dog due to a lack of fishing net casting skills, or meeting the Chittagonian whistler.



This article also published in Star Magazine, here: The Latvian National Academy of Science

In Search of the Zoobr

November Afternoon in Kamenjuki, Belarus

I have indeed, praise be to God, attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the Earth, and I have attained this honour.

                                                                                                            - Ibn Battuta.

…and in the modern world, where lengthy journeys to previously unheard of lands are no longer possible, we lesser travellers have to make do.

In the 4.30 p.m. November twilight, the surface of the Mukhavets, a little river in western Belarus, had become a varnished brown strip of reflection.  Birch, twisted willow and spongy rotting leaves were imaged upon its surface.  I wonder: do you think the great explorers of ages past found a quiet place to partake of contemplation, before their setting out?

Of Europe’s largest mammal I knew little and being in the city of Brest there seemed nothing for it, but to find out.  To the north, I’d read, was the wilderness which straddled the Polish border and in it, in small numbers, was what the locals called the zoobr. 

Ibn Battuta’s first journey in 1325 lasted twenty-one years.  Marco Polo travelled with his father and his uncle for twenty-four years from 1271 and the Muslim Hui navigator Zheng He, from Yunnan, accomplished his seven voyages within twenty-eight years from 1405.  It might be that I had just a day in hand to find the zoobr, but there’d need to be, surely, an expedition.

The river spread its arms around the small green island which might not normally have stood out but it was once the centre of Brest, a bustling trade town dating from around 1000 C.E.  The city’s oldest church is still there, with the rest of the town having been moved in 1838 to allow for the construction of a fort.

It is a place of reverence for Belarusians.  The fort is where two Soviet regiments stood their ground when the Nazis attacked in 1941.  They faced five hundred canons, six hundred bombs and lasted a month before the fort was lost, at the start of an occupation that would claim one in four Belarusian lives.

At the island’s centre an eternal flame burns, surrounded by hundreds of Soviet graves watched over by a massive stone head sculpture called ‘Valour.’  In the south of the island bullet holes in the red brick buildings can still be seen.  It’s in the east of Europe that the scale of sacrifice and devastation that marked the Second World War is most acutely felt. 

Zheng He was well-prepared.  It is said he had over three hundred ships and a crew of almost 30,000.  By contrast, the following day, in search of the zoobr, I would follow the example of Ibn Battuta, who left his Moroccan home, alone.  Do you think the great explorers of ages past went to bed early on the night before their departures?

'Valour', Brest, Belarus

A model Soviet city, Brest had wide, clean boulevards with older painted stone cottages and towering unsightly blocks.  It was in one of the latter I was staying, a monumental hotel of sparse décor.  I found some simple, canteen fare for dinner.

On the morning of the grand expedition the preparations were tiring and endless, or at least they would have been, perhaps, had it been several hundred years earlier.  In the twenty-first century I could not match the magnitude of Marco Polo’s preparations, no doubt, when he set off for China.  But I did pack my things and check out of the hotel, before walking to the bus station wholly unaided.

And just as Marco Polo once met the various tribes of Central Asia so I met a taxi tout who sought a hefty fee for a private voyage to the forest.  Zheng He might have had his fleet but Ibn Battuta went largely under his own steam and that was what I wanted to do.  Yet, the taxi driver could help me.  I was having trouble making the bus ticket seller on the other side of the glass window from understanding my intended destination, the village by the forest called Kamenjuki.  I was able to seize the taxi driver’s enthusiasm for my plan.  He pronounced it for me.  Do you think the great explorers overcame various difficulties with the help of locals?  I’d say they did.

But then, looking at my ticket, I noticed that it said Kamyanyets, in Cyrillic.  It was the second dilemma of the expedition: to hope I was not going somewhere entirely different.  Yet, there was nobody to fill in the gaps on the maps for Zheng He, surely, on his way to Bengal’s Sonargaon.  So I took the bus.

An hour on my imaginarily blistered and sore feet later I burst from the vehicle, spent and flailing: or I would have been, had I rather travelled on foot and by camel.  Indeed it was Kamyanyets but fortunately Kamenjuki was a short bus ride further, about eighteen kilometres.  I could almost smell the zoobr from there, Marco Polo’s China.

