Tuesday, 14 August 2012

 

Start: Chisinau 12:30

Arrival: Tiraspol 18:00

Total: 78 km

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning, we took another stroll through Chisinau. There was a girl selling kvass on a street corner and I was eager to try the beverage. It tasted really cool and refreshing. Sipping at my cup of kvass, we walked over to a bustling market square. A stall with oil paintings caught our eye. We love to purchase local art as a souvenir from our holidays. The bloke selling the paintings gave us some spiel in Russian which we didn't understand. Angliski? No, he didn't speak any English. "Español?," he offered instead. Yes, we speak Spanish! Well, we actually don't, but how hard can it be? Luckily, his Spanish was not too fluent either, so we understood each other just fine. He told us that he used to work in Cuba in Soviet times where he'd learnt the local lingo. He seemed happy to speak it again and reminisce about the good old times. We chimed in in Italian-Portuguese-Spanish pidgin, bonded, three ten-euro bills changed hands and we left the market as the proud owners of a picturesque wood-framed painting depicting a house in the woods, done in the pointillist-impressionist style. I can't remember whether he himself had painted it, in any case, the artwork was signed "Ostahi 2012", so we might one day look it up and find out.

 

Around noon, we walked back to the hotel and set out for our next adventure: crossing the border into Pridnestrovje, better known as Transnistria, a country as yet unacknowledged by the international community. The road toward the border was not too large, but well-kept, like all major roads in Moldova. Soon, the street narrowed and a young soldier with a machine gun motioned for us to stop. The border facilities were still some hundred meters further down the street, but I won't argue with a man with firepower. "Dokumenti." Hm? Ah, ok, he wanted to see my papers. I was a tiny bit nervous. Sonia handed me the car papers and our passports. He inspected them quietly. "Utkuda vuy?" Beg your pardon? Every morsel of Russian I had ever learnt had instantly left my disquieted brain. "kuda" means "where", he wants to know where we are going? "Tiraspol," I offered. Better not mention Pridnestrovje, who knew how a Moldovan soldier might react to the name of their renegade region. He gave me an inquisitive look. "Utkuda?," he repeated, a tad louder. Of course, that meant, "where are you coming from", not "where are you going to". My bad. "Chisinau," I offered. "I think we wants to know what country we are from," Sonia said. Right. Obviously. But he could have seen that from our papers. Odd. "Muy iz Lusemburga," I explained, and gave him a hopeful look. He handed us the papers back. "Good luck." And waved us through.

 

 

 

I slowly drove on. Why would he wish us good luck? Why would we need it? Maybe he took us for two bumbling nitwits, about to blunder into a war-torn region, like American nincompoops in some not-too-funny B-movie? I sure felt out of my depth. By now we had reached the border facilities, which consisted of three lanes with open barriers and a larger building. Noone in sight. Why were the barriers open? Were we supposed to just drive through? A soldier motioned for me to go on, or at least that's how I interpreted his hand gesture. I slowly passed the barrier. We were in Transnistria! Then a movement in the rearview mirror caught my attention. The man was gesticulating for me to stop. What now? I stopped, he caught up with us and explained that I should have parked the car before passing the barrier to get the proper documentation from the building to the right. Ok, did he want me to make a U-turn, or maybe back up in reverse gear? He shook his head and motioned at a parking space further down the lane, then made a walking gesture with his fingers towards the border registration. Just park the car and walk back to the building, get your documents in order and be on your way. With that, he turned and left us to our own devices. What a trusting person.

 

I very briefly considered to just drive on, seeing as we were already past the border, but my common sense kicked in almost instantaneously. We parked the car, grabbed the papers and headed for the registration office. Cautiously opening the door, we found the ground floor deserted. We waited for a bit, then, hearing muffled voices from upstairs, we went up. There was a throng of people in the tiny space outside an office door. We joined them and waited. Nothing happened. After about ten minutes, one of the men impatiently opened the door and spoke to someone inside. Then he closed the door again and we went back to waiting. Still ten minutes later, someone in the queue (was there even a queue? We were all just standing about, waiting) lost his nerve and went in. Shortly after, he came out again, snatched a form from the little table in the corner and started to fill it in. That was our cue and soon we were all filling in forms and trading information. Rumour had it that one had to register the car here on the first floor, then register the travellers in the personal registration office downstairs. There were constantly new people arriving, some of them simply pushing past our queue and walking in. There did not seem to be any order to this chaos. After a while, we decided that Sonia should try to register us downstairs while I would try my luck up here. She left, and after some more waiting, I worked up the courage to just knock on the door and walk in. None of the people waiting objected. The officer behind the desk motioned for me to stand in a corner until she was finished with the person in front of her. Barely five minutes later, it was my turn. The lady even spoke English. She looked at my documents, explained in great detail why I had to pay a tax for the car and how much it would cost me in Transnistrian rubels. I confessed that, for very obvious reasons, I did not yet have any local currency. "Evro?," she asked. Yes, in euros please. She took out a pocket calculator and punched in some numbers. Then she showed me the result and proceeded to explain, again in great detail, why I had to pay this amount and not less. Something about a conversion fee. She seemed almost apologetic. I was more than happy to pay the small sum and be done with it.

