Happy Birthday grandson Nathan in Darwin, a toothless 6yr old today! And also marking 7 months since we Wanderoos departed Australia. Past old cave dwellings/ "towns".
Turned up narrow streets of Bakhchysaray village spotting one mosque after another, obviously a heavy Muslim population. Drove to cave monastery but didn't climb up because raining heavily plus want some kms up today.
GirlRob concentrating on taking photos of tractors as she enjoyed prize winning novel "Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" - big tracts of land under pivot irrigators, circular fields/ crops.
Plenty of “Bee Drovers” along road selling med/honey. Stalls selling doughnut shaped red onions in hanging bags - so plentiful/cheap wonder how the oldies make any money. Children running home from bus, girls with large white pom-pom pigtail holders.
Oh no, trouble now - we did a U-turn across road to stop at a stall to look at salty air-dried fish, backed up slightly into our lane to complete the turn and hit the back of a truck-trailer going in the opposite direction - he was well onto our side of the road - wiping out our whole back box and strewing our contents along road. Our large table shattered, and the whole lid of box (with our precious Wanderoos logo) was totally wrenched off beyond repair. Only small dent and scrape in other blokes trailer, but he immediately called police. After collecting all pieces off road, and stowing salvageable bits in camper (amazingly both chairs were OK and washing was still intact inside barrel), and half hour of waiting, we got hold of Marina by phone to ask the truck driver in Russian why we had to wait when we'd actually sustained all the damage. It appears he'd had a similar collision and wanted to "clear his name with his boss". The truck driver behind wouldn't wait but there were stall holders who’d witnessed the accident.
Got our paperwork ready, passport, international drivers licence, and (thankfully) 3rd party insurance. Real concern is whether they will charge us (and if so could that interfere with either leaving Ukraine or Europe??) But amazingly, after a short discussion, the police let us go, didn't even want to hear truckies story. We put a few kilometres between us in case anyone changed their minds, before pulling into roadside cafe for dinner, then on to Kherson camping beside an irrigation channel. Whilst the pretty sunset didn’t help much to alieviate the mood, we were grateful the vehicle didn’t sustain more damage, and we’d not been injured.
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