A good explorer half-hour later I’d arrived in the village of Kamenjuki.  Ibn Battuta once sought assistance in the mountains of Kamaru, from the followers of Shah Jalal, in order to find him in Sylhet.  I asked a girl from the bus where the forest was and she vitally pointed up the road.  After a huge, ten minute trek to the edge of the forest, my expedition started in earnest.

It was icy and cold.  I had to negotiate a snowy bridge over a frozen stream, but I persevered, adjusting my scarf on the way.  If the cold got in, I knew, all might be lost.

I entered the forest, Belavezhskaja Puscha: 1300 square kilometres of primeval, virgin forest, the last such stand in Europe.  Pine and birch, the canopy closed around me. I relied on my natural instincts to hold my direction, watching the sun, feeling the wind, noting the way moss grew on the tree trunks. And following the road.

Suddenly something stirred ahead.  Could it be the ferocious, mysterious zoobrs I had set out for?  I clutched my camera and trod carefully.  The pine needles were damp and quietened my stride.  But no, it was only a family of wild boar. 

It would be another good ten minutes of arduous hiking before the first zoobr set eyes on me.  In fact it was a small herd led by a large male.  He was enormous, easily as big as ten miniature horses, with horns like the devil himself, a rugged woolly brown coat, legs as thick as saplings, and huge flaring nostrils. 

I wonder what Zheng He thought when he reached Africa and saw his first giraffe.  He captured one and took it back to China where it was believed to be an example of the mythical creature called a qilin, evidence of heavenly blessing on the Emperor of the day.  I thought not to capture a zoobr, except on film.

Zheng He too was said to walk like a tiger.  He didn’t stray from violence when he was threatened.  Faced with a zoobr flaring its nostrils, there was nothing to do but flare my nostrils right back.  One shouldn’t let large wild animals sense one’s fear, or so it might be.  The leader of the beasts took four lumbering steps towards me, through the middle of a mud clearing.  We stood eye to eye now, and if he charged, what would have happened?

When Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs he came across a mountain sheep which ultimately took his name:  the Marco Polo sheep was described in 1271.  But the zoobr had its name, in Russian, and in English where it is called the European bison or wisent.

It could have crushed me without a second thought.  But I held my ground, given that I’ve never heard of anyone suffering death by zoobr and am rarely first at anything; and given that the danger was somewhat reduced by the well-constructed wire fence between us.  Well, there was no point randomly scouring the forest when a few zoobrs had been confined to a pen for easy observation.  Okay, so it wasn’t quite like the great explorers but in the twenty-first century, one has to make do.

The zoobr: legs as thick as saplings and huge flaring nostrils

Also in the small zoo were other examples of local wildlife: moose, deer, wolves, bears and wild horses.  The eyes of the Mona Lisa owl followed me as I passed.

The expedition successful, zoobr sighted, I returned late afternoon to the bus station, really more of a bus shed.  I pushed open the old green doors.  The interior was empty apart from three fellow zoobr-hunters sitting on a bench.  Not a pretty sight considering I had to be three hundred kilometres away in Minsk to find my pre-paid hotel bed.

One man asked where I was going.  "Brest," I replied, and then Minsk".  I wanted to see his reaction.  He didn't burst out laughing, that had to be good.  May be it was realistic.

We introduced ourselves.  It’s how I became 'Onjay' for the afternoon.  Still, they did better than me.  All I knew was that one of them had a name that started with G and the other two didn't.  G kept saying "and you have no wars in Australia?" After Brest fortress one could only say no.  Certainly nothing compared to Belarus.

G. and the Not-Gs., Kamenjuki, Belarus

One of the Not-Gs was swearing about the bus timetable, which was nearly a blank A4 sheet of paper.  "This is an extremely dire and frustrating circumstance in which we find ourselves," he was saying using four-letter Russian words.  "Yeah, but the zoobrs were cool," I replied, and they were.  Only 54 zoobrs existed after World War One; by 2002 there were 3200 of them.

Eventually the bus did come.  The four of us: Onjay, G and the Not-Gs, made it safely back to Brest; and me to Minsk.  I didn’t take back the riches that Marco Polo and Zheng He did, from their journeys, or even the spiritual fulfilment and new wisdom that Ibn Battuta must’ve found, but it had been a nice day.

And at the least I didn’t suffer Marco Polo’s fate.  Upon his return he found Venice at war with Genoa.  He was captured and narrated the tales of his journey to a fellow inmate, in jail.  But I have the luxury of writing this on a laptop, at home.