 

After more than an hour, my sister and I had managed to obtain all the required documents and were back at the car. Luckily, Transnistria is not exactly a tourist hotspot. The border officers would be overwhelmed. They had all been friendly and helpful enough, but rapid efficiency was cleary not their forte.

 

The road towards the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, was in good working condition. Considering that this region is cut off from any outside help and trade except for Russia, shunned and sanctioned to the max, while Romania has been receiving very generous financial grants from the EU, the difference in infrastructure and maintainance was really amazing.

 

We made good speed and passed several settlements on our way. The scattered houses among the hills looked a bit desolate, but the larger villages seemed all right. At a small supermarket, we made a stop to get some local money from an ATM. We couldn't find any machines, but there was a small bank on the first floor where we exchanged some of our euros. Thus equipped with local cash, we explored the supermarket. It was a well-stocked store, not any different from the shops in the Luxembourgish countryside. The customers were dressed totally normal as well. They didn't look particulary fearful, oppressed or impoverished. Just ordinary housewives and teenagers, shopping for their fruit and meat, their Nutella and Haribo, which were all on offer on the shelves. "I need to take a picture of this," I said and took out my phone. "Why? It's a completely ordinary supermarket," Sonia laughed. "Exactly!" I positioned myself on the gallery to get a good shot of the aisles and their assortment. After I had taken a few pics, a security man approached me and shook his head. No pictures. He did not look amused at all. My heart skipped a beat. "Izvinite," I mumbled. Would he snatch the phone out of my hand, delete all my holiday shots, stamp the SIM card to a pulp? No, he just gave me a stern look and walked away. Ok. I guess that means I do not have to delete the pics I took.

 

 

 

Around four in the afternoon, we arrived in Tiraspol. We had no trouble finding our small, but modern and comfy hotel. We freshened up, then headed out to explore the centre of town. As expected, we found some impressive Lenin statues and several public buildings had an air of Soviet architecture about them that was quite nice. Apart from the V.I. statues though, Tiraspol looked like any nondescript South-Eastern European small town. Why my German travel guidebook was cautioning its reader not to go there under any circumstances, and especially not if one had not travelled to a former Soviet state before, was beyond me.

 

A group of youngsters was hanging out in front of a movie theatre which advertised the latest Batman-film. We briefly considered whether we should go see it. It would be kind of neat to have watched The Dark Knight Rises in Transnistria. To this day I remember the tiny London movie theatre where we first saw Bill and Ted in 1990, and I will definitely never forget the Hollywood Boulevard theatre airing A Few Good Men. For more than one reason. But I digress.

 

On further inspection, we realised that the The Dark Knight Rises would only be launched here next week, and the other movies did not sound like we would understand much, without English subtitles. To make a long story short, we did not go see a movie in Tiraspol. Maybe next time.

 

 

Instead, we ambled on. There were not too many people around which suited us just fine. We found a lovely little park on the Dnestr, making friends with a small dog lounging under a bench.

 

The view across the river was peaceful and serene. Hard to imagine that there might one day again be tanks rolling across that bridge to force the rebel region back into the Moldovan fold. But the memorial on the river bank was a stark reminder of the lives lost during the tensions in the early 1990s.

 

Walking on through the centre of town, we came to a post-office and decided to send some picture postcards home. A stamp from Transnistria was, after all, quite the collector's item. We selected a couple of cards, scribbled a greeting on them and stepped up to the counter to buy the stamps. Luckily, we were the only customers in the small post-office. Sonia mentally prepared a sentence in Russian and asked for stamps for Luxemburg and several other European countries.

 

"How do you say Sweden?," my sister asked me. "Shveda or some such?" The girl behind the counter nodded. "Shvedzia." Hm, no, that didn't sound right. She probably meant Switzerland. Why else would there be a "z" in the word? I chimed in: "Stockholm." The girl nodded again and explained: "Eto nje Shvejzaria, a Shvezia." Now we were confused. The girl beckoned for Sonia to step behind the counter. They both disappeared inside a small office. Several minutes passed. Had my sister been abducted? Kidnapped in this oh so it's-scary-don't-go-there-and-see-for-yourself place? When they came back out, Sonia laughed. "It's Shvezia alright," she said. "They proved it to me with Wikipedia and Google Maps. I was non-plussed. Imagine a post-office employee taking a random customer back into their sancto-sanctorum to search for stuff on the net. I think this was the moment when I really fell in love with the republic of Pridnestrovje and her people.

 

By now it was getting dark and we headed back to the hotel for food. The outside garden restaurant had looked very inviting earlier on. I opted for a Solyanka, a lavish meat, vegetable and cream soup, slightly fatty, but unbelievably good and nourishing, at least the version they served at this hotel. They also had a huge TV screen which broadcasted Russian language video clips. There was one song we particularly liked. It was called Родная столица, meaning The Capital City of Our Home, by a boyband named Premyer Ministr. Not the stuff we would usually listen too, but that song was actually quite good and the melody stuck in our heads all night long. If you want to check it out, we found it on YouTube. A nice ending to an eventful day.