Welcome to Ukraine — soaking wet

We arrived at the queue for the Poland–Ukraine border crossing and hit our first problem immediately: we were on foot, and the guards wouldn't let pedestrians through. We had to work our way down the line of waiting cars until we found a driver willing to take us along.

After clearing the Polish checkpoint we got out of that car and found another at the start of the second queue (for the Ukrainian side) to avoid losing too much time. Even so, between one wait and another it took us over two and a half hours to get into Ukraine.

By the time we finally got out of the second car that had let us through the last checkpoint, it was completely dark — almost 10pm — and it was absolutely bucketing down with rain.

Anywhere else I'd been, this wouldn't have been a problem. But right on the other side of a border, in Ukraine of all places, hitchhiking at night while soaking wet seemed like anything but easy.

The road looked deserted — or at least, you couldn't really tell because there were no street lights. Most of the few cars that passed did so without their lights on. We started walking, looking for somewhere to shelter, while I kept trying to flag down a car in desperation, walking along the middle of the road, barely able to see anything, relying entirely on my ears to know when a vehicle was approaching.

After about five minutes, a Ukrainian in a battered old Lada — no windscreen, no lights — stopped to rescue us. He must have decided we were about to die out there, and offered to take us to a motel. He spoke no English. Not even Russian. We could barely communicate at all, but he seemed a decent sort.

The journey to our shelter was memorable. Our driver — stocky, maybe a metre and a half tall with a head like a football — pressed his face to within a hand's width of the windscreen, and with his right hand on the wheel and his left trying to wipe the condensation off the glass, desperately tried to see the road he was driving along.

After fifteen tense minutes we arrived at our romantic Ukrainian roadside motel — state-of-the-art satellite TV, jacuzzi showers, immaculate condition…

Whatever — we had a bed, and it cost us less than €5.

And so we spent our first night in Ukraine, drinking a couple of bottles of wine in our room at said motel, bought from the first open shop I found nearby.

Next morning we said goodbye to a friendly little dog and set off towards Lviv.

Any tricky situations of your own right after crossing a border?