The Lure of the East [Part 2: 23/7-26/7 - Moldova and Transdniestr, Odessa (Ukraine)]
[continued from part 1 here]
So, Moldova...
possibly the poorest country in Europe and it certainly shows - the countryside is absolutely rural and looks very backward, the cities are gloomy post-Soviet monolithic places, where since the end of the Soviet Union things seem to have been left to go down the drains completely... apparently things are now better than they were in the 90s, where power cuts and energy shortages were the order of the day, but still far from even just the level Romania's at and the one (poor as they were) they were before the break up of the USSR. Still, very interesting place, and totally off the beaten track and devoid of tourists (a great plus for us!).
In the morning we had arranged a trip to the Cave Monastery complex, some 50 odd km out of Chisinau, and we got picked up by Natasha and a driver, with whom we embarked on a somewhat adventurous Lada journey inclusive of a near crash (not our fault, but all of a sudden this car coming the other direction swerved right in front of us and nearly ended up in the ditch at the side of the road, far enough from us not to constitute in any real danger but a bit too close for comfort). The Cave monasteries complex is very beautiful, its on some hills with several natural caves, in which the monks have built some monasteries. After we got back to Chisinau we spent the rest of the day on our own, seeing the (few) sights of downtown Chisinau and seeking shelter from the unbearably sticky heat in one of the city parks.
The next day we travelled back in time!! We took a bus, with Natasha, to Tiraspol, second city of the country and capital of the self-declared autonomous republic of Transdniestr: a narrow strip of land between river Dniestr and the Ukraine, where the majority of the population is Russian and which declared indipendence from Moldova in the early 90s - a civil war followed, after which things were just left as they were; basically, Moldova still considers it part of it's territory, no other country in the world recognises it but nonetheless they print their own currency, issue their own passports and have their own border guards! The peculiarity of this country is that - owing to the Russian majority and the feeling of being 'besieged' by a foreign (Moldovan) entity after the split of the Soviet Union, they retained all they had from Soviet times: symbols, street names, Lenin statues, one-party system (though not communist anymore), and guidebooks define it an 'open-air museum of Communism'. The reason we went with Natasha is because the guidebook we had and all the information we'd read on the Internet painted a picture of a country out of the worst Soviet Union nightmare (in the eyes of the west anyway), rife with corruption, foreigners having to pay bribes to the border guards to get in and out, then being followed around and/or arbitrarily stopped and detained by the secret police and locals refusing all contact with you etc... which we didn't really believe but since we only had a day there and there was the possibility of having someone taking us there and showing us all the sights etc. we took it. Well, having a local with us certainly helped cross the border without trouble (and the border guards - speaking only Russian of course - didn't look all that friendly and did ask us various questions, while Natasha was in the office filling out registration forms for us, which I fortunately was able to answer in my basic Russian), and to be honest who knows what would have happened if we'd been on our own - nothing too serious obviously, but perhaps we would have had problems getting into the country and maybe 'make a donation' to smooth our passage or something similar. Once we were in, however, the scenario painted by the guidebook predictably proved to be bollocks - everyone we had contact with was nice and we went round seeing the sights and everything else - in fact, the place seems actually RICHER (if not by much) than Moldova, and we were told that this was actually the industrialised part of the country (which was another reason why they wanted to be independent). All in all a very interesting day, and with socialist statues, symbols and whatnot all over the place the whole experience was visually very nice for me ;-) Only annoyance was the fact that once there we got lumped together with three annoying finnish guys who had been taken there by another driver of the agency Natasha worked for (a guy she kept referring to quite deferentially as 'Mr Boris' when talking about him, putting in our head the image of this mafia-boss with gold chains and rings, driving in a big car with blackened windows - in fact when we actually met him he turned out to be a nice straightforward and thoroughly unthreatening guy, a bit of a let down in some respects ;-) ). Because Mr Boris didn't speak any English and Natasha was there anyway he thought the 2 parties might join... unfortunately for us, cos I'm not sure what the fuck the Finns wanted to go to Tiraspol for or expected to find there, but they didn't seem interested in the place at all and kept slowing us down and being annoying in various ways. Because of that we ended up having to rush (and nearly missing) the last bus back to Chisinau, and eventually getting home much later than we thought, and therefore we didn't really do anything that evening, just got some food and beers from the local supermarket and stayed in.
