Kyiv to Vienna by bus: 36 hours including 15 hour wait on the Hungarian border
The last in a series of ten posts about my recent short trip to Kyiv
I was lucky the night before. No air raid sirens. I had slept through. Earlier, I had asked Ivan, the volunteer feeding 200 grannies, what do I do if there is an air raid siren and I have to catch my bus? You just go to your bus, he explained. I nodded. Ok then. At 7am, I ordered a Bolt, and arrived shortly thereafter at Kyiv’s central bus station, a flurry of activity on a weekday morning, with a parking lot so crowded with people, buses, cars and luggage that I only managed to find my bus because I remembered where it parked when we arrived. Ours was the yellow one in this photo.
I had wanted to find a toilet but then thought twice. Then I remembered, and wanted kick myself, that I had agreed to carry a few things back to Austria for Ukrainians. One husband found me, and thankfully only handed me a small box “vitamins, he said, and a pie” and something wrapped in aluminium foil in a plastic bag. I naively had no idea at that time that all, and I mean all, of our belongings would be searched by Hungarian border guards acting in ways for which I have no non-curse words to describe. “Tell my wife we miss her,” he said. I nodded. I knew there was trouble, rumours of domestic abuse. I thought to myself how complicated everything is, and this war just multiplies all of it, but did not reduce the pre-war issues. They are still around.
Next, a grandmother and grandfather run up to me, the same ones who had met me when I arrived. They are hauling a giant plastic bag (think 1 yard by 1 yard) with a zipper top and two handles, with the classic red/white/blue plaid pattern I remember from “shuttle traders” in the 1990s markets in Russia. I look in horror. They don’t let me lift it. Grandpa slides it onto the bus before the driver can say anything. Grandma gives me a huge smile, and hands me some chocolates. I stare, dumfounded, totally shocked at the size of the “care package” I am expected to transport home. I say my goodbyes, take a deep breath, and look for my seat on the bus.
The child’s drawing under a rainbow wishing us a safe drive. The flags. The curtain. I take another deep breath and sit down next to a middle-aged man. I am surprised not to be seated next to a woman. I look on the walls, and don’t see any plugs. The previous bus had had one socket per two seats. I look back at the toilet, which is just next to the passenger door halfway down the bus, on the side, and see above it an extension cord already filled with five chargers and five phones. I do the math, quickly. Five sockets. Fifty five passengers. I realise how screwed I am with no power bank. I vow to myself be sparing in my use of my phone.
The bus is chatty. Behind me is a solidly built middle aged blonde from Kharkiv who has just come in on the overnight train, the only way to make the 8am Kyiv bus, she later explains to me. To the right of me are a young woman who is already a German passport holder and works in IT in Germany, and a young-ish granny who is — and there is always this character in group situations (I kept thinking about Chekov constantly) — the voice of the crowd. She is bubbly and within a few hours we know a lot of her life story. Originally from Luhansk, living in Kyiv since 2014, daughter is a lawyer now in Austria with two kids, she is going to visit them, only for a few days, as she takes care of her own mother who is bedridden. A neighbour will fill in for a few days. Grandma is carrying a suitcase full of food to Austria: kasha. She mentions kasha about six times. I naively suggest one can buy kasha in our supermarkets in Austria now too. I am quickly told it is not the same. I shut up.
In front of us are a mother - daughter team who seem to have packed an entire picnic (full loaf of bread, cutting board, ham, cheese, veggies, all individually sliced up). They look like they have done this before. Many times. I later learn they too live in Germany, and this is by no means their first long haul bus journey rodeo.
At 8:01 the bus gets restless. One of the two drivers (the plump western Ukrainian, they are almost all plump western Ukrainians with wonderful senses of humour) gets on the loudspeaker. He has just taken a call from a woman who is late. She asks us to wait ten minutes. Grandma immediately shouts back we should leave her behind. What kind of bullshit is that, not getting to your bus on time. Half the crowd nods in agreement, the other half ignore it. We are not friends, yet. Our journey is only just starting. The driver yells, but waits. We make a circle around the parking lot which is more crowded than anything I have ever experienced in a vehicle in my lifetime, and wait by the stairs that supposedly lead down from the subway on which this woman who thinks the whole bus should wait for her will supposedly soon emerge. And she does, middle aged, with a smile on her face reflecting a false belief trapped in time that she can still flirt her way out of awkward situations. I dislike her immediately. She doesn’t say sorry. The others yell at her. She takes a seat by the window and ignores the remarks in her direction. An older man is sitting next to her, and he seems happy to flirt. I roll my eyes.
