Ethiopian trees

Many travel writers wax lyrical about forests. Fewer are the lovers of individual trees. But some of my best memories are of trees; a grove of cedars just outside Hemis-Shukpachan, in Ladakh, silent and sacred; the tilleuls de Sully in France, planted by Henri IV's great minister of state, four hundred year old sentinels; a great banyan tree in Phimai, Thailand, which shelters temples and tearooms under its spreading tendrils.

Ethiopia is full of great trees. In Harar, one Muslim shrine is almost entirely swallowed up by a huge tree, the pockmarked green plaster of the shrine held in gnarly root-claws. Almost all Harar's shrines are shaded by a tree; and that's something, I've been told, that applies in Somaliland, too. Trees here have immense power; they are not quite sacred, but they are certainly numinous.

In Gondar, a massive fig tree stands opposite the entrance to the castle. Under it, now, there's a bar, and a billiards table, and benches for sitting in the shade. It is immense, an entire eco-system to itself. It was, my friend informed me, the great tree of the town, the place of the court before the castle was ever built. I drank a beer under it and felt refreshed, inspired by the tree's long history and huge growth.

Later, someone told me it was also the Hanging Tree for Gondar's malefactors, and the first thing the emperor Fasilides did when he came to Gondar was to hang the town's rebellious nobles from its branches.

At both Debre Berhan Selassie church, and Qusquam monastery, the compounds surrounding the churches are full of ancient, high pine trees. The air seems cool and green under their shade, and while tall, turretted walls protect the interior, it's the trees, not the wall, which create the feeling of isolation from the world's busy concerns. At Debre Berhan Selassie, lammergeiers wheeled overhead, and settled in the swaying tops of the highest trees.

Axum has its own great trees, one in the Piazza, and one in Da'Ero Ela; huge, spreading fig trees with benches set out below them, that dominate the open spaces around them. In Piazza, a funeral stopped at the tree, while the priests circumambulated the coffin and chanted; meanwhile, the owner of a little coffee stand started up her brazier, blowing on the charcoal to get it going. In Da'Ero Ela, camels sneered as they passed at the boys playing football there.

But my favourite tree in Ethiopia was not one of these great ancient trees. It was an acacia, I think, thick of trunk but balding on top, overhanging a street in Dire Dawa. Under its stunted shade were two bright umbrellas, and under the umbrellas were bright plastic stools, and a little stove, and two charming ladies, and half the population of the street, or so it seemed; and I sat there, doubly shaded by tree and umbrella, and drank hot, sweet, cinnamon-laden tea.

Dire Dawa: In Praise of the Boring - Nothing to See Here

I spent a miserable three days in Harar, "Islam's fourth holy city" according to locals, the first circle of Hell according to me.

Pursued by cries of "Faranjo! faranjo!", latched on to by guide after guide, harrassed by urchins, heckled, pinched, grabbed. The city is full of intriguing alleyways, tiny tree-shaded shrines, brightly painted houses - but I was almost afraid to go anywhere. My heart sank. My energy disappeared. I sat for long hours in the patio of my guesthouse, where a hog-tied sheep awaited the slaughter and cats crouched on the roofs avidly waited their chance of what they knew was coming.

And then I went to Dire Dawa.

Dire Dawa is boring. It's a town that owes its existence to the old Addis-Djibouti Railway, and now, it's been bypassed completely by the new Addis-Djibouti railway (the station is 11km out of town). The settlement is a bare hundred years old. There's nothing much to see here; some markets, old railway sidings. There are no cute guesthouses, though there's a street full of modern five star hotels.

But I loved Dire Dawa. Here I could wander round town, sit in a cafe, order mango juice, drink a few beers. Here I could sit at a local tea stall, chat with people, enjoy life. Here I could go shopping in the market, and as soon as people realised I was buying spice and coffee as well as looking around and taking photos, I'd made friends.

At the church, I found the Nativity Play, episode seven, about to start; the Wise Men visit Herod. Herod in his velvet robes and golden crown was an Ethiopian prince, a young Ras Tafari, a bass-baritone who stamped his part with authority and malice; his chancellor stammered in falsetto, limped, and cringed, and the congregation roared with laughter. (Later, when I met the young man who had played the chancellor, he turned out to have a melodious tenor voice and a firm handshake - nothing like his character.) I was invited to sit with the congregation and share bread, under a huge acacia, as evening shade approached.

