Tuesday
1425: I take out my spending book and write out the price of the metro ticket from Theo’s house to the Berlin bus station. The girl with the clipboard and passenger list announces that we will be arriving in Warsaw in approximately seven hours. As the bus trundles out of Berlin I can feel the sun on my arm and I watch the scrubby lines of trees and powerlines cut through the fields. It’s warm and I drift briefly into a head-lolling sleep.
1845: We stop and approximately one hundred per cent of the passengers gets off to have a cigarette. I debate whether to go pee. I’ve always been told not to go too soon or you’ll shrink your bladder. I elect to hold it.
2030: Ok, things are getting interesting. We’re in Poland now and have hit a patch of slow traffic. Checking my ticket I realise for the first time since I booked it a month ago that I only have five minutes to get to my connection in Warsaw. This is a surprise to me.
2130: This isn’t good. We’re still on the outskirts on Warsaw and my next bus leaves in ten minutes.
2135: Shit.
2140: I rush inside the terminal. Where the fuck are the buses? Desperately scanning the departure boards I can’t see anything that looks like it could be mine. I ask at a café and they tell me regretfully that this is the wrong Warsaw station. I got off the bus too early.
2150: Ok. Plan. I will get a ticket for tomorrow’s bus and stay the night here in Warsaw.
2230: Outside my hostel there is a group of friendly young people drinking beers on the picnic tables. I don’t much feel like joining them. I go and find a kebab then climb into my bunkbed.
Wednesday
1030: I get a coffee and find a bench to sit on. I watch the flags move in the wind and listen to a podcast.
1600: After a day of walking around Warsaw, checking out the hot Polish chicks on Tinder, sitting on another few benches and eating another kebab, I pick up my pack from the hostel. On the way back to the bus station I buy some fries.
1700: The train I’m on is going in the wrong direction. Jesus. I’m terrible at this. I’m feeling tense because I didn’t buy a ticket. I spent all my zlotys on those fries. I get off, looking around furtively, and ride the next one back the way I came.
1800: The station at last. The only spare seat is at the front. The ticket guy finishes sullenly checking the tickets, kicks off his trainers and lies down on the front seats, legs across the aisle. He takes the remote for the TV mounted on the ceiling and puts on a loud action show. It looks Russian. Through the gap in the seats I can see his potbelly peeking out of the space between his T-Shirt and his track pants.
1825: Outside we are passing fields of corn and combine harvesters in the late afternoon sunshine. In between eruptions of gunfire and guitar rock from the TV I try to concentrate on my history podcast. Did you know that in World War II more soldiers were lost on the eastern front alone than in the whole First World War? Poland lost a fifth of its entire population. Poland fact of the day.
1930: We stop in a layby for a moment. Clouds are painted on the wide open skies of the steppe. Pot Belly is smoking a cigarette and I notice the way he lifts up the back of his t-shirt to let the warm evening breeze ruffle his back hair. He smokes about a fifth of his cigarette before discarding the rest on the roadside. Back on board he absentmindedly tassels the pubic hairs on his belly while he plays with his phone. Through the gap in the seats I can see him sending snapchat messages to a heavily made-up woman.
2005: The leather-jacketed hero of the TV show has bedded some conquest and the sounds of his fornicating loudly fill the bus. I turn and look back at the uniformly expressionless faces of the other passengers. There isn’t a flicker of response to the coital symphony ringing in everyone’s ears. I guess decades of communism would desensitise anyone. Returning to the screen I notice the photos of Putin behind the desk of the fictional police chief.
2030: The sky has exploded in pink and I can see the spires of a church on the horizon above the fields. I think we’re on the fourth episode now. Surprisingly, for a Russian, he hasn’t yet liquidated anyone for political crimes.
2100: Snack time! I open my crackers and have one of my bananas. I discover that my lumpen, colourful mystery sweets are actually peanuts covered in a sugary enamel. I’m undecided about how to feel about this.