Zoobrs

Detail from Brest Fort monument

The Eternal Flame, Brest Fort

From Belarus it's not impossible to head south to Kyiv or to take a bus to Riga to meet a secretary to a scientist.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: In Search of the Zoobr

National Secrets

St. Michael's

Like the city she was busy making her life anew when I arrived.  She’d been there longer but it didn’t mean she knew it well.  She was a friend of a friend, Sveta, and the day I called her on the old phone set in the Soviet built apartment in Sviatoshyn it was the first time we’d ever spoken to each other.  If I’d seen her picture it was only briefly, but she knew I was coming.  Her voice was a little nervous, because of the English I suppose, and yet it seemed to have a little dance step to it, a welcoming pirouette in her tone as she suggested we could meet for the first time on Kyiv’s busy main boulevard, Khreschatyk. 

‘How will I recognise you?’ I asked, ‘What will you wear?  Maybe you could wear something special, like a red rose pinned to your chest?’  She suggested perhaps I could wear the rose but I said that unfortunately I didn’t have one.

‘Then you’ll wear a big smile,’ she said, ‘I’ll find you.’  It seemed a little precarious to be meeting on the basis of only a smile.  There was nothing about my appearance or locally bought clothes that would stand out in Ukraine.  And yet, even from the short phone call it felt as if we were like a pair of old socks, parted in the wash by the whims of circumstance but easily recognisable to the other as the match.  With my smile at the ready, I headed for the metro.

There is something about Kyiv that reminds me of Dhaka, although to look at there’s little of similarity between the two.  And I’m only telling it to you, since it involves national secrets and we shouldn’t be spreading such things around. 

Building design detail, Kyiv

The Dhaka part of the equation happened in fact before Dhaka, on a flight in from Bangkok years ago.  I was allocated a seat next to a Bangladeshi businessman and although for most of the distance we silently did our own thing there was a brief conversation by the time the plane was tilting downwards again.  He asked the reason for my journey and I said it was a holiday.  It’s the simplest way to explain the village.  Then he looked me over, as though he was deciding whether I was trustworthy, whether he could divulge his national secret.

‘Bangladesh is a poor country,’ he said in almost a whisper, ‘but I think you’ll find Bangladeshi people are really open-hearted.’  There was a short tense pause as he examined my face to see if what he’d said had properly registered and how I would take this information.  ‘I know,’ I was able to say, quietly, seriously, entirely sincerely, ‘I’ve been to Bangladesh before.’  I couldn’t help but give a half-smile at the understanding that had arisen between us, but I didn’t want to give the game away to the rest of the cabin so I kept it low-key.  My fellow passenger however was not so cautious.  His smile was broad and loud; it’d been entirely unexpected that I might already know.  There were few further words between us.  There didn’t need to be.

A similar thing happened in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, before I travelled to Kyiv.  This time the national secret was Ukrainian, and it came from Maria-of-the-school, my boss.  Always immaculately dressed, with perfectly styled blond hair, she was attractive, as were all the ladies at the school.  On the day she said what she did we were in her office at the language institute, talking of the month I’d spend in the capital.  ‘I think you will like Kyiv,’ she said and then, lowering her voice and with an eye to my reaction she continued, ‘Because for us Ukrainians, Kyiv is a sacred city.’  She waited.  I smiled and with it she had the confidence to continue.  ‘Maybe you’ll feel that,’ she said, ‘I always feel it when I’m there.  Kyiv is spiritual.  It’s not like other cities.’

A city of around two and half million people, Kyiv was founded at least 1400 years ago by four siblings, the three brothers Kyi, Scheck and Koryv and their sister Lybed.  The city’s name comes from the eldest of the brothers.  There’s a statue of the four of them in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square.  Legend says the city was prophesized by St. Andrew in the first century A.D.  One of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe, Kyiv was the first capital of the Rus’, and gave rise so they say to three countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Well she was late, Sveta, which is more or less to be expected in Ukraine.  I stood beside the metro station entrance on Kreschatyk amongst the crowd of passers by, waiting in the crispness of the coming spring.  I was laughing to myself at the thought of adopting some cheesy grin and aiming it at various women coming and going.  It’s hard to sustain a grin over an extended period and besides, I might’ve gotten myself arrested for disturbing them.