My seat partner is quiet, and we do not talk until much later in the drive. He ends up being a fascinating, inspiring individual, but because of his current role, actively serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, I will not share any of that here. He told me a lot in confidence. He had 15 days leave. A new law was passed, allowing soldiers to visit their families abroad while on leave. His wife and daughter are in the UK. His daughter has an amazing corporate job there she achieved entirely on her own, after showing promise in Kyiv with western audit firms. It is only once we start talking I notice he is wearing dark trousers and a khaki-coloured T-shirt. The T-shirt has the name of some western brand across the chest, but the color is a signal. I am so grateful that he confides in me a lot of what he has seen, experienced, heard, thinks about the future. As a career military man, it was no question for him what he would do when the war began. He knew it would come. His brother is wounded now, being treated in Kyiv. He was in Donbas for a long time. He was driving near the pizzeria in Kramatorsk when it was hit. He describes that experience to me. I tell him how horrified we in the west were to learn about Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina’s death in that attack.
We head out of Kyiv, and our driver (funny western Ukrainian) gets on the loudspeaker again, and gives us a dose of reality. The situatoin on the border is not good. It is in all of our interests to drive as fast as we can with as few stops as possible to power through to the border by early evening. Do we all agree? Da. But we do not have much of a choice. We make a quick stop on the side of a road in Zhytomyr and a blond woman of about my age who has evidently recently sampled much of what Ukraine’s injectable cosmetologists have to offer gets on. She talks a lot, and explains she has lived in Austria for years, and was visiting her parents. She too seems to know exactly how these bus trips are supposed to work.
During the day, it is a monotonous race to sundown, heading west across Ukraine, first through flat, heat-scarred fields of sunflower and corn, then reaching the winding roads of the west, the beautiful Carpathians. We even take a little detour through Uzhgorod this time, and the city looks like something trapped in time. A brutalist crumbling hotel next to buildings that could be in Lviv or Graz, newly built golden-domed churches, and those ubiquitous Soviet housing blocks. You wonder how the balconies of some don’t simply fall off. Maybe they do?
By early evening, we finally approach the last gas station before the Ukraine-Hungary border (Chop - Zahony). Our driver (there are two, but only one does most of the talking) tells us now we may do some food shopping and stretch our legs. Some race to buy coffee and hot dogs, others to vape and smoke. There is a family: mother, father (very overweight, very kind with his kids, carries them around like they are as light as a feather for him), girl of about six, boy of about six, but he has trouble walking and wears special shoes which function like braces. The family takes him out to walk at every stop, mother or father patiently holding his hands so he can stretch his legs, taking careful step by careful step. I watch in awe and also in embarrassment of my own complaining to myself about what I feel is about to be a miserable night.
I don’t know what to buy. You sort of stop eating. You try to drink very little: enough caffeine not to get a headache, but not too much that you run to the toilet every few hours. This bus has a toilet which is…not great. You don’t want to visit it too often. We are constantly warned not to make it gross and not to clog it. Otherwise, we are all screwed. Unlike the others, I don’t have any healthy snacks. I think I squished a banana somewhere in my bag. You lose track of time. I buy something salty, those tiny little fake French fry chips, and something sweet, a Snickers, thinking it will be filing.
It must have been around 8pm, but it was still vaguely light outside, when we finally rolled into the line of buses standing on the Ukrainian side of the border. To the right of us there was a very unappetising looking roadside cafe with outside tables and a cover roof, like a western saloon, but not, and a huge “shop” filled with candy that I didn’t dare think about how long it had been piled up, and a paid toilet upstairs. I think it cost us around 10 UAH (€0,25). It was not clean nor pleasant.
“Sixteen,” our driver tells us, shaking his head, after returning from his brief reconnaissance walk to the front of the line. You have to walk carefully. At any moment, a passenger car or enormous lorry can come zooming past. This isn’t a motorway. It is a highway that suddenly turns into a line. And the buses seem to be at the back of it all. “Last time they took an hour per bus,” he says, grimly.