2200: I’m starting to get anxious. We must be getting close to the Ukrainian border. Five months ago my Spanish visa expired so I’m technically an over stayer in the European Union. I’ve heard many a story of punctilious EU border officials. I have prepared have a little package of receipts, bus tickets and boarding passes and a complex legalistic argument about New Zealand’s special bilateral visa arrangements that I have only moderate confidence in. I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t buy it.
2245: Here we are, at the border. I’ve just given my passport to the Polish border people. I’ve been told the penalty for overstaying can be a ten year entry ban. Or maybe out here on Europe’s eastern fringes they just strangle you and bury you in a field. They’ve turned off the air conditioning and it’s a hot night. I try to relax.
Thursday 2345: Not super-efficient, these border guys. I leaf through my documentation again. 0004: Success! After an hour of waiting I got my passport back, stamped and without comment. I beat the system. I’m good at this.
0027: A harsh looking woman in combat fatigues gets on the bus to collect our passports for Ukrainian immigration. I give her my American one, the first time I have ever used it. She looks at me with a look as though I’ve just spat in her goulash and asks me, ‘Where are you going?”
Odessa, I sheepishly answer.
“Why?” she snaps.
International espionage, I’m tempted to answer. But I don’t. Tourism, I reply.
0035: After two hours parked at the border we’re let out to go to the toilet. I’m turned away at the entrance to the gents by another stern-looking woman because I don’t have any Ukrainian currency. I’m too afraid to pee in the bushes in case I’m shot. Ukraine is at war, after all.
0102: I’m in Ukraine! After getting our passports back we stop at a service station where two men are changing currency out of the boot of a black car. I get a hefty wad of cash for my twenty euro note. The girl next to me tells me the exchange rate was “very bad”.
0130: The woman across the aisle is from Odessa. She asks why I am going there. She says it is unsafe. People will target me when they hear I don’t speak Russian. There’s a light fog on the road. The driver has turned off the TV and is playing Russian techno. Really loudly.
0528: I come into consciousness with another jolt. Pot Belly has moved to the seat directly in front of me and is dangling his arm over the back of his seat, right by my face. Fields of sunflowers and dusty townships pass in the morning light. We pass a horse and cart.
1030: I wake up with a stiff neck and the sun on my face. Dribble has dried on my chin. It’s hot and I loosen my shirt. We’re passing through a series of slightly larger towns with wide avenues lined with big leafy trees. The roads have the same potholes, some filled with gravel. The Russian trashpop is still blaring.
1235: We’re stopped at a big station somewhere in central Ukraine. I can smell the toilets before I see them. They are holes in the concrete, sides slicked with piss and shit, the first squat toilets I’ve seen in Europe. Afterwards I stand with the other passengers in the shade while the drivers drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. I stand and wait, and sweat.
1519: And now we’ve broken down. We can’t be too far from Odessa. Two of the guys are doing some sort of mechanical work under the bus while the driver sits in his seat and smokes. A field of sunflowers stretches out to a distant line of trees. The guys wave down a passing truck but they don’t seem to be able to help.
1601: We’re finally moving again. On the side of the road are people with stalls set up on the asphalt selling watermelons and vegetables. We must be close. I left Berlin over forty eight hours ago.
1646: At last! We’re coming into Odessa through a mix of crumbling ornate houses in pastel colours, service stations and billboards advertising household products in Cyrillic script.
1705: The trees lining the road are big and look subtropical and the whole place feels Mediterranean, dry and dusty. The cars are a mixture of Russian and Western European makes. I’ve spent a lot of time on this bus. I don’t feel prepared to deal with stuff yet but I gradually cajole myself into some sort of energy. The techno thumps on and on.
1715: We’re here. I pack my things into my small backpack and peel my sticky back off the seat. Outside is noise and people and heat. Now I have to find my hostel, a day late. Pot Belly looks up as I pass him on my way out the door. I nod at him and smile gently. I hope you get early onset incontinence, I think to myself, and step out into the evening.
