IN PRAISE OF UNREMARKABLE TOWNS

AND DAZZLING SEASCAPES TOO

Travelling through Ukraine, Jon Fasman finds much to surprise him, from the plain everyday life of his wife's ancestral town of Uman, to the near-Mediterranean landscapes and exotic history of Crimea ...

from our travel blog, FURTHERMORE

I'm back from a two-and-a-half week trip through Ukraine. We missed Lviv, unfortunately, but saw the other big-three cities: Kyiv, Odessa and Yalta. All were enjoyable, but, like most tourists, we went knowing what to expect: Kyiv the bustling capital, Odessa the tree-lined and fast-talking port town, and Yalta the glitzy and rather corny beach resort.

Between our first two stops, however, we spent a couple of days in Uman, an unremarkable agricultural town of about 100,000 in the centre of Ukraine's wheat belt. I went for family reasons--my spouse's great-grandfather emigrated from there two New York--and spent two days scouring graveyards, trying (and failing) to find archival records, or even a phone book, and basking in a lot of curious stares.

Tourists tend not to go to Uman (tourists tend not to go to Ukraine, but that's another story), and why would they? Its major attractions are Sofiyikva Park, a nature reserve about which Ukrainians tend to get quite breathless but which is about as exciting as a subsection of Central Park or Kew Gardens; and the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which draws about 20,000 Hasidic pilgrims--different, of course, from tourists--every Rosh Hashanah.

Still, I found it the most rewarding of our stops, precisely because it was so unprepared for tourists. It was Ukraine unscrubbed, lacking the shine of Kyiv, the storied allure of Odessa, the Russian wealth of Yalta. Generally, people were friendlier, more talkative and open, and not as quick to reach their hand into our pockets than their counterparts in more touristed parts of the country.

Admittedly, I have macadam in my veins; as a traveler and, alas, a person, am somewhat immune to the charms of nature, but it made me wonder why more tourists don't include at least one unremarkable city on every journey. Just as you learn more about people when they're drunk or just awoken than you do when they're prepared, so you learn more about a country by visiting places where there's nothing to do but drink, smoke and talk to people. Swoon at the Eiffel Tower, but spare a night for Lille and Toulon.

We found plenty to surprise us in Crimea, too. Yes, we knew that Yalta would be kitschy, crowded and expensive, but we had not reckoned on being confronted with quite so beautiful a landscape. We took an overnight train from Odessa; we boarded by the sea, rolled through rather unprepossessing farmland (that describes much of Ukraine: think Nebraska, with fewer Wal-marts and prettier women) and woke up in paradise. If I lived in Europe and had some spare cash, I would buy property here. Simferopol is an hour's flight from Kiev and about four from Paris; its airports serves more international destinations than anywhere other than Kiev. Away from the clutter of the southwestern coast, you can still be pretty isolated pretty quickly.

The other draw is cultural: almost every civilization worth mentioning has dipped into Crimea for a while and left at least a few interesting ruins--few of which we saw, alas: by the time we arrived, travel had taken its toll on us; the only ruins we saw were the empty beer bottles we racked up on the beach.

For more than three centuries, Crimea was home to the Tatars, a Turkic-Muslim people known for devastating raids into the European mainland. In the 16th century they reached (and burned) Moscow; they were the principal opponents of the Cossacks. Ultimately, the Russians defeated them, and Stalin deported them. But slowly they are starting to return. Restaurants advertised "Krimsky-Tatarsky" cooking, and it was the one place your swarthy, hairy correspondent has visited in eastern Europe where people didn't glare at him like he was a terrorist.

Of course, the Cossack spirit that drove millions of swarthy people from Ukraine to the west remains strong in the non-Tatar inhabitants. Driving to the airport on our last day, my wife saw a field dotted with little huts. She asked the driver what they were, and he started ranting in a thick Ukrainian accent: the only words we caught were "Tatar" and "illegal". Finally he calmed down, and, having heard us speaking English to each other, said, in perfectly comprehensible Russian, "They are our problem. You have your [unprintable racial slur]. We have Tatars."