I do the math of one hour per bus times 16 buses and think I might vomit. It is starting to sprinkle. Gently. We stand in the gentle rain, stretching our legs, vaping, smoking, kids running around, some go to buy a beer and eat something and the roadside cafe. Others, to my astonishment, decide to stay on the bus. For a while, the engine is running. This means you can charge your phones (at this point all 55 of us have to implicitly trust each other not to steal devices while they are charging) and sit in the A/C. But when the engine is turned off, and it is, eventually, overnight, once it becomes clear no one will be crossing the border for hours, the air on the bus turns into a stale awful mixture of sweat, people, snacks, heat, night breathing, snoring. You have to try and pass out just to stop smelling the smell.
Dusk turns into night. My military seat mate tells me more about his life. The women walk up and down the street in groups, gossiping, sharing stories. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is Ukrainians have not stopped talking about the war. In fact, it is almost all they talk about. Everything from mixed-sentiment in villages near the Russian border to how men are now brazenly handed draft papers everywhere and anywhere in cities like Kharkiv. Someone’s husband stopped driving to work. It is too risky. He feels safer on the metro. Although, they can get you anywhere. The granny originally from Luhansk recalls what life was like in Donbas before the war, how you could so easily cross the border into Russia to buy fish, cars went back and forth all the time, some even took Russian passports. She is so angry now. The war has turned her into a solid Ukrainian patriot. She speaks Ukrainian on purpose, only switches to Russian for my sake. She talks about ordinary people living near the border brainwashed after decades of Russian TV.
By this point it has been established that I am a foreigner. I say I am a volunteer. Which is true, and a much easier explanation than the long, complicated version. The second bus driver, who doesn’t look at all like the other — he is taller and very thin, dark hair, very nimble, still in his black trousers and crisp white shirt, while the plump funny one has already changed into his “pyjamas”: t-shirt, shorts, sliders. The tall dark-haired driver asks me, “so you are really American?” Yes, I nod. “Do you know my great uncle?”. I doubt it, I reply. Where does he live? “Hold on,” he pulls out his phone, and begins to scroll, “Brooook-LIN”. Ah, Brooklyn. Well, yes, there are many uncles living there, I smile a little bit to myself. He explains, he is Jewish, he would like to go to Israel, his brother is already there, his wife does permanent make-up and her client introduced them to a lawyer who can help them with the paperwork for 11,000 Shekels but it’s complicated because mom wasn’t married to dad at the time of his birth, even though dad was born in Podil, he is definitely Jewish, now they want him to do a DNA test in an Israeli lab….€1,000.
I take it all in. Wow, that’s a bit step. You really want to leave?
Yes.
He seems firmly confident that he will find work. He will be able to start over. That hardworking people can make it anywhere. Which is probably very true.
By now it is dark. A giant rat scurries by a woman sitting on a curb. I make a note to self not to sit on any curbs. There are two buses ahead of us filled with teenagers from Dnipro on their way to Lake Balaton in Hungary for a camp. They are alone, without parents. They are doing running races up and down the asphalt. Granny gets upset when she sees even the kids are being made to wait for hours. She goes to talk to their counsellors. The counsellors explain that last time some of the paperwork “wasn’t in order” and the Hungarians almost didn’t want to let them in at all. They will be quiet and wait like everyone else.
I look at the bus routes. Zaporozhye to Naples. Ternopil to Rome. It blows your mind.
By around midnight most of my travel companions have returned to the bus and the hot night air. The plump driver has crawled into his sleeping compartment under the seats, a little box that opens next to the stairs. He was crawled in and pulled the door almost shut, leaving room for air with an Adidas slider. I shudder in a feeling of claustrophobia. The skinny driver is asleep at the wheel, hands on the wheel, his head on his hands. He is sleeping sitting up. I take my seat next to my military seat mate, put my purple pillow on my neck, and close my eyes.
Somehow I open them and it is morning. We have moved a few buses forward. The bus wakes up and starts talking again. Eventually, Ukrainian armed soldiers and then border guards come on board and do the drill again, collecting all our passports, taking them away, brining them back in a thick pile of blue and the occasional red snippet of leather, handing them back. My seatmate in khaki has special paperwork for his military leave. It is scrutinised carefully, but he is not questioned.
Once our passports are stamped, we still have to wait. A few women go to find coffee. Others go sample the perfume in the “duty free shop” which feels like a McDonalds on Mars in this context. We have now been waiting for 12 hours.
The line is not caused by the Ukrainian side. The line is a man-made creation of the Hungarian side intentionally not processing cars, trucks and buses as fast as they could. Our bus drivers begin to educate us on what comes next.
“Two packs of cigarettes max per person, one bottle of alcohol, any medicine must be yours and yours alone and you must have a prescription from within the last two months.”
