Day 02. Užhorod - Košice - Prešov - Poprad

I spent the night in a Ukrainian train, where I met some college students from Cherson heading to winter camp. The ride took me a night and cost some 50 UAH (5 EUR). I absolutely love Ukrainian prices.

I arrived to the Užhorod station around 7 a.m. I planned to walk some 6 km up to the Slovak border, passing by the old town (one can't call it downtown), which I did.

Užhorod doesn't seem to be a safe town in any respect. People looked rather suspicious, I have even hidden my camera inside my backpack in order not to get robbed. The few photos I did take are of a quite low quality. I didn't visit the Užhorod Castle.

When I came to the border, I discovered a very unpleasant thing: this border crossing was for cars only. The border officer asked for no more, and no less, than 10 EUR. Now I realize I should have started hitchhiking on the Ukrainian side. In any case, the border officer would have sure recognized me as the pedestrian once he had seen me. So I kind of accepted. But he still wouldn't let me cross the border on foot, so he made the next driver take me up. But then it turned out that this driver had some major problems with his documents. Finally, they didn't let him in. I went with another driver, who was actually Slovak and who was a former border officer at the same border crossing. That was the first time I had to speak Slovak.

He took me up to the town of Sobrance. In some ten minutes, I got a lift to Michalovce. The driver was kind enough to show me Zemplínska Šírava, or Slovenské more (the Slovak Sea), which is the biggest dam of the country. In Michalovce, I waited for some five minutes and I got a lift from a guy who spoke English and who had travelled to Brazil previously. He was heading to Prešov but he was also intending to visit someone in Košice, so I had a free hour in Košice and a guaranteed lift to Prešov. Isn't that great?

Now, Košice has an awesome chocolate-flavoured Old Town. I just fell in love with it. Hoping to re-visit Košice in the future, I enjoyed it so much.

After an hour of excited wandering, I left for Prešov. Prešov didn't impress me like Košice did, but it was at least neat and very pleasant.

Hitchhiking to Poprad proved to be impossible due to several reasons, though I was trying hard for several hours. Desperate, I came back to the Old Town, where I took a bus to Poprad. The ride was expensive, it cost like 5 EUR. As far as I understood, this bus didn't follow the highway, but it went on a more northern route.

My first Slovak host Martina kindly took me from the bus terminus in Poprad, which finished my East Slovak adventure.