From Krakow to Lviv

<< 2007-09-19 20:35 >>

Krakow railway station

We really wanted to visit Lviv during our 2006 holiday in Ukraine (photos), because of the praise heaped on it in the guidebook, and in travel reports in various newspapers. Getting there from the Crimea would have taken ages, however, given the state of the Ukrainian railways, so we skipped it. Since then we've kept trying to find ways to get there, and eventually we decided to spend a week of holiday on the trip. This meant we could travel in via Krakow, since there are direct flights there from Oslo.

The question was: how to get to Lviv from Krakow? My first thought was to rent a car in Krakow and simply drive there. This wouldn't be expensive, and Google Maps says it's just 350 kilometers to Lviv, so the drive should be straightforward. I've driven on Polish roads before, and while they are narrow and winding, they are OK to drive on.

A bit more research turned up problems, though. Various reports on the web and elsewhere said it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 9 hours just to cross the Polish/Ukrainian border, and most reports seemed to indicate about 4 hours. Then people were reporting that the roads in Ukraine were not so good, and one person even wrote that they'd found the surface missing from 10 kilometers of road due to repair works, which left hundreds of cars stuck in the resulting mess. And then it turned out the rental company wouldn't actually allow us to drive the car into Ukraine.

So we decided to take the train instead. It takes 9 hours, which implies an average speed of 39 kilometers an hour. Train travel in Eastern Europe can be very relaxing, however, provided you get a decent seat, so we decided to just consider it a day off. Buying the ticket in Krakow turned out to be easy (rather unlike previous experiences in Ukraine), and getting on was also easy, once we figured out that the platforms were 200 meters from the station itself.

The train itself was old-fashioned, but fine, and we shared a 6-person compartment with two Iranian-born American brothers. One of them lived in Krakow, and the pair were going to Lviv to invest in property. That's probably a good move, but to me it seemed like it would be difficult to bring off in a single day in a country you don't know. They were very nice and talkative, and we spent pretty much the entire 10-hour trip talking to them. They told us quite a bit about Poland, Iran, etc etc.

Adjusting the wheels, Polish/Ukrainian border

The train actually travelled quite fast, so we were on the border after a mere 3 hours. The train tracks in Poland and the former Soviet Union have different widths, however, and so the distance between the wheels had to be adjusted. This was done by lifting the cars up, and fiddling around underneath them, which they actually managed to spend a full two hours on. (You may have heard that Stalin made the Soviet Union choose broad gauge-tracks in order to make invasion from the west harder, but this turns out to be untrue, because that decision was actually made in 1842, long before he was born.)

Eventually our car, the only one in the train going to Lviv, was moved to a different track and we were ready for the border control. The Polish border control actually took a while, and the guards took the passports of the Iranian brothers, then returned them much later, just before we moved on. Why they didn't want our passports I have no idea.

However, we were still not done, because now it was time for the Ukrainian border control. First came one kindly older lady, who just glanced at our passports and moved on. Then two uniformed guards who took a little longer. None of these wore the obligatory peaked nazi-style cap which all border guards in present/former dictatorships seem to carry, so we knew we weren't done. And sure enough. Three more guards arrive, wearing the caps and carrying a laptop. They spent a long time processing us, and asking questions (seemingly looking for inconsistencies) but eventually let us go through.

The end result was that we spent 4.5 hours crossing the border. With another 1.5 hours to get to Lviv, that means half the trip was spent on the border. Small wonder there are so few tourists in Lviv.

Hotel George, Lviv

We got off in Lviv well after midnight, into what must be the prettiest railway station I've ever seen. It was still full of sleepy-looking people waiting for their trains. We went out of the station to find a taxi, and found lots of them lined up. I went up to one of the first, and said "Hotel George?". This completely failed to engage the interest of the driver. Eventually, some local came over and took the taxi, leaving me baffled in the middle of the road.

It was at this point we realized that we were in Ukraine, and that Ukraine is not like the west. We'd spent the entire train journey chatting with the Iranians, and so we'd not had time for the mental switch-over that Ukraine requires. You can't just walk up to a taxi here and ask it to drive you somewhere. That would be too easy. Instead, you need to jump through lots of pointless hoops, and then you can drive off in a taxi.

So, we regrouped on the pavement with all our luggage, the guidebook, a pen, and paper. My girlfriend tried to figure out the taxi system, while I try writing out the name and address of our hotel in Cyrillic. What I don't realize then is that I'm making a total hash of this, because the square where the hotel is is named after the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (Mickiewicz Square), who of course is called Mytskevych (Ploshcha Mytskevycha) in Ukrainian, and if you write Cyrillic you write Ukrainian, and not Polish.

Anyway, armed with this we try again. There seem to be four groups of taxis. From left to right: taxis with their engines and lights off and no drivers, taxis with drivers but apparently not looking for passengers, lower-grade taxis, and higher-grade taxis. We try the taxis-with-drivers-but-waiting first, but are rebuffed. Then some locals try it, and get the same treatment. At this point you'd think we'd focus on the lower-grade or higher-grade taxis. We don't. They all left while we were struggling with the address in Cyrillic.

Still, there's lots of locals waiting for taxis, so we don't give up. After a while, a taxi drives up. Two locals and I converge on it, and start asking the driver to take us. The locals in Ukrainian, me in some broken mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and English. The driver goes off with a local. After a few repeats of this experience we start to see a pattern.

So, we decide to divide up. My girlfriend goes over to the high-grade taxis; I stay with the lower-grade ones. Within a few minutes my girlfriend has a taxi, and we drive off.

Lobby, Hotel George, Lviv

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