The next day it was time to move on again already, and we boarded a bus to Odessa, in the Ukraine (again, there are no train services between Moldova and the Ukraine) - this time it was a real big bus, though a very old, clapped-out one, and completely full, which we sat in for the 6-hour journey. Having finally got to Odessa we set out to finding a place to stay for the night (we hadn't booked anything here, all we had was a couple of phone numbers for supposed hostels). Having found one we got a cab there, having negotiated a price of 40 hryvnias (local currency - roughly equivalent to £4) after he tried to rip us off initially asking for 70 (the hostel receptionist told us the right price for a cab ride from the coach station would have been 30-35). The 'hostel' was in fact a slightly dodgy cheap hotel - not that there was anything wrong with the rooms (though they were very small), and it was in fact full of western travellers using it effectively as a hostel, but a couple of things kinda implied that it was used also for ANOTHER purpose - like the fact that besides the normal rate per night you could also get a room for 2-hours only, and the fact that one of the channels on the room TV broadcast non-stop full on hardcore porn!
Well, to us it was just a place to spend one night, so we didnt particularly mind, and soon we were out and about in the streets of Odessa, having a first look around, dinner and a few drinks. Odessa really can be described as the Blackpool of the Ukraine - popular and mass-tourism seaside resort, heaving with Ukrainian and Russian holiday-makers and western travellers, full of bars, restaurants and clubs and where the streets, especially at night, are packed with often ridiculously over-dressed men and women (ukrainian women, as we saw later on in Kiev and Lvov too) only seem to own extremely high stilettos and never go anywhere without full (and often excessive) make-up and being totally dressed-up - if it wasn't for all the colours of their dresses you'd think they must be a bunch of bloody goths, they are just as bad as them - and like them, while SOME look great, the vast majority just looks vulgar or plain ridiculous ;-)
The next day we left our 'hostel' and dropped our luggage at the station (we were going to travel to Kiev on the overnight train) and then headed for the beach - and a mere 18 YEARS (if memory serves me right) since the last time I did it, we went for a swim in the sea! I must say, it was really nice. After that we did the usual walk around seeing the various sights, including the famous Potemkin steps, a long stairway desceding towards the sea and immortalised in the 1920s Russian silent film 'Battleship Potemkin' (which every Italian knows, though not necessarily because of their knowledge of cinema history ;-) ). After more people-watching (and laughing at) on the promenade and a few drinks it was time for us to get on board the night train to Kiev, bringing back memories of my trip across Siberia last year. When the train left, to our surprise we saw that we were the only ones in our cabin (second class, so there were 4 berths) and settled down for the night.
We would arrive in Kiev the next morning, but this will be the subject of the next part of the story, stay tuned for it...
So, Moldova...
possibly the poorest country in Europe and it certainly shows - the countryside is absolutely rural and looks very backward, the cities are gloomy post-Soviet monolithic places, where since the end of the Soviet Union things seem to have been left to go down the drains completely... apparently things are now better than they were in the 90s, where power cuts and energy shortages were the order of the day, but still far from even just the level Romania's at and the one (poor as they were) they were before the break up of the USSR. Still, very interesting place, and totally off the beaten track and devoid of tourists (a great plus for us!).
In the morning we had arranged a trip to the Cave Monastery complex, some 50 odd km out of Chisinau, and we got picked up by Natasha and a driver, with whom we embarked on a somewhat adventurous Lada journey inclusive of a near crash (not our fault, but all of a sudden this car coming the other direction swerved right in front of us and nearly ended up in the ditch at the side of the road, far enough from us not to constitute in any real danger but a bit too close for comfort). The Cave monasteries complex is very beautiful, its on some hills with several natural caves, in which the monks have built some monasteries. After we got back to Chisinau we spent the rest of the day on our own, seeing the (few) sights of downtown Chisinau and seeking shelter from the unbearably sticky heat in one of the city parks.
