I took the overnight train from Kyiv to Transcarpathia after meeting my co-workers at the station.  The train was an agreeably old-school affair; leather beds, wooden carriages and black tea served by frosty Soviet waitresses.  Nick and I shared our compartment with two great Russian bears.  I began unpacking whilst Nick and one of our room mates ducked out for a smoke.  I was left alone with the man in the bed opposite mine who, rather alarmingly, began to strip.   He somehow managed to inhabit all of the space beside the door and, unable to push past him, I saw it all.  His body was huge and hairy and the sandblasted mountains of the Hindu Kush were writ large across his great sagging mass.  When this burly Cossack had finally squeezed into his pyjamas I breathed a terrible sigh of relief.
After escaping, I was anctious to find the others, having seen quite enough of my own cabin, so I ducked into the room where my co-workers were staying.  We drank tea and chatted for a while and then I headed off to go to sleep.  Unfortunately I confused my mattress with a duvet and passed a sleepless night lying on the bare leather of my bed under its suffocating bulk.
That morning the sun rose upon the startling beauty of the Carpathian Mountains.  It had been dark when we left Kyiv and my first sight of the Ukrainian countryside was of rolling snow covered hills, icy mountain streams and thick pine forest fading into the distance towards Romania.  We left our train in Volovets, a pretty provincial town nestled within a gentle valley. From the station we rode in one of those minibuses that are ubiquitous to mountain-regions across the world.  From time to time we passed small villages but mostly the road, and the valleys, were empty.  This stretch of our journey was my first experience of the sort of frantic folksy accordion music with drunkenly shouted lyrics that is played everywhere in Ukraine and sounds like the blueprint for every Gogol Bordello song.