Kiev Boryspil

Despite what Chris Cooper, playing Bob Cody, said in Interstate 60, I hold that F.J. Turner's frontier theory still stands in the modern world: those who cannot fit in back home can still pack up and have places to which they can head off. For sure, some of those places might be a little less wild than the English language pro-business press would have you believe (had such articles been printed verbatim a quarter of a century earlier, they would have been classed as western propaganda). This is how I found Russia to be, but I recently spent some time in critically-acclaimed Ukraine - critically acclaimed when the government is more defiant towards Moscow than the west, anyway.

Some time ago I booked a flight home for the holidays, deciding to save a few coppers by changing planes in Kiev. On the way out, I only got one boarding pass when I checked in, and so I spent the first leg of the journey wondering how I would get on the second plane without a second boarding pass. I reasoned that this must simply be the way they do things at Boryspil, as I saw no way for human error to make the machine print just the first of two passes, and so it proved: all I had to do on arrival was fight through a scrum and state my destination and the second pass was printed. After buying a bottle of vodka and a matryoshka doll, thereby disposing of my duties as a stereotypical tourist, I boarded the plane. After an hour or so in the air there came an announcement that we were turning around and going back to Kiev. The cabin crew chose not to disturb us further with any explanation, a decision they upheld for the remainder of the journey. We did eventually take off again in the same plane, lending weight to the theory of the man seeming the only other British passenger, that the airline had not paid a bill and consequently been refused access to Polish/EU airspace.

On landing, the door of the cockpit flew open to give a clear view of the runway and the pilot operating his controls. I mentioned this to my fellow Briton, and he did not find it strange, relating other occasions he had witnessed, including one where the door fell right off. Clearly, terrorism is not a major concern for those in charge of the fleet. As we parted, this fellow mentioned that this was the sixth time he had had a problem with this airline, and in future he would be using their competitor.

Said competitor turned out to be the airline I was using for the return journey, and this time I got both boarding passes from a check-in agent with whom I was of course able to speak in English. Thus I set about my pre-departure shopping with a spring in my step. You know how there always seems to be one plane at the top of the departures screen that should have left hours ago? This time it was mine - and when it was finally assigned a gate, a large number of people thought it was theirs too, though it wasn't. One can only sympathise, when the monitor displays your flight number and destination but the staff checking passes are telling you to go back to the lounge, explaining in a language you don't understand that there is another flight to the same destination in an hour's time. So it was that our flight got underway a good ninety minutes later than scheduled. I had been assured in London that my connection would be waiting in Kiev, but it wasn't, and so I found myself airside, alone and utterly at a loss. Customs folk the world over seem to relish giving you a bad time, but the supreme indifference of the first few knuckleheads I spoke to here would take some beating - as, I thought, I might if I wasn't careful. The uniform was not a reliable hallmark, however, as I eventually I found a helpful woman who explained my situation to the bored check-in attendant who had earlier waved me through transit security - resulting, incidentally, in the loss of most of the remaining implements in my nonetheless-still-useful Swiss card.

Though during my brief visit I found Kiev less westernised than the press report it, I was glad that at least taxis are proper taxis, and the drivers stay in them rather than actively soliciting fares with a manner somewhere betwixt that of a ticket tout and that of a drug dealer. I therefore had a peaceful wait for vouchers for a hotel and a meal, having been told that the next flight was at seven the next morning. The meal voucher never arrived; ultimately I was escorted to a naff Italian restaurant and told that my meal would consist of salad, soup and pork. After devouring these things and getting fed up with waiting for tea, I set off to redeem my hotel voucher. Unsurprisingly, I was in the dingiest room in a pretty dingy establishment, where the TV showed 24 Russian channels with Ukranian subs or vice versa, and one German news channel, and was on the blink in any case. Reasoning that asking for room service would likely lead to frustration, I headed for the bar/restaurant to buy mineral water and beer and politely enquire about the possibility of getting online: 'Wi-fi? Internet?' 'No.'

It would be superfluous to name the airline I used for either journey; they were different and I have had similar problems flying through other places, such as supposedly-developed Zurich. The moral of the story has to be that it is well worth paying more to fly direct - although once you are on the ground in the UK...let's just say 'Heathrow Express' is a misnomer!