An Accidental Visit to Moldova

My girlfriend and I were eight days into a 10,000-mile drive from the small village of Bodiam, England, on our way to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in a comically unsuitable car, when we woke up in our tent on the Black Sea beach of Mamaia Nord, Romania. As we cooked breakfast we were figuring out the day’s route and plan with our map. (A GPS would’ve made the entire trip a lot easier, but we firmly believe that it would’ve constituted cheating on this adventure.) A ]glance at our “Eastern Europe” road atlas revealed that it would be a quick and easy drive for us to get from this beach to the seaside town of Odessa, Ukraine. Let’s do it!

After a couple hours of driving, we realized that this wasn’t going to be as stress-free as originally advertised. The bridge that crossed the Danube River from Tulcea, Romania, into Izmail, Ukraine, wasn’t actually a bridge, per se; it was a crossing that was only passable in large modified off-road trucks, and our 1.1-liter 2004 Fiat Panda didn’t stand a chance. Turning west, our map showed an international ferry crossing from the town of Isaccea, but in our explorations of the “pier” we discovered little more than a derelict fishing boat listing in the water. Backtracking even further west we finally reached the city of Gala?i, the major border town on the way out of Romania. After stopping twice in Gala?i and getting conflicting directions, we finally started making forward progress!

Immediately once we got out of Romania we approached a border entry post, and we prepared our passports and documents for the car. There were no signs at the border post, and it wasn’t until the Immigration Control officer gave us our paperwork that we realized we had made a slight mistake. We weren’t entering Ukraine.

Apparently our road map which covered all of Eastern Europe didn’t have the scale that was required to see little details. Like the small detail that Romania doesn’t border Ukraine. That’s right, there’s a very slim finger of a country that reaches south towards the Danube to separate Romania and Ukraine. We were entering Moldova.

With that inauspicious welcome, without a sign or a flag to warn us, we were thrust into Europe’s poorest and least visited nation. With a breakaway region that no country in the world recognizes as independent, a democratically-elected communist government, and a surprisingly top-notch wine industry that is truly world-class, this stage of the adventure was just beginning!