Bacon butties and extra-terrestrial communication....

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As an aside, it has been an object lesson in how out of date Google can be......if you Google for a Black Sea ferry, you get plenty of hits.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,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria_RT-70_radio_telescope

And here is a picture.

Back to Yalta

So off we went back to Yalta, to greet the visiting cruise liner Queen Victoria.

On the way, I took a side trip.......on my motorbike.

According to the map, there was a direct road over the mountains to Yalta, but when we got to the bottom of the pass, the way was blocked by a red flag waving policeman. Turns out the road is so steep and bendy that only private cars and minibuses are allowed. Our van was too big!

It was late, so we looked around for a place to park, and, as is becoming normal in Ukraine, ended up in someone's backyard! This particular yard belonged to the last restaurant before the pass, and a very nice restaurant it was too.

But the guide book said that the mountain pass was spectacular, and I love mountain passes, so after some deliberation, the next day I decided to to whizz up it on the bike and have a look.

Luda is not too fond of motorcycling, so off I went alone. I even donned a helmet and some leathers, just to be on the safe side.

My bike is a little Honda 125 trails bike, nothing butch or powerful, but a great little machine for shopping and exploring. It sits on the back of the van, and is just light enough to be lifted on and off easily.

I hadn't had a decent ride on the bike for a while, and I couldn't have chosen a nicer trip.

The road wound up and up, hairpin after hairpin, getting colder all the time, but through dense forest. A tunnel of green and brown, with shafts of sunlight beaming down, and random Ladas zooming past. Yes, Ladas, not llamas!

After about thirty minutes of this, suddenly the trees thinned out. I was expecting wild rocks and mountains, but what I got was a high grassy plateau, which extended for about 5 miles. It was gorgeous, with hints of Switzerland and my beloved Wales.

Then in the distance I saw three bloody huge golfballs!! An ex Soviet radar station. When I got there I was greeted by a sheer cliff, straight down to the coast, and the town of Yalta, spread out like you see from a plane as you come in to land. I was just below the cloud level.

Unfortunately the tiny complex at the top was a bit of a tourist hell hole, being connected to the coast by one of the most spectacular cable cars I have ever seen. According to the map it was the best part of a thousand metres, straight down.

Nevertheless it was a wonderful sight, and I was quietly proud that I had done it the hard way, from behind. (oo er)

A coffee and a cig, and I was on my way back down, my little Honda lapping it up, no need for raw power, and light enough to whizz round the hairpins like a pushbike. I felt I was riding on air.

An hour later and I was back at the restaurant and the van, Luda having had a relaxing couple of hours relaxing in the van.

After a superb Lunch we set off to Yalta the long way round, arriving a few hours later. A full day!

Unfortunately it was all downhill after that.

The guy I previously mentioned who had promised to host us, and take us out on the pilot boat turned out to be ...... how shall I say, unreliable. I feel unable to go into details, in case of the slim chance that he may read this. But I wish him well, he was well intentioned, but a complete alcoholic. Sort yourself out mate.....

So we made a hasty exit.

We are now in eastern Crimea, in the town of Feyodosia, another Russian Riviera town, but with a quaint and wonderful character.

We came here because in the midst of all this activity, I broke a tooth.....so needed a dentist.

I could write a whole story about dental crises in foreign countries, but suffice it to say that I have have visited dentists in Morocco, Berlin, Thailand, and now Ukraine.

We had no local contacts, so just headed to the nearest big town and asked around. Thanks to Luda and some helpful locals we ended up at a dental clinic on the outskirts of Feyodosia.

I suppose by now you are expecting a tale of woe and Ukrainian dentistry. Nothing could be further than the truth, In fact, having had the privilege to travel, and therefore have my genetically weak teeth fettled in various lands, I can tell you from personal experience that British dentistry is in a pathetic state. Unless of course you have lots of money, or insurance, as any decent dentist in the UK has gone private, and is driving a BMW at your expense.

If you break a tooth in Manchester, for example, you have two choices. Choice number one is to pick up Yellow Pages, stick in a pin, and make a dozen calls until somebody condescends to see you within 24 hours, at a cost of anything up to a couple of hundred pounds. Choice two - pitch up at the Manchester Dental Hospital, queue for 4 hours, and hope you get a student who has paid attention in lectures.

Here on the other hand, I was treated to a dental surgery in a building of glorious Soviet era disrepair, and inside a surgery of dated, but obviously well maintained, clean, equipment. And a wonderful middle aged woman who exuded confidence and ability.

I thought the tooth was a gonner, it having broken in two, and half of it waggling about like a broken leg. Without further ado, she yanked out the broken bit, chucked it in the bin without a comment, had a poke around, and announced with Luda translating, that although nearly all the tooth above the gum was gone, the root was sound.

Within twenty minutes, with no X ray and no anaesthetic, she put a pin into the root, and then constructed a up a new tooth using this fancy plastic stuff that you shape and then then harden with UV light.

You just know when things feel right........and it feels right. Cost......300 Ukrainian Grivna....about £25.

So who's the mug? That £25 was cost plus profit, and I was in and out in half an hour. So what makes UK dentistry so expensive?

I had a long conversation with Luda about Ukrainian healthcare. It's different, but families and friends club together in emergency. And at these prices they can afford it. If you go in hospital here, you pay about £5 a night for the bed, plus treatment.

It begs the question.......universal healthcare is expensive. But when it is driven by capitalist forces, such as all powerful pharma companies who are making such profits that they can bribe and lobby entire national governments.....it is VERY expensive. So much so that the socialist dream in western europe has almost bankrupted us.

What would you rather do? Earn £1000 pounds a month, pay 40% of it in tax and "insurance", yet still pay £50 for the dentist and £8 an item at the pharmacy.....

Or earn £500 a month, about 10% tax, yet everything, and I mean everything, including food and fuel, is less than half the cost.

Do the maths. Someone, somewhere is making a shedload of money out of 1st world countries. Are you trying to tell me that dentistry equipment and materials are any more expensive in any country anywhere in the world? It costs what it costs.

What makes the same house £200k in the UK and £20k here?

2nd world countries like Ukraine, Thailand and Morocco (the ones I have experience of) have a lot to teach so called 1st world countries.

I paid £30 for a very high tech filling in Thailand, and £40 for a triple visit root canal treatment in Morocco.

You are being conned. By Tesco, Dentists, Energy companies, the Media and Big Business. Don't blame the politicians, they are being conned too.

And now you are being conned because of a financial crisis caused by a bunch of greedy strangers.

It's a crazy world, but I am extremely happy with my twenty five quid tooth!