Later, there were hymns - but this isn't Hymns Ancient and Modern, this is Hymns Dub and Bass. Out came the big drums, blam, blam, blam, Full-throated, raucous singing. A huge syncopation of the bass drum announced every chorus - ker-dum dum ker-dum. A girl slung one of the drums round her neck, started the beat again, and began to lead her friends round, dancing in a tight circle. Everyone was smiling, grinning, laughing. Their joy was palpable - a vibrant, active joy.

And then to the Samrat Hotel, where the chef prepares authentically Indian meals. For me, pure veg - chana masala, then the next night dal tarka, with curds and rice - in impressively large portions, for a total of about six quid. Authentic deshi food served up by charming Ethiopian waitresses, with iced tea. Happy and full I retired to bed in the rather ancient, but clean, Hotel Mekonnen, to the wails of its resident, very noisy cat.

Next day I found Dini Paradise, a lovely garden by the wadi where its friendly proprietoress mixed me up fresh durian juice and gave me the wifi password, and I watched little yellow birds, and blue starlings, and sacred ibises in the palm trees next door. "There's a pond," she told me, "where the birds fish," though I never got round to finding it.

On the road from the Kefira market running north past Mezjid Alezi, I found a tea stall with two gaily coloured umbrellas under a huge spreading tree, nicely shaded, with a dozen bright yellow and pink stools, half of them already taken by customers. I had tea, tasting of cloves and cinnamon and richly sugared, and when I got up to go, my neighbour had already paid for it. I became a regular at the tea stall; I paid for my own tea now, but the welcome was as warm as the first time.

All the houses here are brightly coloured; pink, lime green, purple, red. One was chequered in black and white; another with purple walls and a bright green door frame. There are buildings redolent of nineteenth century France, but in colours no French architect would ever countenance; one like a town hall, but with a star and crescent where the letters RF would normally be, and an arabic inscription instead of Liberté; Egalité, Fraternité. The streets are wide, shaded by trees; tiny shops like Al-Hashimi Sweets (2 slices of baklava and a Coke for less than half a euro) and Bashanfer Trading (big bags of Harar coffee) have dim interiors, where you think you're stepping back in time, even though in fact Al-Hashimi had a makeover five or six years back.

In Mekonnen Hotel, I was introduced to the proprietor, a slight and charming man who, it turned out, had worked in India for many years, in Delhi and in Agra. We traded stories of India over cups of tea in the corner of the Mekonnen Bar, and laughed at the cat's importuning the customers for scraps.

Dire Dawa brought me luck; I met a British train driver who was visiting the yards here, and tagged along. Huge metalworking lathes gleam in the dim train shed - they make all their own spares here - and the old locos with their wagons wait in the sidings. We saw the blueprints for all the locos back to 1901, saw the civil engineering diagrams for the bridges on the line, jumped in the carriages and cabs. French is still the working language of this railway, though nowadays Amharic is increasingly used; and the trains, discontinued in 2007, have started again, though they only run to the border, and not to Djibouti any longer.

At four in the morning, I heard the long sad moan of the train's klaxon from my hotel room and thought of the passengers setting out for their villages in the bush.

Dire Dawa then; move along now, nothing at all to see. Which is, perhaps, why I loved it so much.

The Real Experience

The Guardian has a piece today on what to buy the super rich for Christmas. It turns out the answer is a luxury experience: a special trip to Antarctica, behind-the-scenes at Jimmy Choo's.

Well, I might put some money aside for a trip to Antarctica. But it won't be full-on luxury. And in fact, Antarctica will have to compete pretty hard with something I got for free: a walk along the shores of Iceland's Jokulsarlon, at midnight, completely alone, listening to the calls of wild geese and the crack and suck of breaking ice-calves in the lagoon. I'd pitched my coffin of a tent behind the little cafe, and after the tourists left, I had the place entirely to myself in the dim, strange light of the not-quite-night.

Which leads me on to where you get the real experience. I know I've rushed some countries. I was about to say I'd rushed Laos, really only seen it as a tourist, and only seen Luang Prabang and Vientiane - I had a motorcycle crash that put me out of action, and it was back to Bangkok for dental work and effective painkillers (not available in Laos, but hearty thanks to the villager who put me on the back of a truck and took to me hospital, and the excellent health team in Phonsavan who stitched me up). And yet just by dint of taking these cities gently and slowly, and walking everywhere,

• I chatted to the young curator at the photo museum who showed me with great delight a photo of himself as a monk, taken a few years before;
• I got invited to dance at a wedding in the suburb over the river;
• I sat and watched a man make a cage for his rooster - he didn't speak English, but it didn't matter - and had a cup of tea with him afterwards;
• I met pilots from all the different Asean countries who were visiting Pha That Luang after a two day conference;
• and I was invited to share lunch in one of the temples on Buddha's birthday.