Just when I was considering giving up, thinking how foolish it’d been to rely only on a smile when wearing a rose would’ve been a much more marked symbol, a young woman cautiously approached.  She had such life in her eyes, a freshness to her face.  She was beautiful.  ‘Excuse me, are you Andrew?’ she asked.  ‘How do you know?’ I said, astonished, ‘I wasn’t even smiling!  Should I smile now?’  It was altogether too late to smile.

With a meeting like that there were no polite formalities to be bothered with and as we walked down Kreshchatyk although the words of the questions belonged to strangers the talk was of old friends.  But Kyiv is a city that will open its soul to newcomers, revealing its shortcuts and artistry to any who take the time to admire it.  So I suppose the whole meeting was in that sense unsurprising.  It was of the city and nothing more.

There’s so much to celebrate about Kyiv.  It’s a city of statues and I loved their statues which depicted culture more than war: in place of generals and battles familiar to some cities were scenes from fairytales, the sibling founders and the female spirit Berehynia, protector of the City.  It’s a city of churches, in particular the divine blue St. Michael’s and the dreamy St. Andrew’s which sits atop Andriyivs’kyi uzviz, a narrow and unlikely zigzag of a road that falls into the fashionable Podil neighbourhood below, by the Dnipro River.  That road is an art market crowded with art lovers and painters of varying skill trying to make a living.  There’s the hills nearest the river, parkland, to wander through, amongst the chestnut trees that flower white in summer, the trees that are the symbol of the city; and the Dnipro River doesn’t only divide the city but the whole country, with citizens of the right bank traditionally speaking Ukrainian while the left bank was mostly home to Russian speakers. 

The Great Lavra Bell tower

In those days, 2002, left-bank Ukrainians in particular were eager to re-learn their national language as Russian was out of favour with some, not least for them to use at job interviews: it could be embarrassing turning up at an interview with the interviewer speaking Ukrainian, quite possibly struggling with it, and not be able to answer properly, or to get the grammar wrong.  Kyiv was still reinventing itself as a national capital, not least linguistically.

Khreschatyk, the main boulevard, is in itself an attraction, particularly on the weekends when it’s closed to traffic and becomes a fair of street stalls and entertainers finding place along its length in order to please the throngs of people out to relax.

And there are the remnants of Soviet times in the city, with previously patriotic statues of workers and partisans under a rainbow metallic arch; and further south the enormous silver woman holding a sword aloft to recall victory in the Second World War.  It’s true that all these elements, fable, churches, the layers of history and the art in the architecture of many centuries lend a mystical element to Kyiv; but nowhere is it truer than at Kyiv Perchesk Lavra, the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves.

Motherland monument seen from the walls of the Lavra

Founded in the eleventh century, the extensive monastery complex includes the Great Lavra Belltower, innumerable orthodox churches from grand to miniscule chapels, and the riddle of caves and underground passages.  With the light of candles we went down there, where the coffins of monks are hidden in grottos and along the narrow passageways, where Ukrainian women kneel in prayer in the smallest chapels of all, and where in a glass coffin the mummified hand, a sacred relic of Saint Ilya Muromets protrudes from under his shroud.

For many centuries pilgrims made their way to the Lavra of Kyiv, sometimes walking hundreds of kilometres to get there, and in communist times when religion was discouraged and the site was officially a museum they came still, examining the museum ‘exhibits’ and discretely offering a prayer there.  And in communist times the sword held aloft by the great metallic woman on the horizon was marginally taller than the Lavra Belltower, perhaps a symbol that communism was greater than religion; but post-independence her sword was shortened so that once again the tip of the belltower is nearer to the heavens.  And orthodox priests lead services of chants and incense; icons of saints again draw open crowds who bring with them their fears and regrets to leave with new hope and inspiration, such as religions can bring.

We saw all that, Sveta and I, not in the one day but over several; and it got to the point where Sveta was surprised at my ability to negotiate the city.  She said I was constantly revealing to her short-cuts along streets where she’d never walked before.  But the city liked me: that’s all it took to turn the guided into the guide.  On the first day however it was in a Spartan café in Podil that we ended up, introducing ourselves to each other’s lives and I recall she was asking about my mixed career of several strands.  ‘What is it you really wish to be?’ she said.  ‘I want to be a writer,’ I told her.  And so I did.

Kyiv.  Is it a sacred city?  Yes: but don’t tell anybody.

At the Lavra

Photos by Val Voronkova



Kyiv might be sacred, it's true, but there are other cities, such as the funky city, the mysterious city and the one with the snake and the frog.

This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: National Secrets