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This is a common landscape to be seen in Vylkovo village, nicknamed Ukrainian Venice. KP Media, photo by Greg Bloom From lively Odesa to nature sites and birds of Bessarbia

urned to Ukraine last year after a four-year hiatus to update Lonely Planet’s Ukraine guide. This is the second of several columns documenting his travels.

The big news emanating out of Ukraine’s transport sector when I arrived was that the death trap known as the Kyiv-Odesa highway was now a 100% divided highway. It used to be divided only as far as Uman. Driving the 200 km stretch of two-lane road south of Uman was akin to an extended game of chicken with a Thermopylaen fleet of German luxury cars. It added two hours to the trip and subtracted two years from your life.

The newly widened highway looks like Germany’s Autobahn on the surface, only with more maniacal drivers and the odd cattle truck going dangerously slow in the right lane. I had a Lonely Planet sales executive, Richard Samson, temporarily ‘shadowing’ me, which sounds more ominous than it is. The goal is to give someone from the LP office a taste of life on the road as an author. We rented a car for the trip so that Richard would get a good taste of Ukrainian-style driving.

Traditionally, my favorite part of this drive was stopping for plov or soup at one of many old-school Ukrainian “rest stops” that line on the shoulder of the road, manned by sturdy, surzhik-speaking peasant women. Had these iconic eateries, brazenly flouting all that is modern, survived the modernization of the Odesa–Kyiv Highway? Surprisingly, many of them had. We stopped at one around Uman and I treated Richard to his first real Ukrainian meal, of solyanka and shashlyk.

We pulled into Odesa around 1 a.m. after a five-hour journey. Odesa’s story has been well-told, and I won’t dwell on it here. What struck me most about Odesa on this trip was the architecture. As you walk around Odesa you’re liable to lock a vertebrae looking up at the turn-of-the-20th-century neo-Renaissance and Art Nouveau facades. Yet, unlike in Kyiv, I found a good web-based guide (www.theodessaguide.com) that somebody should turn into a book.

I wanted to take Richard somewhere off-the-beaten-track. Southern Bessarabia, that seldom-noticed paw of land dipping into the Black Sea southwest of Odesa, fit the bill. It’s bordered by Moldova (where the rest of Bessarabia lies) to the west, and to the south by the Danube, one of Ukraine’s “big three” rivers along with the Dnistr and the Dnipro. All three rivers empty into the Black Sea within 200km of Odesa, their marshy estuaries attracting an incredible array of birdlife. Yet all three areas fall well below the radar of tourists – great news for the birds, who like nothing less than busloads of snap-happy package tourists sashaying through their domain.

The Danube Delta is probably the best-known of the three, but at the time of our visit the Ukrainian government – never a risk to garner any green-thumb awards – was about to reopen a little-used old military canal to commercial traffic, potentially scaring away much of the bird life. Miraculously, its plans were nixed by the Ukrainian Supreme Court in November of last year (see http://www.danubecampaign.org/index.cfm?uNewsID=117520), thus ensuring that the Danube Delta will remain one of Ukraine’s most pristine natural sights, at least for the time being.

About 100km before emptying into the Black Sea, the Danube River splits into three channels – the Sfantu, the Salina and the Chilia. Only the latter channel touches Ukraine; the other two lie entirely within Romania. The Chilia is fairly narrow (I’d guess about 40 meters on average), yet it boasts no bridges or official border crossings to Romania, which adds to its sense of isolation. We entered the Chilia at Vylkovo, dubbed the “Ukrainian Venice” because it is criss-crossed by a network of canals branching out from the Chilia. In old times these canals were the only means of transportation. These days regular old roads are more popular, but the canals are still in use and are quite charming, albeit in a bucolic, very un-Venice sort of way.

As we chugged out toward the mouth of the channel in an outboard, we spotted wild cattle roaming the grassy fields to our north. Marshland lay to the south. At the mouth of the channel we came across a small island populated by thousands of terns and their just-hatched chicks. On one side of the island roosted flocks of cormorants and white pelicans (the reserve is home to some 70% of the world’s white pelican population). The cacophony of squawks and chirps was deafening. We appeared to be the only human beings within miles – the rule, rather than the exception, in these parts, although I was told that busloads of students occasionally invade in summer.

That night we stayed in a wonderful riverside lodge in Vylkovo run by a local tour operator, Pelikan Tour (www.pelican-danube-tour.com.ua). I was awakened several times during the night by loudly squawking waterfowl frolicking in the lodge’s small marina. The owner of Pelikan is a certified ornithologist who occasionally guides tours for hard-core bird-watchers. Another good tour operator is Odesa-based Salix Tours (www.salix.od.ua), which runs ecologically responsible bird-watching and other tours and operates a private cabin deep in the middle of the reserve.

Alas, our stay was by necessity brief. The next day we were off to Izmayil, scene of one of Russia’s greatest military victories, Alexander Suvorov’s successful sacking of the supposedly impenetrable, Turkish-held fortress of Izmayil during the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-1792. All that’s left of the fortress today is a 16th-century former mosque, which houses a brilliant diorama, in English no less, of Suvorov’s epic victory. From Izmayil it was back to Odesa, where duty called for inspecting the nightclubs of Arkadia. It was Saturday night, after all.