All of which things happened to me, just because I was taking things slowly, keeping my eyes open, and keeping my mind open, too. 

I've had a tour of Pago railway station in Myanmar by the second station-master; two days later I met Burma's sole Rastafarian and we gave an impromtpu performance of 'Get up, stand up' on the platform. 

Sometimes the guide books tell you to avoid great local festivals - it's difficult to get a hotel, there are crowds, it's not for tourists. I was about to take that kind of advice and jump on the bus at Palitana when I changed my mind, and stayed for the great mela,  walking 18 km with a few thousand Jains, cheered with cries of  'Jai Adinath!' and supplies of water and cool towels when things started to get tough. At Pachmarhi, I climbed Chauragarh with the pilgrims at Shivatri Mela and made friends with a brass band from Hyderabad, and ended up jamming with them back at their camp (I had no instrument, but I can carry a tune).

None of these experiences were really planned. None of them involved the mediation of a tour group of facilitator. And they sure as heck weren't super-luxury.

Sometimes you have to get up before sunrise. Sometimes you have to stay up late. Sometimes you have to put in some physical effort.

You might need to know how to read a map. You might need to put up with some discomfort, or with spartan living conditions. You might need to travel light.  You have to put up with buses that refuse to take you, or let you on and then sit there for two hours, or trains that are six hours late; and sometimes you crash in what looks like a great hotel, only to find that the temple or mosque next door starts broadcasting at four in the morning.

But the big luxury you need? It's not being super rich. It's affording the time. Whether, like me, you're lucky enough to be able to take six months off, or whether you have two weeks but apply them to getting to know one place, rather than whistle-stop-touring ten.

So if I had a super-rich friend, I'd give them one luxury. Three weeks of travelling light, and travelling rough, and just seeing what happens. The ultimate luxury.

Visites protocolaires

I have just found a lovely phrase from writer Julien Gracq: les visites protocolaires, by which he means the 'obligatory' visit to the five-star attraction.

It's rather a wonderful phrase. It doesn't actually dismiss such sights, but it very nicely sums up the somewhat institutional nature of such visits - and the fact that we are not always (perhaps not often) free to choose how we see such places.

Contrast, for instance, Stonehenge, the visite protocolaire, and Stanton Drew, a pair of stone circles in the middle of nowhere, not even in the top ten megalithic monuments in the UK.

Stonehenge has to be experienced the way everyone sees it - through the visitor centre, into the fenced compound with the crowds. It's impressive, but unless you're there at midsummer (which I really must do some time, it's always going to be the same; crowded, something to gawp at.

At Stanton Drew some years ago, I wandered in, putting a pound in the honesty box, and found the circles delightfully inhabited by children playing a game of tag around the stones, and families picnicking. It wasn't till someone hailed me - "Blessed be!" - and offered me bread, cheese, and a cup of wine, that I realised it was Beltane.

My way of experiencing Stonehenge a bit differently was to walk away from it. It's part of a superb, huge-scale sacred site, stretching from Woodhenge (now with concrete discs where the post-holes were) to the Normanton Down Barrows and the great swath of the Cursus cut through the landscape. I walked all the sacred sites around Stonehenge in a huge circle; sometimes I could see Stonehenge, more often not, but I felt its presence. Instead of the claustrophobic confines of a fenced compound, I had the liberty of Salisbury Plain, the wide chalk landscape and the huge open sky.

Visites protocolaires have something to be said for them, even if, sometimes, it's just that you never have to do them again, that you'll never regret not seeing the Taj Mahal. And if you want to study Mughal architecture, you do need to see the Taj - but you also need to see Sikandra, and Agra Fort, and Itimad-ud-Daula, so you'll need a week in Agra to do things properly. Sites such as Chartres Cathedral, Avebury, or St Peter's, Rome, are on the list for a reason; so are Mount Bromo and the Pennine Way.

But it's the little things you see along the way that sometimes make the most impact; a fern-fringed fountain in a Breton forest, an orange-painted stone under a banyan tree.

