Eco-tourism. My two weeks in Lviv completed, I join a mission of EU ambassadors to "Europe Days" in western Ukraine.

First stop is the Carpathian town of Yaremche, where we open en EU-supported tourist information centre. Yaremche was in Poland from 1918 to 1939. A photo-op at an EU-supported bike rental place involves a 5km ride, crossing a rickety suspension bridge over a raging river ("no more than three people at a time"). Yaremche has been a popular  mountain resort since  Soviet times: the hillsides are studded with sanatoriums and hotels built for visiting trade union delegations.

Now it's reinventing itself as an eco-tourism desination. We travel on to Europe Day celebrations in the regional capitals of Ivano Frankivsk and Ternopil, taking a trip to a village at the latter to present an EU/UNDP-funded bus to a local school. The children are thrilled, the parents and teachers, emotional. Back in Ternopil, local TV stations are keen to interview me in Ukrainian. I weigh up the PR benefits of being able to say anything at all against the risks of sounding daft… and go for it.