February 2003 – After a year of teaching English in South Korea I embark on a two week jaunt through Japan, then a full Trans-Siberia Railway journey from Vladivostok, Russia to Kiev, Ukraine. From there I planned to visit my paternal great grandmother’s hometown outside Lviv near the Polish border.

This wasn’t the most comfortable of trips. For three weeks I meandered around Japan, bullet training through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Nagoya, Tokyo, Kyoto, Niigata, and Nagano on a Japan Rail Pass. That last city featured a 8 hour hike in the snow along the highway, returning from the snow monkey park with no access to the ATM on a public holiday. I holed up in the Best Western for two days with severe atrophy in my legs. Other than that hiccup, Japan was great, by far the best service I had experienced abroad.

Then came Russia: service without a smile. I had arranged a full private guided Trans-Siberian tour, which was needed, since I wasn’t about to go solo through the streets of Ulan Ude – wasn’t getting the safest vibe. But my guides did help to arrange some unique experiences, including a full course family dinner with some ageless Old Believers in the Republic of Buryatia, just north of the Mongolian border. They told tales of working on the collective farm, read poetry in praise of Ronald Reagan, forced me to play some Bob Dylan tunes on my guitar, and drank me under the table.

That tour finally ended in Kiev, where I went westward to the town of Drohobych and explored my ancestral village of Kotovanya with the help of a taxi driver who I think was just a guy who happened to have a car and some free time. All I found there was a few run down wooden homes and a babushka feeding some chickens in the middle of a dirt road. It was an eye opener. Not a smile was seen along the entire 5,000 mile route.

Plans originally called for a longer southern leg of my journey into Romania and Bulgaria, stretching my dollars as far as I could. But after a few weeks absorbing the whole of Russia, I had had enough. So I quickly arranged a flight from Lviv, Ukraine via Warsaw to Amsterdam. I imbibed in some local delights, bought a sturdy Dutch road bike for $200, and pedaled around that flatland nation for over a month. Best decision I made the whole journey.