The pity is that some people spend all their time chasing from one visite protocolaire to another, without noticing what's in between. Modern tourism is expressly laid out to enable you to do this; and modern tourists, only too often, are intolerant of the in-between. They're bored once they've seen the big sight; they get back on the bus, they chomp crisps or read or book or chat, and never look out of the windows.

Manners makyth man, but protocol does not make a traveller.

In praise of early morning

Jaisalmer
Walking round Gadisar before breakfast. After the ghats, it peters out to shallows and scrubland. The city-side banks of the lake are covered with temples and chattris, but out towards the country, there are only scattered memorials, single stones, small cenotaphs. A bittern sits hunched, looking miserable. A heron stalks the shallows.I hear doves cooing and a single crow guffaws loudly at his own joke.

Pushkar
Walking towards the Brahma temple I find the street of confectioners, the cauldrons of halwa already simmering, steam rising into the cool morning air. Shopkeepers coming to their shops are singing: one passes me - Hari Ram, Hari Ram. The streets still empty. The sun just touching the edges of the roofs with gold.

Bermondsey Antique Market, London
Even though it's August, it's chilly this morning, the sky pearly grey like a silver tabby. The market's bustling - not crowded, but purposeful. I stalk the stalls for sight of vintage fountain pens but all I can find is Parker 45s, all in black, all with medium nibs, all priced at a tenner. I buy a little brass lion instead thinking it will go with my Omani lion-shaped padlocks bought in the old souk at Muttrah.I listen in to a chiseller trying to get a price reduced and the stallholder giving as good as he gets; it's like listening to an old married couple squabbling. They've done this before, I think.

There's an Italian guy does coffee and bacon sarnies i the corner. I crack. The bacon is crispy and the coffee hits my bloodstream with a jolt. Fortified, I try the little inside market - and here I find my prey; a whole big big of vintage pens that cleans my wallet out and is still cheap at this price.

Gelati, Georgia
The little wicket gate hangs open, awkwardly, and awkwardly I bend to go under it, and down the steps, into the monastery. A black cat stalks across the lawn and is lost in the monastery buildings.

Inside the church, the early light is pale gold, suffusing the sky blue of the paintings. So many paintings; every arch, every pillar, every inch of wall is covered with images. A priest all in black, and black bearded, comes to cense the church; the censer's chain hisses and rattles, but his feet make no noise at all on the pavement. Everything else is quite still.

Outside, a monk sits on a bench by a waterspout and talks to a cat, which takes umbrage and turns tail. I stand and look at the view of the forested hills and the twisting road below.

Cannaregio, Venice
Out here you feel closer to the lagoon than anywhere else in Venice. No twisting alleys or tall palaces close off the lagoon. I walk past the abandoned bulk of the new Scuola, brickwork that was never meant to be seen - a tale of old failure; there was no money left for marble. A solitary jogger passes me.

The houses are low, the pavements narrow. Grey water of the lagoon, brown water of the canal. As I walk back towards the centre of Venice I smell dark bitter coffee being brewed up. Someone is loading an upright piano into a boat.

Taj Mahal
I can't believe it. All the tourists who came in through the gate with me as it opened have stopped on the steps of the Naubat Khana to take pictures of the sunrise over the Taj, and I am alone here, quite alone with the tombs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan, and the cleaner, who is rubbing the white marble till it shines and sprinkling rose water on the tombs.

I take my time looking, drinking in the atmosphere. The stone is like honey, pale honey. The stillness is absolute. As I turn to go, the cleaner motions me over, signs for me to give him my scarf, and tips rosewater on it. All day I move in a rose scented cloud. 

Burgundy
I had a big slab of ham with chervil sauce last night, and coq au vin, and I still feel pleasantly full even though I've started out before breakfast to climb this last ridge and look out over the smaller hills below. That's where the path will lead today, towards Avallon and Vezelay and the great basilica of the Magdalene; but it's too misty to make out where the path leads, and the furthest hills are lost in haze.
I turn to look back, and suddenly the low sun lights up a glittering sprawl of diamonds - the funnel spiders' web alight with flame.

Mornings It's not just the fact that the big tour buses don't arrive till everybody has had breakfast, and they've rounded up the guy who is always late, and called the rota, and fixed all the lunch bookings, and found the guy who is always late has wandered off and they have to find him again...

That's one reason I embrace early rising on holiday, because there's no better way to see places without the crowds. But it's not the only reason.

There's something marvellous about seeing the world before it has put its makeup on. Seeing everything fresh, sometimes fresh with dew, or a thin rime of ice before it melts. The early sunlight that casts long shadows or tinges the world with gold. The expectation of the new day.

