Luba and I took off from Kiev under a sparkling blue sky that filled us with high hopes and great enthusiasm. We were on our way to the Crimea to savour the hot days of summer with its long beaches, warm sea and sexy girls.

The first leg of the journey was by air to Simferopol, and then a two hour drive over a bumpy road to Yalta in a twenty year old Lada provided by our hotel. I couldn't help smiling as I looked back with a clear memory to being picked up in a Rolls Royce at the airport on our recent trip to Dubai. Life is about contrast isn't it?

We had timed our arrival in Yalta to coincide with Yalta Day and its celebrated Miss Yalta Competition – there are lots of beauty competitions, but this is the competition and, naturally, it is as hard to get a backstage pass for the show as it is to get a live interview with Michael Jackson or a ticket for the European Cup Final. But we had come too far to fail at the last hurdle. Luba flirted outrageously with the press attaché and, after I flashed my big camera, we finally got these gold dust passes and, boy, was it worth it.

No boasting here, but I immediately picked out the winner and stuck with her for the duration of the competition, getting real close and getting some candid shots that are natural and très sexy. As you can see from the Day 1 photos, this is as good as it gets: #Alexandra doing the splits in her little white mini skirt, #some eye-tingling up the skirt snaps of her doing the cancan on stage, #intimate studies of her in her skin-tight-next-to-nothing golden bathing suit, #Alexandra's sister oiling her legs...and don't even wish or pray for more because she is too young to become a Hegre Girl. So, here's all the news that's fit to print, a backstage documentary CNN could never show: Alexandra, the official Miss Yalta 2004.

From Yalta, Crimea,

Petter Hegre reporting.