In terms of travelling, the exploration of more
obscure, rural and out-of-the-way countries has always appealed to me more than
any other urban counterpart. Although admittedly a modern European city has its
perks, there comes a time when one wishes to withdraw from the chaos. After
living in Verona since June, and for a year during my Erasmus studies before
that, I decided to go with my girlfriend to her motherland, Moldova, a small
banana shaped country in Eastern Europe.
Officially the poorest country in Europe, and an ex-Soviet state, it gained its
independence as a republic in 1991, and continues to be an intriguing blend of
both Romanian and Russian culture. The language of the nation itself,
essentially a dialect of Romanian that uses many Russian loan words, reflects
its liminal position between Europe’s perceived East/West border.
I have decided to create a blog to document my
travels here, some posts may be of a single day, as this first entry will be,
others will span between days on a certain topic. I hope the reader will enjoy
hearing about my experience, and be encouraged to stray off the beaten path
once in a while, and find the gems the world has to offer.
***
Flying from Bergamo airport in Italy, we landed
in Chisinau at noon, met with a grey drizzle and overcast sky. The airport was
a relatively small building, with some new areas under construction. Tools,
sand and other building equipment all lay strewn across the floor metres away
from where we enter passport control. The queue begins, and as in many
continental European countries the line is most un-English. Four clumps of
people stand separately awaiting the passport checks, while a retro 80s synth
jingle plays over the PA every time an announcement is made. Once at the front
of the queue my girlfriend explains to the passport checker that I am English
and do not speak Moldovan well, although that is only a half truth, as my
spoken Moldovan is poor, but I understand easily enough. As with many people in
tourism and travel, the checker states she speaks English anyway, and wishes me
a good day, while I erroneously respond ‘grazie’ still stuck with my Italian
manners. I pass the security border into Moldova, where our lift is waiting for
us.
My girlfriend’s mother greets us, while our
driver is a neighbour of hers, driving a bottle green Volkswagen campervan. It
is snug inside, with a patterned cover lay over the back seats. My comfort,
however, soon begins to fade, as the quality of road surfacing becomes
apparent. Bumps, cracks, holes and humps all pepper the road in front, and I am
discouraged when my girlfriend tells me the roads around the capital are better
than anywhere else. We skirt around the city in order to avoid the traffic,
with a half an hour detour taking us onto a road heading south, towards the
district of Cantemir, named after the twice prince of Moldova Dimitrie Cantemir. The two hour journey ahead of us is filled
with me glancing left then right, and then left again to capture all the
details I now recount. The vehicles sharing the road with us are a mixture of
sports cars, military style trucks, vans and stylish soviet throwbacks. I begin
to note more people at the road side, one man stands by his car, a fish for sale
hooked onto his open boot. At a crossroads, another man waves us on, as we slow
to avoid spooking his horse, while he sits in his carriage, with an open wagon
in tow, filled to the top with apples. Further on, dips in the road become
small lakes, the constant rain we’ve had since landing preventing me taking any
quality photos, with the windows steamy and dashed with water. Some women stand
near artfully painted wooden bus stops, hitch-hiking, we slow so as not to
drench them with the muddy mocha puddles beside them. As we pass through small
villages and towns, I see a recurring image of simplistic breeze-block
outhouses, brightly coloured roofs, corrugate-covered garages and green wooden
fences. Yet, in between all these humble habitations, I notice the empty shells
of decrepit buildings, some small houses, the owners now gone or their homes
forgotten, while others are large, vacant spaces, that I imagine to have been
hotels, factories or hospitals. Away from civilisation, the view is often an
endless, haunting skyline of fields, some verdant and lush others brown and
tilled, now bare in the coming winter.
Half way through our journey we stop in a bar
that doubles as a youth hostel, the building is modest and well-built, like
many things here. We order coffee and some plăcintă cu brânză, a kind of
Moldovan pastry filled with cheese (in this case), potato or cabbage, not too
dissimilar to English pasties. When the coffee comes, I am confronted by a cup
of water with what appears to be cement floating on the surface. The rest of
our party laugh at my surprise and tell me here in Moldova, instant coffees are
more common to be served, and a mix-it-yourself philosophy is encouraged, in
line with the whole country’s DIY prevalence. The plăcintă goes down well with
everyone, especially my girlfriend and I, who have not eaten since seven in the
morning, with it now being past one. As we approach the bar to pay, I glance at
the menu, and am confused again about how to convert the inflated currency of
the Moldovan leu (meaning lion), with the plăcintă costing 24 leu, an
equilavent of just over 1€. Also on the menu I note two typical Moldovan
dishes, both with sovietic origins, borsh (a beetroot based soup) and zeamă (a
type of chicken and noodle broth.)
Amongst the unassuming but attractive houses,
other areas are more like a bomb site, with the earth seemingly ruptured,
remnants of a farmhouse scattered in a field, now deserted. As we progress on
the road, overtaking slower vehicles like tractors is a hazard. With the
sloppily laid tarmac on the street ending abruptly, what would be a shoulder
lane is just a dirty sidewalk, with tufts of grass giving us more bumps as we
slug on ahead in our VW, which sometimes rattles as we go up hills. Every
village we pass has an image or statue of Christ’s crucifixion at every corner,
almost a statement of religious strength in opposition to the harsh secular
measures of the old Soviet government.
The last stretch of the journey is a pot-holed
mess, and our driver dodges and weaves in every part of the road to avoid the
holes, like some arcade game. We stop on the street to my girlfriend’s family
home, our driver reluctant to go further on a street now turned from tarmac to
mud. He wheels away, slipping through the dirt, and we walk the rest of the
journey on foot.
