In his book The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain saw southern Ukraine, and said the people he met there greatly impressed him with their friendliness and hospitality.

Kara-Dag National ParkComing from anyone else, this comment could be considered a bit of backhanded praise. After all, when you have nothing better to say about a person, you say they have nice eyes, and when you have nothing better to say about a country, you say the people are very warm and friendly. However, Twain had just gotten through reproaching the Portuguese, French, Italians, Greeks and Turks for slovenliness, indolence and shameful social inequality. (don't even ask what he thought of the Moroccans) Twain liked the people in a couple cities elsewhere, but only in Ukraine did he complement the population as a whole. (though, to be absolutely honest, many of those nice city people were likely to have been Russians)

It probably helped his impression that, while in Yalta, he "danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and one I had not heard of before, with a girl, and we talked incessantly and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever knew what the other was driving at."

Ironically enough, many American men still come to southern Ukraine to dance astonishing dances with girls they can't talk to. They're not as witty as Twain, but they make up for it by being loud. Traveling in the area, Lesya and I found them every time we did anything vaguely tourist-like. Here's how to recognize these international daters:

1) Actually, I was going to give you a list of things to do here, but you don't really need one. Spotting I-daters is about as hard to find as a spoiled 3-year-old in church service.

2) Of course the women involved are not necessarily victims without recourse. A friend of mine once worked in an I-dating agency until she got fed up with it and told me this story by way of explanation: One day, a client walked into the agency with an expression of triumph on her face. She told the office that she had caught her date cheating on her. When he'd arrived, he'd brought her a very expensive Versace dress. However, one time when he was in the bathroom, she checked in his luggage and found two more identical dresses. She managed to shame him enough to give her the other two dresses, and gleefully showed the staff her spoils.

The Crimean CoastIt's a real shame that so few of the foreign tourists focus their attention on the more permanent topography of Crimea. Yes, this is the former Soviet, but put away thoughts of beaverskin hats. Crimea is 980km of Black and Azov Sea coastline that just happens to be in the FSU. Parts of it remind me of the California coastline, parts of the Hawaiian coastline. There are huge spires of rock rising up out of sparkling blue water. There are dry cliffs which roll and slide slowly down into beaches. It's stunning.

Sevastopol and the West Coast 

Lesya and I started in Sevastopol, the beginning of the most resort-heavy part of the peninsula. There I got to see the ancient ruins of the Greek colony of Chersonese and the Russian Black Sea Fleet, a more recent collection of ruins. For the intervening period they have a fabulous 360-degree mural of the Battle for Sevastopol in the Crimean War. It commemorated the heroic, but failed, attempt to keep the whole city from being reduced to ruins.

Balaclava, to the south, also had history, only without the wretched Soviet housing in more populous Sevastopol. If the money ever shows up, it may also get a WWII museum in an old submarine-docking bay -- among the coolest ideas for museums I've ever heard of. While there, Lesya and I hopped a ride in beat up old skiff run by a jovial middle-aged man. He was too suntanned to determine his ethnicity, but the way he talked gave it away -- he was 100% fisherman. We took his boat into some natural caves along the beach and by a rock with legend says will deliver your true love to you if you kiss it. Of course, that's provided your boat doesn't shift, clunking your head against the rock and sending your unconscious body to the bottom of the sea. The two of us decided to pass on reinforcing our relationship with some rock-kissing and the fisherman seemed none to eager for love, either.

BalaklavaYalta

Nothing ever really happened in Yalta. I was shocked. I got there expecting great and mighty historical importance and got the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Someone had dressed up a ship to look like Jason's Argon, and set it on stilts in the bay. The street vendors were selling cherry, caramel and blueberry popcorn. Horrifying. What about the Yalta agreement? Nope, took place in a nearby town. Ancient Turkish settlements? To the east and to the west, just not here. About the only thing that actually happened here is Twain and Pushkin each visited. (Now that would have been a meeting of the minds, not to mention creative facial hair.)

Since the only historical monument was the Argon, and I doubted its provenance, Lesya and I went out dancing. We had hopes, after all, the place was called the Cyclone, not the Millennium.

Did we dance to astonishing songs, and ones we had not heard before? Well, they at least had some Ukrainian music: Ruslana's "Wild Dances," which won her the grand prize in Eurovision 2004. My friend Tonya described the album best: "cool, in a train-wreck kind of way." She appears to have won by singing like Celine Dion and looking like Mad Max's girlfriend.

The dance clubs of Crimea do have this over the ones in Donetsk: the international daters there had enough energy to get out on the floor and represent the country for a few minutes before ulcers or whatever forced them back into their seats. Aside from those worthy attempts it was more New Russian men watching their girlfriends dance with the mirrors.

Livadia Palace Conference RoomSo off we went to Livadia Palace in Alupka, where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt actually met when they signed the "Yalta" agreement. The palace includes the bench where the three of them took that picture that's in every WWII book ever written. Amazing, historical -- it's still a bench. On the second floor they have pictures and descriptions of Czar Nicholas's family from his family's summer trips to Crimea. The curators had nothing bad to say about Nick, which made me wonder if these were the same people who had undoubtedly had to bad-mouth the Czar during Soviet times. Perhaps the museum picked up some wandering freelance curators after 1991. Did you know that the Tsar was good at tennis?

Further Down the Coast 

The rest of the coastline is dotted with towns like Foros, Noviy Svit, and <cough cough> Cocktable, all the way down to the southeastern tip of Sudak and Tuzla where you could spit across into Russian waters. (and Ukrainian nationalists often do) All the little towns have to their credit is acres of beautiful beaches, good Ukrainian wines (the sweet wines, not the dries), mountains, forests, and beachside barbeque joints. Lesya and I went to one of the nice beaches, which was like all nice beaches: a pleasant place to lie around and not think. After a few minutes that's just what I didn't do.

[Additional Crimea pictures can be found in our Crimea gallery]