Fuck, I think. I have medicine which Vassily asked me to pick up. I have only a link on my phone to his Ukrainian prescription. I also have no idea what is in the enormous bag the grandparents handed me, nor what exactly are the “vitamins” I am carrying. I start to get anxious. The Ukrainians are trading cigarettes around, asking which of the non-smokers can take extra packs. The drivers ask us to sort this all out now, so we don’t have problems once the Hungarians start inspecting us. It is apparently Russian roulette. You don’t know how tough (or not) they will search.
The pretty blonde lady who lives in Austria tells us she came a week earlier, on the Vienna-Kyiv bus, same border crossing. There were even two Austrian diplomats riding the bus. They sat nine hours at the border and the driver was then fined €1,500 by Hungary for arriving three minutes early to his “time slot” on the border.
I remembered the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. For a while, Serbia was under sanctions, and you could not fly in. My dad and I, in 1994, took a mini-bus from Budapest to Belgrade with about a dozen others. Back then, the Hungarian border guards let a queue of five, six kilometers build up in the blazing July heat, and then we each had to put Deutschmarks in our passports to pass. I remember that. I remember those long hours waiting in the blistering sun. I remembering the funny feeling of paying to cross a border. I remember thinking the Hungarians were cynically profiting off the war next door. These thoughts all flooded back to me.
We pulled forward to a drawbridge over a river. On the other side, Hungary. We wait. Finally, it is our turn. They pull the bus to the side. We must all get out. We must each carry all of our bags inside to be scanned like in an airport. But first, passport control. I cannot manage to lift all my stuff. There are now three identical plaid bags. I take the wrong one by accident. The young IT specialist from Germany tells me I have hers. I apologise, by this point covered in sweat, and switch plastic bags. At passport control, two young Hungarian male officers are giggling and talking about each woman as she passes. It was disgusting and humiliating. They did the same to me. American passport made no difference. The bus driver, in fact, back in Kyiv, did not want to let me on without seeing my Austrian ID “green card”. Strict orders, he said. No non-EU residents allowed.
We began to lift our heavy bags to be scanned, but the humiliation did not end there. Then, gloved officers, also men, began rummaging through all of our stuff. Searching for any kind of contraband, anything illegal they could fine us hundreds of Euros for. The bus drivers watched, nervous, unable to influence anything. I wanted to strangle the offer across from me as he sifted through my dirty clothes and underwear. Luckily, he did not manage to find Vassily’s medicine. How many cigarettes? One pack, I show him, from a neighbour. He nods. I am clear to go.
But next to me is a young woman, and they are yelling at her. She has 10g too much (yes, you read that correctly) e-cigarette liquid. They will issue her a fine. We all wait outside another half an hour. I do not know how much she paid. The drivers say they cannot do anything. This is Orban’s politics in action in the hands of country boys and girls for whom an easy job in uniform surely beats working fields all day. It disgusted me. As if war wasn’t bad enough.
The Ukrainians took it all in stride. They were upset, but no surprised. We were all very hot and tired at this point. The family with the disabled boy were still walking up and down. I admired the parents so much for their patience, for not getting hysterical. They calmly put up with everything we had to go through. Others are getting nervous. They have onward flights and trains and buses, and we will arrive in Vienna at 6pm rather than the scheduled 9am. We spent 15 hours crossing into Hungary. My seatmate is very nervous he might miss his RyanAir flight to Luton from Budapest. We try to do the calculations in our heads. He loans me his powerbank and lets me fill up my phone to 30%. In this situation, it is like handing someone gold. I cannot believe his generosity.
I curse Hungary to myself until we get to Budapest. I swear I will not spend another Euro there anytime soon. I angrily tweet the whole experience. We arrive mid-afternoon. The lovely woman from Kharkiv behind me is going onto Strasbourg. She clearly has not yet bought her onward bus ticket. She knew we would be late. She does it now, for 11pm. The mother and daughter from Munich are in a panic they will miss their train from Westbahnhof. We cannot tell them otherwise. They probably will, that money lost. The grandma has a ride to Linz. Someone will pick up her up. Same for the blonde lady who has lived in Austria a long time. My seatmate runs as fast as his legs take him off the bus when we pull into Budapest bus station. No break. No one is allowed to go smoke. We push onwards towards Vienna.
