Days 46-47 – Cutting Through the Bleak Landscape of Southern Moldova: Chișinău to Vulcănești

Thursday February 19, 2015, 184 km (115 miles) – Total so far: 3,485 km (2,165 miles)

Day 46: Chișinău to Comrat – 100km

I felt slightly better in the morning so decided to get back on the road again before I changed my mind. I had booked a cheap hotel in Istanbul for 2 nights in 11 days time. I had 1000km between me and Istanbul so I thought this should be achievable. I had booked it in order to give myself a bit of motivation which had been waning over the last week in Moldova.

***Yes, yet more cat photos from the hostel!***

Getting out of Chisinau wasn’t too bad at all. There was one section of busy dual carriageway with no hard shoulder that was a bit dodgy but it was still bearable.

***A partly frozen lake on the outskirts of the city***

***An unusual watchtower by the side of the road***

***Hairpins on a Moldovan road, this was a first! Usually they just go straight up the bloody hill no matter how steep it is.***

After a good 30 kilometres on a busy road I split off onto a more rural road which passed through small Moldovan villages on its route southwards towards the Romanian border. Cycling along this road was a very strange experience. First of all, it had been newly laid so the surface was perfectly smooth, secondly there wasn’t a hill in sight and thirdly I had a massive tailwind. These were three things which I thought could never occur at the same time in this country! It was not the Moldova I had come to love (and hate!)

***Passing another battered looking Moldovan village***

***Enjoying the smooth, flat road and tailwind while it lasted***

***One of the fancy fountains which line the road here***

After 40 to 50 kilometres of unexpected blissful cycling along this road I reached the village where I had to turn off for the town of Comrat, my destination for the day. I knew Comrat had a couple of cheap old Soviet era hotels which I could stay in so aimed for this town instead of camping in the sub zero temperatures as I had been doing for most of northern Moldova.

The steep hills returned on the road to Comrat but after such an easy day I had plenty of energy left to get up them and I rolled into the town of Comrat just before dark. As I arrived into town there were hundreds of crows circling around the main church. With the darkness and overcast clouds it made for a nicely ominous scene.

***There were posters like this one all around this area saying “No Mafia”***

***The rather ominous scene upon arriving in Comrat***

I found the hotel I was looking for. Now that I was outside Chisinau, English was going to be of no use whatsoever so it was back to speaking Russian. I tried out bartering in Russian for the first time (which somehow worked!) and I managed to get a nice 2 floor room for around €10. I love these kind of old forgotten hotels which populate a lot of the smaller towns in Eastern Europe so I was happy to stay here for the night. There isn’t a huge amount to do in a town the size of Comrat so all I did for the evening was to source out the Andy’s Pizza in town. This was the last one in Moldova so I had an absolute feast here to make up for all the good food I’d be missing. I was going to miss these restaurants, the glasses of wine for €0.75 or the pints of beer for €1 were going to be hard to beat!

***Chicken and mushroom soup served in a bowl made of bread, genius!***

Day 47: Comrat to Vulcănești – 84.4km

My hotel room in Comrat, the bedroom was up these stairs. The stairs were slightly dodgy as the banister on the lower section was about to fall off and there was none on the top section, instead there were just a couple of pointy nails sticking up where it had previously been!

I planned for a shorter day today as the town of Vulacnesti which had another cheap hotel lay only 85km away. When I had these cheap options available to me I was happy to go for them rather than wild camp and struggle with my numb hands every morning.

Leaving Comrat the rain had set in for the morning and there was a slight mist down. With the brown landscape surrounding me it made for a very bleak scene for the majority of the day.

***The rather depressing scene leaving Comrat, the dog who was hiding behind this sign even looked down***

***The road deteriorated like this in a few places but for the most part it was surprisingly good***

There was a surprisingly smooth tarmac surface for the start of the day before I reached a turn off onto what was supposedly a busier road. Here the road turned into a wide/mud dirt track. It stayed pretty bad for the rest of the day. The horrible road combined with the even bleaker landscape around me and the overcast weather made sure that it wasn’t the most enjoyable day of cycling I’ve had but I just got on with it.

***A typical Moldovan scene, old Soviet like sculptures and a completely overloaded truck spluttering along the road***

***The incredibly bleak brown landscape which surrounded me all the way into Vulcanesti***

***Reaching the end of one of the worst sections of road yet***

After a long battle with the deteriorating roads I made it to Vulcanesti. I rolled through the centre of town looking out for the hotel but couldn’t see anything. Before I knew it I was out the far side of town without a clue where to go.

I had no idea where to even start looking so I asked the first person I saw on the footpath as to where to go. The first person I saw was one of the typical old babushkas you see in Moldovan villages, I had passed hundreds during my time in Eastern Europe but never actually stopped to talk to any. It turned out she spoke Russian as a second language (as everyone above a certain age in Moldova seems to.) So we were able to communicate no problem, she said she would walk me to the hotel so I set off pushing my bike beside her as we made our way back in towards the city centre.

We spent the next 10 minutes chatting about all manner of things, about how she was a Gagauzian citizen rather than Moldovan (Gagauzia is an autonomous region of southern Moldova which I had never even heard of before this trip), we spoke about our lives, my trip, about Moldovan women and a couple of other random topics that my limited Russian allowed me to converse in. The conversation was very broken and I didn’t understand all of it but it was a fantastic experience just to chat away to her. She delivered me right to the front door of the hotel which I never would have found without her (seeing as it didn’t have a single sign saying that it was a hotel or anything other than an empty office building!) I thanked the lady for showing me where it was and she headed back towards the centre of town. It might not sound like much but that 10 minute chat with her was one of the coolest experiences I had in Moldova. I was happy that I had made the effort to learn a bit of Russian before leaving, it was worth it just for that experience alone.

I spent the evening in the cafe next door to the hotel which was the only place with Wifi. Here I pored over maps of Central Asia and researched the visas which I needed to obtain in Turkey before I could continue into the Stans of Central Asia. I sat back with a beer and tried to figure out the mess of applications and embassies. I was leaving this very late, the Iranian visa was the only one I had actually started work on. I have a very bad habit of procrastinating and just acting too relaxed about things like this so I decided I had to get my ass in gear here and try and figure out these applications before it got too late. As my Mum would say if I was any more laid back I’d fall back! This wasn’t the best attitude to approach the intense bureaucracy of Central Asia! So I made sure to do my research tonight and have a solid plan in place for the next month before I left the cafe.