There appear to be incredible numbers of cats in Crimea. Rosa and I were having a picnic on a hill in Yalta, eating some very nice fresh food from a market, and after sitting there for about 10 minutes, we were surrounded by about 5 cats. We thought this was quite exceptional, especially because we were not feeding them or anything. They were just happy to sleep next to us. Later that day we saw more cats, and since then, we have seen cats everywhere. I think that there might be more cats than people in the Crimean peninsula. I have nothing against cats, but I am also not a really big aficionado. Rosalinde is. She is turning into a cat woman :)
We did a nice tour of the coastline of Crimea, going from Yalta to Sevastopol. There we couchsurfed, and the plan was to go next to Simferopol, where we had been before for an hour, stay there for a night and then head to Odessa in the night train. Simferopol is in the middle of the peninsula, and all the public transport passes through it, so it seemed a logical short break in the journey to Odessa.
Alas, it was not to be. All the train tickets for the night train were sold out, and the busses were not very attractive because they take about 10 hours to get there and also for those there were no tickets available on the right day. After some re-planning and weighing of options, we decided to stay a bit longer in this part of the Ukraine, and take the night train two days later.
We went back to our very sweet host in the city center, whom we asked where we should go. She asked us what we would like to see. Rosalinde said “Sea”. I said “Mountains”. She said “then you have to go to Sudak”. So we did. Before we left, we sent out one couch surf request, byt we realized that we were very late and probably would have to sleep in a hostel.
In the bus to Sudak we got a text message from the lady we wrote to, and she agreed to pick us up from the bus station. Wow! Sometimes you send out 15 request 5 days before you go to a city and you get no response. This time, we sent one request, four hours before we arrive, and bingo! And the great thing was that when we were at the bus station, they came with 3 people. The lady we wrote to, her husband who drove the car, and another girl. Then it turned out that the lady already had guests and couldn’t host us, but she had called the girl, asked if she had time and space, and thus found us a couch! We spend a very nice and warm day in Sudak, visited the beautiful castle, and in the evening went for dinner with our host.
The next day, we came back to Simferopol. We met up again with Svetlana, the couch surfer who hosted us there earlier, for a city walk. It was quite interesting to visit the city again. Everyone we met, including the inhabitants of Simferopol itself, told us it is not a very nice city to visit, and now we were here already for the third time :) Actually it was not such a bad place, we saw some very nice soviet monuments, some Lenin statues and some tanks.
In the evening, we finally got into the night train to take us all the way to Odessa, 12 hours away by train.
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