Visiting the ancestral patch of land is the single most important activity for passengers on the cruise. This is essentially why you come together in Ukraine from as many as six provinces and ten states. It doesn't really matter if there is a Mennonite house still standing or not. Suddenly you are on hallowed ground. Planning for the village excursions starts early. Passengers fill out their requests on the booking form and this starts a process which eventually generates a bus schedule. Participation in this bus schedule is included in the cruise price. Free bus routes apply only to the Molochna, Khortitsa and Yazykovo colonies. A book of maps is important. See the Reading List .  There is also a comprehensive set of maps on the Internet

The cruise bus schedule changes from cruise to cruise, reflecting the requests of the passengers. Since there are usually many requests for Molochna villages, you may want to look up the Molochna map and use the back & forward buttons of your browser between the map and this page. .

The 2008 Cruise Bus Schedule is largely based on passenger requests

Set days during which everyone sees the same things:

Historic Balaklava harbour, now a fashionable resort in Crimea

The bus routes do not ordinarily allow you to spend more than 20 to 30 minutes in any one village. If you have very specific villages in mind and would like to spend several hours in the village, we strongly recommend that you book a private vehicle and guide. We can easily arrange this for you if you give us enough time. Please don't wait to do this until you are on the cruise.  Vehicles and guides are limited.
 

Additional Possible Private Arrangements 

We can arrange for private transportation to nearby colonies and have also sent small groups quite far on overnight stays. We have access to a variety of local transportation means.From Kiev we have sent small groups to villages in the Volhynia region and beyond. From Odessa we have sent passengers in the direction of Bessarabia and we have sent people to various parts of Crimea. Fees for private trips are $40 to $45 USD per hour or more (fuel prices have soared), depending on size and kind of vehicle and whether an English-speaking guide is needed. Our passengers to date have uniformly praised the local arrangements because the Ukrainian people have been so helpful and warm.

The private trips generally take all day, often a very long day. We try to put together people who are interested to see villages in a specific outlying colony. This means they share both the time and the cost. Sometimes passengers, especially family groups, are keen to book a van or bus entirely for themselves and spend as much time as possible in one village.

With proper lead time & advance planning, we can get passengers to most of their individual village requests in such colonies as Fuerstenland, Sagradowka, Schlachtin-Baratov, Borozenko, Memrik, Ignatievo, etc.using a variety of vehicles from cars and vans to small buses.

   
Local Ukainians, usually the Babushksas, have long memories. Here a senior resident of Friedensfeld, Borosenko Colony tells Victor Penner,
assisting on a private trip, about his memories of Mennonites before 1943 ("they were my best friends and I miss them")

We schedule one of our cruise resource leaders and a Ukrainian guide on each bus excursion to the Khortitsa, Yazykovo, Molochna and Crimea villages. The October 2008 cruise bus resource team is made up of Paul Toews, Rudy Friesen, Alan Peters, and John Martens and guest resource leader, George Dyck. The Ukrainian guides include Olga Shmakina and Lyudmilla Karyaka. All of these people have been to the villages many times and have amassed an enormous amount of information and lore about them. Frequently, passengers bring with them extensive knowledge about sites, like Olga Friesen of Steinbach, Manitoba (Sept '97), who grew up in Ukraine until her teens. Olga was descended from the Heese and Toews families in Dnepropetrovsk (Ekaterinoslav). With great authority and accuracy she could point out existing buildings, remember destroyed buildings and describe the people who lived and worked in them. This priceless information, along with many similar interactions with passengers, has been passed on to the guides. Olga has since passed away but her memories are a treasured part of the cruise lore.

The Zaporizhia Guiding Unit on the Ship

In 1996 we discovered an amazingly simple and wonderfully effective tactic. We invited the Zaporozhye Intourist Guiding Manager, Larissa Goryacheva and a number of her guides, notably Olga Shmakina and Ludmilla Karyaka, onto our ship as we sailed from Kiev. In late September 2008 they will join us again in Odessa, refining the visit schedules as we sail downriver. We also asked them to provide our guiding needs in Dnipropetrovsk. Larissa, who actually grew up in a former Mennonite house, learned about Mennonites from Gerhardt Lohrenz in the 1960s and 70s and has been helping Mennonite tourism ever since.