I realised that it had been a mistake to pass the last petrol station on the fertile plain near Sibiu, before starting the long ascend along the Transfăgărşan Road, which is crossing the Transylvanian mountain range from the North to the South. The forecasted 150 km of reach, the fuel gauge had indicated, had …
Category Archives: Travel
Timisoara
Robert Popa was indignant when I entered his consulting room in Timisoara, in the most western corner of Romania, and the image I saw was just all too familiar to me: Robert had just examined a one-year-old terrier with a non-weight bearing lameness that had for all of two weeks not responded to rest …
Hearts, Guns N’ Roses
“She’s got a smile that seems to me Reminds me of childhood memories Where everything was as fresh As the bright blue sky Now and then when I see her face She takes me away to that special place And if I stared too long, I’d probably break down and cry….” (Sweet Child …
Sculpture of destruction
Oleksandr Nazaryshyn was preparing his consulting room for a busy afternoon surgery. Outside his small practice on the ground floor of a multi storey building in Irpin, just a few miles west of Kyiv, pet owners already started to queue to have their animals seen. Together with his colleague Alina Klechanovska, a native of …
Air raids and Borscht
We were just approaching the Maidan, the very heart of Kyiv, which by now was a Sea of blue and yellow flags that were commemorating fallen Ukrainian soldiers, when my phone exploded with the sounds of my first real air raid alarm. Both drones as well as rockets were approaching the capital, and we …
The Patron Pet Center
Exiting Vystavkovyi Tsentre metro station, we first had to pass a considerable amount of tank barriers, which had been placed conveniently on the pavement next to Akademika Hushkova Ave, to be always at hand to set up an impromptu road block on this major trunk road leading into the centre of Kyiv and to …
On the train to Kyiv
It wasn’t exactly a journey I was looking forward to, but it had been too many times that I had found excuses for not visiting my colleagues in Ukraine at their annual vet congress despite their warmhearted invitations, that I would have felt too much of a fraught, if I wouldn’t have gone this …
Magda’s Place
There is no other river, that is so quintessentially Polish than the Vistula. With its source in Barania Góra in the South West corner of the country, close to the border to the Czech Republic, this stream of water connects Krakow, Warsaw, Bydgoszcz and a number of other Polish cities, before its waters flow into …
Tito’s Iron Fist
Back in Sarajevo, following a week of travelling and hiking, it was once again time to get some washing done, but this time I had decided to leave my dirty clothes in the gentle care of “Tito’s Iron Fist”, an institution no traveller to the city should miss, regardless of their need for a …
Brown bears and land mines
Today it is hard to imagine that the peaceful valley of Sutjeska, at the eastern rim of Hercegovina, was once the setting for one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Josep Broz Tito, then the charismatic leader of just a few, hopelessly outnumbered brigades of partisans, but who eventually would prevail …
The Blue Vet Diary 