“But I need to buy a coffee!” I exclaim, surprising even myself, like an impatient small child. The bus driver looks at me, the funny chubby one. “I’m gong to get one of those caffeine headaches,” I continue, in embarrassing fashion. He promises to make me a coffee from his own stash, using his own mini-kettle. He asks me if I take milk and sugar or black. I cannot believe my luck. I thank him profusely. He makes me promise not to throw the tiny little white cup away. I keep my promise. I sip, slowly, staring at the countryside between Budapest and Vienna, feeling like the luckiest woman on the planet. My headache subsides.
As we cross into Austria (no checks, no border, nothing), I pull out my phone and film the same scene a mom on my trip to Kyiv from Vienna had filmed. At the time, I didn’t think it was that interesting. This time, I thought I understood. She was documenting leaving Austria, for good, and I was documenting returning, finally.
At 6pm we finally pulled into the dingy Vienna central bus station. A dad was waiting for me to take the huge plaid plastic bag from the grandparents in Kyiv. I didn’t mince words when I told him what I thought of handing me 25 kg without warning as a “care package”. He clearly had no idea what happens to items searched on the Hungarian border on buses. I was in no mood to be friendly about it. I was tired, hot, sticky, hungry, and my feet looked swollen.
Another granny, I have not noticed her before, walked after me as I exited the parking lot, and asked me how to get to a town in Lower Austria. I looked at her in disbelief. Is no one meeting you? No, she said.
“Where are the volunteers?” she asked me in complete seriousness.
I wanted to cry and scream.
“There haven’t been volunteers for a long time,” I explain, calmly, showing her the way to the metro.
Granny, the original, chatty one, from Luhansk via Kyiv, who would have been the main character if this was all a Chekov play, hands me a piece of paper with the name and number of her daughter, a lawyer by training, now living in Austria with her two kids. I thank her and promise to get in touch, which I do. I needed legal advice this week, and she helped me.
The world is tiny. There are assholes a plenty, but the good people make the whole place go round, and the whole life worth living. A truly unforgettable 36 hours. But next time, if there is a next time, I will try to take the train, or at least aim to go via Slovakia or Poland. Huge respect for the drivers and the Ukrainians who undertake this journey on a regular basis. Remember, they do it because they have no choice.
I can now say with confidence, most of us have no idea what the long-haul bus journeys across Europe are like. They are a normal part of life for so many. This night, I drove 600 kilometers round trip to pick up my daughter in Salzburg at 4 AM. Flixbus after Flixbus. Germany, Romania, Balkans.
Ukraine is even further, and it is at war. It blows your mind if you stop to think about it. And yet, we laughed and joked and made friends and enjoyed interesting conversation and gossiped about everything from travel to manicures to whether Diet Coke will kill you (said my a middle aged chain-smoker) and all the war gossip. All the whispers I won’t elaborate on here. What is and isn’t working. Who is or isn’t to blame. Ukraine is very much still an active democracy in that its citizens are vehemently expressing their individual views in public. They are not afraid. They say it like it is.
And yet. There were teenage boys alone on the bus. Seventeen, I imagine. As the mom of a seventeen year old boy, I understand this in my bones.
When I later told the chatty granny that my seatmate was an officer in the army, she was upset I hadn’t said anything earlier, “We should have all thanked him for his service”. But he didn’t want attention. Although, she is right. We should have all thanked him and all the other fathers, sons and husbands. The things they have seen, what they have lived through, they will not recover fully from that. I think it is impossible. You are forever changed.
Ukraine is forever changed by this war, but it has not lost its spirit. The spirit of the Ukrainian people is special and strong, like a quilt of a thousand different coloured fabrics. So many fascinating personalities. Perhaps you can say this of any nation, but I didn’t have that much “fun” during a long travel ordeal since once being stranded at JFK airport during a blackout and ending up at a stranger’s grandma’s home in Brooklyn, feeding all of us, as if we had known each other for years. That was a very American experience, the best of America, and this bus ride also reminded me in many ways of the best of Ukraine. All very different people but now all very much united in a common goal. Surviving. Getting through this. Proud. Unwavering. Strong. Kind. Big hearted. Funny. Very well prepared for long bus journeys! I will never master the fine art of packing the right snacks nor having enough charging capacity.
My entire Twitter thread from my August 2023 trip to Kyiv is here.
Unrolled web-version here.
A big, big thank you for this series of posts, and an even bigger one for undertaking the trip in the first place. This series has provided a wonderful insight into how Ukraine and Ukrainians are functioning, like nothing else I’ve read. I wish many more people would read it!