ZALIZNYI PORT, Kherson Oblast – Following Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014, mainland beach resorts have seen a rise in visitors as Ukrainians seek domestic alternatives with sun, sea and sand.
And with the hryvnia devaluation and economic crisis hitting Ukrainians’ vacation budgets hard, beach resorts in Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia oblasts are now packed with domestic vacationers. While the most expensive options are in Odesa and its suburbs (the price of a room varies from Hr 300-1,000 ($12-$40) a day and higher, villages near the sea in Kherson Oblast are much more affordable.
Cheap digs
For instance, the price of a room in small hotel or in a private house in the village of Zaliznyi Port, one of the biggest resorts in Kherson Oblast, starts from only Hr 80 ($3.20) a day. The average price of a family room in a hotel is Hr 350 ($14) a night. The more pricey establishments go up to a still modest Hr 700 ($28) a night.
Zaliznyi Port is a tiny village of only 1,530 people located 640 kilometers from Kyiv and 90 kilometers from the regional center, Kherson. The village is famous locally for its nightclubs, cafes and bars, which welcome tourists every holiday season, as well as its long beach of white sand. For many Ukrainians, villages like this are rapidly replacing former favorite spots in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Bad service
But the resort could be a little too similar to Crimea for some people’s tastes – the service is bad, food overpriced and the quality of hotel rooms generally poor.
That’s because, as in Crimea and in almost every other Ukrainian beach resort, the locals of Zaliznyi Port during the vacation season try to squeeze as much money as they can from their guests’ pockets, living on the profits for the rest of the year, rather than investing in improvements. Prices for food, clothes and other products are inflated by up to five times at the beach area, although prices fall further inland. Walking to the center isn’t a problem in small villages like Zaliznyi Port – in fact you can walk from one end of it to another in about 30 minutes. The village is so small that it doesn’t have any public transport except private buses and old Zaporozhets private taxis.
The nearly four-kilometer-long beach area is crowded with locals selling shrimps, salted and smoked fish, mussels, cold drinks, sweets and fruit. They weave between visitors’ sunbeds and towels, loudly hawking their wares. Farmers from nearby villages also come to Zaliznyi Port to sell vegetables, fruits and homemade wine at low prices at the local market on Morskaya Street, which runs from the village center to the coast.
Pleasant exceptions
Despite the village’s bars selling drinks and food practically at Kyiv prices, don’t expect Kyiv service as well: the waiters and bartenders are often inattentive and might only have sketchy knowledge about the contents of their menus. Two pleasant exceptions are the Veranda and Domino cafes, both of which are located right next to the beach.
Check the weather forecast before embarking on a trip. Any rain can turn the roads of small villages into swamps, with the roughly asphalted roadways being covered with mud from the roadsides. Storms at sea can also wash jellyfish inshore (some of them, like the Black Sea barrel jellyfish, can be a size of a human head, or larger).
Although since Russia’s annexation of Crimea Zaliznyi Port has been developing fast, a vacation there is still like a nostalgic excursion to the beach holidays of Ukraine’s Soviet past. That has its own, very specific type of charm, but charm nonetheless.
To get to the Zaliznyi Port from Kyiv, take the express train from Kyiv to Kherson, and then a private bus from Kherson rail station to Zaliznyi Port for Hr 80.