The next day we travelled back in time!! We took a bus, with Natasha, to Tiraspol, second city of the country and capital of the self-declared autonomous republic of Transdniestr: a narrow strip of land between river Dniestr and the Ukraine, where the majority of the population is Russian and which declared indipendence from Moldova in the early 90s - a civil war followed, after which things were just left as they were; basically, Moldova still considers it part of it's territory, no other country in the world recognises it but nonetheless they print their own currency, issue their own passports and have their own border guards! The peculiarity of this country is that - owing to the Russian majority and the feeling of being 'besieged' by a foreign (Moldovan) entity after the split of the Soviet Union, they retained all they had from Soviet times: symbols, street names, Lenin statues, one-party system (though not communist anymore), and guidebooks define it an 'open-air museum of Communism'. The reason we went with Natasha is because the guidebook we had and all the information we'd read on the Internet painted a picture of a country out of the worst Soviet Union nightmare (in the eyes of the west anyway), rife with corruption, foreigners having to pay bribes to the border guards to get in and out, then being followed around and/or arbitrarily stopped and detained by the secret police and locals refusing all contact with you etc... which we didn't really believe but since we only had a day there and there was the possibility of having someone taking us there and showing us all the sights etc. we took it. Well, having a local with us certainly helped cross the border without trouble (and the border guards - speaking only Russian of course - didn't look all that friendly and did ask us various questions, while Natasha was in the office filling out registration forms for us, which I fortunately was able to answer in my basic Russian), and to be honest who knows what would have happened if we'd been on our own - nothing too serious obviously, but perhaps we would have had problems getting into the country and maybe 'make a donation' to smooth our passage or something similar. Once we were in, however, the scenario painted by the guidebook predictably proved to be bollocks - everyone we had contact with was nice and we went round seeing the sights and everything else - in fact, the place seems actually RICHER (if not by much) than Moldova, and we were told that this was actually the industrialised part of the country (which was another reason why they wanted to be independent). All in all a very interesting day, and with socialist statues, symbols and whatnot all over the place the whole experience was visually very nice for me ;-) Only annoyance was the fact that once there we got lumped together with three annoying finnish guys who had been taken there by another driver of the agency Natasha worked for (a guy she kept referring to quite deferentially as 'Mr Boris' when talking about him, putting in our head the image of this mafia-boss with gold chains and rings, driving in a big car with blackened windows - in fact when we actually met him he turned out to be a nice straightforward and thoroughly unthreatening guy, a bit of a let down in some respects ;-) ). Because Mr Boris didn't speak any English and Natasha was there anyway he thought the 2 parties might join... unfortunately for us, cos I'm not sure what the fuck the Finns wanted to go to Tiraspol for or expected to find there, but they didn't seem interested in the place at all and kept slowing us down and being annoying in various ways. Because of that we ended up having to rush (and nearly missing) the last bus back to Chisinau, and eventually getting home much later than we thought, and therefore we didn't really do anything that evening, just got some food and beers from the local supermarket and stayed in.
The next day it was time to move on again already, and we boarded a bus to Odessa, in the Ukraine (again, there are no train services between Moldova and the Ukraine) - this time it was a real big bus, though a very old, clapped-out one, and completely full, which we sat in for the 6-hour journey. Having finally got to Odessa we set out to finding a place to stay for the night (we hadn't booked anything here, all we had was a couple of phone numbers for supposed hostels). Having found one we got a cab there, having negotiated a price of 40 hryvnias (local currency - roughly equivalent to £4) after he tried to rip us off initially asking for 70 (the hostel receptionist told us the right price for a cab ride from the coach station would have been 30-35). The 'hostel' was in fact a slightly dodgy cheap hotel - not that there was anything wrong with the rooms (though they were very small), and it was in fact full of western travellers using it effectively as a hostel, but a couple of things kinda implied that it was used also for ANOTHER purpose - like the fact that besides the normal rate per night you could also get a room for 2-hours only, and the fact that one of the channels on the room TV broadcast non-stop full on hardcore porn!
Well, to us it was just a place to spend one night, so we didnt particularly mind, and soon we were out and about in the streets of Odessa, having a first look around, dinner and a few drinks. Odessa really can be described as the Blackpool of the Ukraine - popular and mass-tourism seaside resort, heaving with Ukrainian and Russian holiday-makers and western travellers, full of bars, restaurants and clubs and where the streets, especially at night, are packed with often ridiculously over-dressed men and women (ukrainian women, as we saw later on in Kiev and Lvov too) only seem to own extremely high stilettos and never go anywhere without full (and often excessive) make-up and being totally dressed-up - if it wasn't for all the colours of their dresses you'd think they must be a bunch of bloody goths, they are just as bad as them - and like them, while SOME look great, the vast majority just looks vulgar or plain ridiculous ;-)
The next day we left our 'hostel' and dropped our luggage at the station (we were going to travel to Kiev on the overnight train) and then headed for the beach - and a mere 18 YEARS (if memory serves me right) since the last time I did it, we went for a swim in the sea! I must say, it was really nice. After that we did the usual walk around seeing the various sights, including the famous Potemkin steps, a long stairway desceding towards the sea and immortalised in the 1920s Russian silent film 'Battleship Potemkin' (which every Italian knows, though not necessarily because of their knowledge of cinema history ;-) ). After more people-watching (and laughing at) on the promenade and a few drinks it was time for us to get on board the night train to Kiev, bringing back memories of my trip across Siberia last year. When the train left, to our surprise we saw that we were the only ones in our cabin (second class, so there were 4 berths) and settled down for the night.
We would arrive in Kiev the next morning, but this will be the subject of the next part of the story, stay tuned for it...