Well this certainly was an interesting trip and not one which turned out quite as planned (the most memorable trips seldom do). Here’s the story about by journey by car all the way from Lviv to Chişinău with some friends who I had met in Ukraine. You can find more about my experiences in Lviv here and my travel tips on this link.

Having spent all of summer 2008 in Ukraine, finally the time came where I had to head home and start getting back to work (that didn’t turn out quite as planned either). Anyway, a regular visitor to Lviv who was based in Kraków at the time, a friend of his and my flat mate decided that perhaps it was time to see somewhere else and go somewhere completely random. Just short of going to Chernobyl instead or some other godforsaken dump, we decided that it just had to be Chişinău, a place which I had been interested in visiting for quite some time.

So, I packed up all my things and met the guys at the hostel where I had previously stayed for six weeks. The driver, an English guy from Poland owned a comfortable little Honda which was in for one hell of a beating, quite a lot more than we had planned for. The trip was supposed to take about ten hours driving, splitting it up with a night in Chernivtsi near the Romanian and Moldovan borders to break it up. As it turned out, it was more like sixteen hours, typical of the gross underestimations that us travellers tend to make with regards to time.

Having had quite a heavy night previously since it was our last night in Ukraine, we amazingly got going only two hours over schedule. It was a Wednesday, the weather fine and the road ahead initially looking promising as we made our merry way through out of Lviv, narrowly dodging some of Europe’s most horrendous drivers.

After about three hours of driving on a relatively smooth run, we decided to stop for lunch before hitting the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, about half way between Lviv and Chernivtsi. The town we stopped in was small and run down, as many of the other places we had passed through and we ended up stopping at a café to enjoy a rather hopeless lunch consisting of borsch and soggy, stodgy pastries which cost virtually nothing. After that we found a small super market; Кооп Маркет as it appeared in Cyrillic. We found this highly amusing having the sense of humour of politically incorrect fourteen year olds and proceeded to take a few photos of the sigh, much to the puzzlement of local patrons.

After that little interlude we then continued on our way, narrowly dodging cattle and other animals which seemed to be wandering about the road through small, rustic villages. At this point, we were convinced that this was all going to be a lot of fun, until, that is, we found ourselves lost in Ivano-Frankivsk for around an hour with half of Ukraine wanting to commit road rage against us.

Though I believe Ivano-Frankivsk to have an attractive historic centre as many towns in Ukraine do (the photos on Wikipedia look lovely), the outskirts were truly formidable; tumbling down concrete slums and bombed out factories which we could not quite tell if they were still functioning or not. From this point on for the next several dozen miles were enormous unsightly rusted pipes flanking the roads and to be perfectly honest, it was a sight thoroughly depressing. We were loving it!

Darkness came as we wound our way against roads which were in shocking condition until we finally found signs to Chernivtsi. We had booked a hostel there, a pleasant little place with only six beds in an apartment in the inner suburbs. Finding it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare though.

Driving through the centre of Chernivtsi, it was certainly an attractive centre, but unfortunately we did not have enough time to do any sightseeing since we were destined to leave early the next day if we wanted any chance of getting to our destination.

After some hassle, we found the hostel, settled in and then the owner showed us to a nearby place where we could get some food and a few beers, so the five of us ended up waiting for extremely slow service and finally finishing up close to midnight at which point we hurriedly got a taxi to a club that the guy had recommended to us.

So, one of our team was wearing trainers, so the four of us were immediately frogmarched out of the entrance before we had any hope of indulging in some debauchery. Angrily and thinking that it was the end of the world, I hailed a taxi and told them in my very limited Russian to take us to another club, the name of which was also recommended to us.

Luckily we got into this dingy nightclub and started to drink like fish in a tank. However, the driver thought it was perhaps time to cut his losses and get some sleep in preparation for the next day, so I went back to the hostel with him and the others followed shortly after.

We left at about midday on the Thursday, a good couple of hours later than intended. In spite of the border to Moldova being barely twenty-five miles away it took as over an hour to find the right place and avoid being sucked into the traffic headed to Romania (the border of which is almost adjacent to the crossing into Moldova).

After destroying a wing mirror and bouncing around the roads for a while, we hit the border where we were doomed to be held up for another two hours.

Two little bribes and a whole load of bureaucracy later, we were in Moldova. We didn’t need any visas, since EU and US citizens can travel three months visa free there, but it made little difference since we needed all manner of documents to take the car in and appease the local Igors.

Entering Moldova, we were confronted with a dangerous looking three-lane highway which is the main road running through the centre of the country. It was in surprisingly good condition, but Chişinău was still perhaps 160 KM away and the quality of the road was not to last, soon giving way to a dangerous, pot-hole ridden highway which we could not travel much more than thirty miles an hour on. To be honest, I have never seen anything quite like it in Europe, especially not on one of the main national roads of a country.

Eventually, close to dusk, we arrived in the outskirts of Bălţi where we were greeted by the unspeakable horrors of communism in the worst kind. Towering concrete blocks and ramshackle roads and pavements, this was perhaps amongst the most depressing, dour  places I have ever seen. So we decided to stop in a petrol station on the very edge of town where there was a small bar where we ate… you guessed it… more borsch! After that, we experienced the world’s most frightening toilet, a stinking hole in the ground in a concrete shelter near the petrol pumps. We took photos of the horrors and joked that this would indeed be the highlight of our trip.

The rest of the journey was in darkness, the roads deteriorating even more as we rolled on through the countryside, at one time coming close to completely obliterating the car as we bounced over a ridge in the road, the presence of which completely puzzled me.

We arrived in Chişinău at around eight in the evening, a lot later than we would have liked and it was at least another hour before we reached the hostel. Asking for directions to the Central Youth Hostel near Stefan cel Mare street, we finally found our way onto the huge thoroughfare, unwittingly somehow ending up on the wrong side of the road, which was rather terrifying.

Having managed to cross, the police sirens sounded behind us and we were held up for another half an hour as the policeman asked the driver for a €100 bribe. We didn’t have Euros, so he asked for $100 instead. We didn’t have dollars either. “You must have a hundred of something?” was more or less what the policeman asked then. If only we had Belarusian rubles, which were worth about two pence. Instead we ended up giving him a hundred hryvnia, about £12 and he let us go, having done his job as honorably as any Moldovan policeman would do.

We found the hostel we had booked shortly after that, a delightful place in an apartment in the centre of town. I’ll be adding a review of it in due course and you can read more about my experiences in Moldova in my upcoming posts.

Unfortunately, I have lost all my photos of this trip due to unwittingly formatting my computer thinking they were backed up elsewhere. Hopefully I’ll get hold of some from my friends in the coming weeks, otherwise I’ll just have to do it again!

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