We had not expected a border post. This was not a border. Way over the other side of a high pass through the Carpathian Mountains lay Romania, but this small village nestling in a valley by a rushing river was in Ukraine, wholly in Ukraine, and we were anyway not taking the turning for Romania but continuing only a few kilometres more up a side valley to what our guides, Stas, Elena and Igor, said was a ‘rough’ mountain hostel.

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