Our second installation of the report back from Ukraine from an NEU member. The views expressed are that of the members.

Getting to the Border

At last Kharkiv airport. Where to find our hire car. Instructions from the app say find the desk in the airport. After a long search, we found out there was no desk, but instead we had to all squeeze into a very small minibus with another family. 8 seats for 10 people. EU Health and Safety legislation obviously has not reached this far east yet.

The car ordered was too small. First thing learnt, never trust Ryanair website to hire a car. Then the added car insurance policy wasn’t valid. Second thing learnt, never trust car insurance brought through Ryanair website! Then finally, we were told that we could not take the hire car into Ukraine. We needed additional papers, and these would not be ready for 24 hours. Third thing learnt, never order anything through Ryanair website as special instructions and extra charges obviously do not get passed through to the car hire company!!!

So, we had a car that was not allowed to cross the border as we did not have the right documentation. We had a free upgrade. But had had to pay again for the insurance upgrade as the one provided by Ryanair was of no use.

In the end, we were off onto the open road. But how to cross the border? We decided to make our way to the train station and catch a train to Lviv. The website claimed that their were a lot of seats available, but you couldn’t book online without filling in multiple forms and downloading a dozen apps from the internet. So we get to the train station and ask for tickets. Polish station clerk takes us for fools and sells us the wrong tickets, somehow at an inflated price, and they say Ukraine is corrupt, we have been had before we even get there!

Finally we are on the train! For those that love bureaucracy you would be in heaven! Our berths were not the ones we had requested and paid for. We asked to move to the other coach. Impossible. First it didn’t exist, then it was full, then it was impossible to increase the ticket price. When we said we would just pay for new tickets, there was some confusion as they wanted to know who then would be in the other seats. For some reason those seats couldn’t be left empty but the ones we thought we had booked could be. But because the staff could not talk to each other from the different sections there was no way to sort it out.

The train departed