Ukrainian local,Fox Bay,Crimean Coast.

Just as in America, the most accessible places on the Crimean coast attracted the lazy tourists, while the backcountry offered sanctuary for the seekers. On our final day we stumbled upon a scene farther east that reminded me of the American desert or Baja California, Mexico. Here, on a less spectacular and less crowded beach called Fox Bay, where muddy brown cliffs collapse on a desolate shore, the beachgoers were younger, thinner, and better-looking than the porcine bathers around Morskoye and Sudak. On this beach the tents were permanent, palapas of palm branches and plastic sheets strung between Russian olive trees along the base of the crumbling bluffs, the only shade on the entire stretch. The women were tanned and nude, the men wore sarongs, and naked babies scurried underfoot. A gorgeous naked woman scrubbed laundry in a plastic tub while a man with a long beard stuffed his pack with empty plastic water jugs and headed down the beach to find a place to refill them. At the nearest road head someone had an old van up on blocks and was working on the tranny. I got the feeling that in Fox Bay they were ready to wait out the apocalypse, or maybe they thought it had already come and didn’t care; they’d found their paradise.

Has freedom really come to Ukraine? It’s hard to say. Prime Minister Yuschenko’s reformist party has been assailed as corrupt and incompetent. And the old Russian-backed party won the recent parliamentary elections, which means Yuschenko now works directly with the man accused of poisoning him. Business as usual, it seems.
But as I walked along a dusty two-track, where a pair of loose cows rummaged through a trash pile, I suddenly felt elated. As surely as governments will misgovern and leaders will mislead, there will also always be havens like this where the dreamers sink beneath the surveillance and soak up the sun’s democratic warmth. Freedom is our way, after all, and freedom is what we may yet find.

Mark Sundeen,Rob Smurr,and Gia.The Ukraine

Mark Sundeen at the Simprool train station.

For more about Mark- http://marksundeen.com/blog/