While the rest of Kyiv is bundling up for winter, Slava Hatalsky is getting ready to shed a layer of clothing and ride his bicycle...
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No, the 35-year-old artist isn’t a masochist who takes pleasure in peddling through snowdrifts across the capital’s slush-soaked cobblestones and death-defying tram rails. On the contrary, Hatalsky doesn’t even ride a bicycle in Kyiv.
Instead, as he’s done for the past 10 winters, Hatalsky will soon be headed to warmer climes – to embark on the sort of exotic cycling trip that other bikers, armchair-adventurers and working stiffs can only dream of.
“There are something like 170 countries in the world, and I’ve been to 40 of them so far,” Hatalsky said recently over lunch at Shakherezada restaurant. “Every country brings something different, like [Zambia’s] Victoria Falls, but I also love simply to see how people live – I’m less interested in the pyramids than I am in the people of Africa.”
Africa was Hatalsky’s most recent adventure. He spent three months riding from Cape Town, South Africa, to Hurgada, Egypt, in the winter of 2002-2003, passing through nine countries along the way.
This time around? In just a few weeks, Gatlasky will fly to Bangkok, make his way to Malaysia and spend the better part of the winter cycling across Southeast Asia and, if the visa works out, Australia.
“I’ve been to Asia three times already, but haven’t yet been to Malaysia, so that’s my main goal,” Hatalsky said. “For me there are certain names that sound so attractive – Cape Town, Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur – and that make me want to see the places for myself.”
One place in Kyiv that Hatalsky did want to see was Shakherezada, in the Globus shopping center. Malaysian it may not be, but Azerbaijani and exotic it is – tapestries hang and couches are strewn with embroidered pillows. Located above the more frantic food court, Shakherezada does represent an oasis in the heart of the city.
Travel talk flowed easily over one of the many tobacco flavors the restaurant offers for its hookah pipe. While the fragrant strawberry-and-cognac tobacco (Hr 65) was more luxurious than the simpler smokes Hatalsky was invited to share when passing through Africa, it helped establish the mood. So, too, did the restaurant’s appetizers in the Hr 10 to Hr 15 range: brynza cheese, badimdzan eggplant with nuts and garlic, marinated olives, kutaby cheese lavash, and hamreashi bean-mutton soup. Conversation was also aided by Obolon Premium beer (Hr 6 per half-liter).
But guess what? Traveling is not all wine and roses and hookah pipes for the adventurous artist. A cold beer would have gone down well when he was forced to push his bicycle across stretches of scorching desert in Sudan. And that wasn’t even the worst of it: Zambia was the worst of it.
“The biggest challenge of the Africa trip came about two months in, when the rainy season caught me in Zambia,” Hatalsky recalled with a shudder. “There were hills and roads that were so muddy, at times I couldn’t ride my bike. The camping was very bad, and I couldn’t start a fire – despite trying to use half a bottle of 75 percent samogon some South African farmers had given me as lighter fluid. Sometimes I went to sleep hungry.”
That hardly makes Hatalsky a starving artist, though. A 1990 graduate of the Kyiv Technical Art Institute, Hatalsky does quite well through his art. When in Ukraine, he can be found at the Pyrohovo folk-art museum, chatting with tourists and selling his watercolor prints and ink-drawings. He likes to depict park and rural scenes, and Kyiv streetscapes, and has shown his work at the American and British embassies and the Kyiv International School. He spends most of his time outside, however, and said he prefers the pastoral Pyrohovo to the more central Andriyivsky Uzviz – another artists’ haunt.
“I started selling at Pyrohovo more than 10 years ago and fell in love with the place,” Hatalsky said. “Pyrohovo’s got fresh air, more tourists and less competition.”
Hatalsky is an unusual biker. He said he doesn’t ride for the love of the bicycle per se, but in order to discover new things – and to see them in a more detailed way than most tourists can. He discovered that on one of the first major trips he took – to Germany and Western Europe back in 1993, when he also began selling landscape drawings as a way to fund his travels.
High-tech mountain bikers might tend to disdain the artist’s casual approach to his equipment. Rather than go state-of-the-art, Hatalsky said he plans to travel light – and pick up some cheap, used Japanese bike in a Kuala Lumpur market along the way.
Airfare aside, Hatalsky claims to have spent no more than $165 on his African journey – so cheap were costs, so few were his needs and so generous was the hospitality he encountered. Hatalsky said he didn’t receive the sympathy vote on account of hailing from an economically depressed country.
“Even if I had sewn a flag on my packs, they wouldn’t have recognized the Ukrainian flag or seen what the difference was,” he said. “Everyone treated me like a rich guy; they treated me like a king.”
He was treated pretty well, too, on his return to Ukraine this year. He won a mobile telephone and was named “Most Independent Ukrainian” in a contest run by the M1 all-music channel after submitting photographs of himself posing with Maasai tribesmen in Kenya, in front of Buddhist temples in Thailand, and so on.
Hatalsky is leaving town in the near future, but he welcomes contact by e-mail at [email protected].
Shakherezada
Globus shopping center, Sector B, 238-2094.
Open daily from 12 p.m. to the last customer.
