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I kid you not!
This piece is actually going to weave these two very different concepts together.....maybe even for the first time ever! I have a sort of anoraky love of conceiving sentences that may never ever have been uttered by any human being, ever. It's actually quite difficult, because a. there are 6 billion of us, and b. we've been around for a while.
I can't be totally confident in this particular case, because Manchester, where I come from, is the home of the bacon butty, and also to one of the most famous scientific campuses in the world, and of course just down the road we have Jodrell Bank, the grand daddy of all radio telescopes, and still one of the biggest in the world.
Well right now I am sat within a few kilometres of one of its Soviet era buddies. It is called the Yevpatoria RT-70, and it also is one of the biggest radio telescopes in the world.
Like most things Ukrainian, it hides it light under a bushel. We didn't even know it existed until an hour or so ago. Unlike Jodrell Bank, which is a major tourist attraction in it's own right, RT-70 just sits there on the coast, just outside Yevpatoria, which is yet another past its sell by date Soviet era cheesy seaside resort. It also has the distinction of being the only place left in Ukraine that has a working ferry connection across the Black Sea to Turkey.
As an aside, it has been an object lesson in how out of date Google can be......if you Google for a Black Sea ferry, you get plenty of hits. It has taken us a frustrating week to finally find a ferry, and Yevpatoria is the only place!
So having arrived 2 days ago, and sat in the docks waiting to see if they could squeeze us on to yesterdays boat...they couldn't, we are now waiting for the next one, which may be Monday, or Tuesday..... However we are such an oddity wherever we go, we are treated extremely well. They will call us and tell us when to go back to the docks, and we are guaranteed a nice place on deck. It's basically a cargo ship that takes mainly lorries and only the odd car or tourist.
So having sorted all that out this morning, we now have a few days to kill, and were recommended to drive a few k down the coast where we would find a long deserted beach where people and vans can wild camp in peace and quiet.
But before then we needed a shopping trip.
Shopping in Ukraine is fun! Half the stuff on the shelves is self explanatory....like pasta, bread and cheese etc. The rest is completely alien. I shudder to think what it's like in a chinese supermarket!
I've been travelling long enough to forget about trying to source equivalents of what I like back home. It's basically a daft idea. So I eat what the locals do, and take my chances. Random food is fun, and Luda is a fussy vegetarian, so I get to try all sorts! A favourite snack out here is strips of dried fish in packets, much like crisps back home (which also exist here, but in weird flavours - I had red caviar flavour crisps the other day). It's an acquired taste, in fact it has taken me just about the entire stay here to summon up courage to try it, because boy oh boy, does it smell iffy.
But once you start to chew, it's certainly flavoursome. Lot's of tempting smutty double entendres spring to mind......
But every now and again I get the urge........to the point of obsession.....and today it just had to be a bacon butty. I must have been dreaming about it or something last night.
So I carefully selected bread and ukrainian pork, in the hope of assembling a reasonably authentic bacon butty. Of course the whole thing would have been a non starter without the magic ingredient - HP sauce, but being a well organised chap, I've been jealously guarding a quarter of a bottle for such emergencies.
We also stocked up on all of our favourites that we have discovered in the last few weeks, in what was quite the best ukrainian supermarket we have been in so far. They even took Visa, and the machine didn't spit it out contemptuously, like it does most of the time.
So suitably stocked, and now salivating copiously, both of us, Luda having found a couple of her own personal favourites. Off we trundled to find the recommended beach, which we did no problem. There's even another camper van here - a Swedish one, that makes 7 we have seen in as many weeks!
But what we didn't expect was this magnificent engineering edifice to heave into view, getting bigger as we approached. Not only is there the RT-70, but about at least another dozen or so lesser RT's.
At first I thought it was ex-soviet cold war hardware, of which there is tons and tons. We have seen that many radar golf balls, you would think Crimea was a cosmic scale pitch and putt!
The choice of pork and bread proved to be a good one, and within 15 minutes I was munching away on a very acceptable bacon butty, with Luda munching on a cheap supermarket sushi set, the Black Sea on one side, and fields on the other, and the RT-70 looming over it all.
Surreal!
So surreal in fact that I fired up the laptop to see if I could find out more - not expecting to as I have already found it very hard to Google stuff in Russian. However it turns out that the RT-70 is quite famous. It has the distinction of not only being one of the worlds largest RT's (which are basically just big dish receivers) but also had the worlds most powerful transmitter as well.
It is basically a planetary radar - it transmits high power radio waves and then analyses the echos. Wow!
Then I read that it regularly transmits digital information about the human race in the direction of specific star systems that the scientists believe may have planets capable of supporting life.
Double wow!
So here I am munching a bacon butty, while saying HELLOOOO! to the universe! Phew, got there in the end!
Triple wow!
The Wikipedia link is here,
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