A friend once told me he would never, ever get up before eight. I can't be bothered to argue with him. I just feel sorry that there are so many things he'll never experience.

The Charterhouse, London

I used to live almost opposite the Charterhouse at one time, when I was working in London. I knew the area around Smithfield, and Saint Bart's, and all the little streets of old houses and ancient pubs that both the Great Fire and the Luftwaffe had failed to reach. But I'd never visited the Charterhouse itself, till Friday last week when I was walking from Barbican down towards Holborn to catch a bus, and found myself in Charterhouse Square facing a sign that pointed to a 'Museum (free)'. Either one of which words would have been appealing, but the two together made a visit irresistible.

The Charterhouse has had a mixed history. It was founded as a monastery; became one of the most luxurious houses in London after the Reformation; then became a school and almshouse. Now, the school has moved out and only the almshouses remain, sheltering gentlemen* of a certain age. What's remarkable is that the flavour of the Charterhouse incorporates all these strands of its rich and complex history.

In the chapel, the ornate Renaissance tomb of Thomas Sutton, (re)-founder of the Charterhouse, tells the story of the self-made man who left his entire fortune to charity. (It was contested, of course.) It fills practically the entire wall, soaring up to the roof on columns with beautiful gilded capitals; at the top stands the figure of Charity with her cornucopia, and besides two men in armour, a cherub blowing golden bubbles (the fragility of which represents mortality), figures of the virtues, and the heads of spotted hounds (Sutton's crest), there's also a frieze of Jacobean gentlemen listening to a sermon - perhaps actually here in the Charterhouse. Not a space is left unfilled by this exuberant, if not always polished, work.

The chapel is a wonderful space, with its high white ceiling, particularly on a bright summer day when the sunlight pours in. The other memorials may not all be tasteful, but they're interesting if you have a historical bent - I spotted composers Tobias Hume and JC Pepusch (a friend of Handel's), as well as the writer Thackeray, the Methodist John Wesley with the motto 'the world is my parish', and Lord Ellenborough whose statement that "one must not put manacles on science" was instrumental in developing the concept of fair use in copyright law.

Go into the museum and you're in a much smaller, almost claustrophobic room, giving on to dim corridors with faintly lit exhibits. Here is the original founder Walter de Manny's bulla, found in his coffin - a papal seal, probably from the document that gave him the privilege of selecting his own deathbed confessor. Here is a skeleton, not de Manny's but that of a plague victim. Then there are views of the spectacular carvings in what was Lord North's splended house, before it passed through the hands of the Howards to end up with Thomas Sutton; there are pots, and Bibles, and a splendid English alabaster carving of the Trinity, and a Communion Cup in silver,and most splendid of all, a water map of the Charterhouse showing how water got from Islington to the monastery, dating from 1341 and rolling out on three metres of parchment across the wall.

Perhaps most touchingly, there's an ancient chair - added to, restored, repaired, much like the Charterhouse itself. 

Why did I never visit the Charterhouse before? There's a good reason; from 1348 to 2017, the Charterhouse guarded its privacy. It was never open to the public. Since the beginning of 2017, the museum and the chapel have been open to visitors, and guided tours (£10) offer a chance to see the inner courts, Great Hall, and part of Lord North's great mansion. Or you can take a tour with one of the Brothers - a more intimate tour, since each Brother gives the tour from his own perspective, talking about his own life and interests as well as the Charterhouse's history.



* I understand the Charterhouse now also accepts ladies as residents.

A trip to Ukraine

I'm just back from a couple of weeks in Ukraine. I've visited almost all of Eastern Europe, but a few countries were left outstanding: Ukraine, Albania, Macedonia, Moldova, and Belarus. Well, Belarus can wait, but I'm getting round to the others.

Damn, but travelling in Ukraine is hard. That's partly down to the fact that a lot of public transport is in the informal sector - private minibuses (mashrutkas) - and consequently not well signposted, and without timetables. And even fewer people than I expected spoke English, even in tourist-orientated enterprises. (In Lviv, a lot of hostels, hotels and bars cater mainly to a Ukrainian tourist clientele - two girls from Kiev told me "we go to Lviv to experience a real European city". They don't count Kiev as properly European.)
And the toilets. Oh God, the toilets. The bog at one monastery was, I think, the third worst I have ever encountered, and the two that were worse (Old Delhi railway station and a madrasa in Morocco) I didn't actually use. I had to use my scarf as an impromptu facemask, and take one very big breath outside before plunging in, and I just about managed without losing my stomach contents. A speciality in some places is the chemical toilet, but without actually using chemicals. It's like Glastonbury without the mod cons (bogroll, sanitiser and regular pump-outs).
Plus, what to do for breakfast?  Ukrainians either don't eat breakfast, or eat hot dogs and salad. In Lviv, I was able to find both croissants (food perverts, how about a croissant with whipped cream and prunes? it was actually lovely, but how they came up with the idea I can't imagine) and full English, but in other cities and towns life was more difficult - I ended up buying bread and soft cheese from the supermarket the night before.
Another slight hitch is that many of the historic monuments are reconstructions or highly refurbished, having suffered from both Soviet and Nazi damage. And in many of the churches, you're not allowed to take photographs, which for a keen photographer like me is absolutely maddening.

Okay, that makes Ukraine sound like a place you don't want to visit. Here are the upsides;
Life is very, very cheap. Three quid a night for a bed in a nice hostel dorm or a room of your own in a grottier hostel. About a tenner for a really glorious room in a nice guesthouse in the country. Beer for 50p to 75p a bottle, and you can get a massive mug of draught beer at that price. Three quid for a tasty small meal and two beers in a gastropub. Ukrainian self-service restaurants like Puzata Hata (branches  all over Kiev and in Lviv) offer a meal for two quid, with favourites like borsch, fresh salads with dill, vareniky (dumplings), and all kinds of ragouts, as well as lasagne (possibly not real Ukrainian food but popular, all the same).
The people are fantastic. Almost no one ever admits to speaking English if you actually ask them. But swear at a bus timetable for long enough, or have enough problems buying a ticket at the railway counter, and someone will appear and help. One girl took me all the way round Chernihiv. A lady who really, really didn't speak English showed me how the farm at the Pirohovo open air museum was arranged by making chuck-chuck-chuck noises for the chicken house and making herself 'horns' with her index fingers to show me the cowshed. An older woman in Lviv helped me out with halting German, and smiled when I told her how much better her German was than mine (which was true). A bus driver in Lviv saw I didn't know where to get my ticket and actually deserted his bus to take me to the ticket office, order my ticket for me, and accompany me back to the bus to make sure I didn't get lost. (Life is very unfair; an hour into our journey the offside back tyre exploded, and the poor chap had to strip to the waist to get under the bus, the spare wheel being screwed to the bottom of the bus rather than put in a neat interior compartment. He was somewhat blackened by the experience, though a wash in a bucket got the worst of it off before he put his white shirt on again.)
It's worth getting off the beaten track. Two of my favourite places were Pochayiv and Chernihiv - the first, a monastery set on a hill that dominates the rolling plains, and the second, a town with historic churches in the most delightful settings (and a fine gastropub, it turned out). Yes, it took a bit of doing, but it worked nicely in the end.
Some things are really different. I've been in cave monasteries in Burma and Thailand, but the Pechersky Lavra in Kiev has a completely different feeling; the tunnels are full of pilgrims weaving from side to side to kiss the tops of the glass coffins that contain saints' bodies, and the dim hanging lamps mingle with the pilgrim's precariously held tapers to create an atmosphere of mystery and intensity I've rarely met elsewhere. I don't think you'll get that powerful experience anywhere else in the world.
The open-air museums in Lviv and Pirohovo (Kiev) show you wooden architecture that's characteristic of the region - soaring wooden churches, low thatched farmhouses, shingle-roofed cottages.  To see one such house or church is interesting - to see dozens arranged in a beautiful setting (forest in Lviv, rolling grassland and woods in Kiev) is a dream.
And the flowers are amazing. Ukrainians love flowers. Every little house has its garden of lush greenery; every monastery has flowerbeds inside its walls. There are lilies, roses of every hue from light peach to bloodiest red, delicate hollyhocks in pastel pink and light purple, and garish orange sunflowers everywhere. These aren't neatly trimmed municipal flowerbeds, either; the climate, with intense summer sunshine mingled with heavy showers, makes the plants grow rank and leggy, sprawling, into mini-jungles. Even street artists aren't immune to the charms of flowers - one had airbrushed sunflowers on a wall near the hostel in Kiev where I stayed.

So while I might not put Ukraine right at the top of my list of destinations, I'm very glad I went - it's a country with a definite difference and well worth the effort.