I am writing this first blog in an Italian looking cafe in Cluj, Romania. The sun is shining through fold out doors in the front and very suave looking Romanian business people are knocking back espressos and smoking around us. It's been quite a journey to get here and a very interesting one so far.
We had a very early start and thanks to Jonny's mum, made our 6am flight to Venice from Leeds. Unfortunately we couldn't leave the airport to look around so had to wait in there for a good 6 hours for our late connecting flight to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
When we finally arrived, it was dark so we couldn't really tell a lot about the city. We wandered slightly lost trying to find the hostel when two rather large, rather Russian looking chaps directed us around the back of the buildings down a dark alleyway......suspicious. We cautiously followed their instructions and found the pretty miserable, grey, concrete entrance to 'Trotters Den' hostel. When we got up the steps an American guy told us that the owner had gone out and would be back in two hours! This wasn't really what we wanted to hear, feeling pretty tired from a day of travelling but we befriended another American guy and went to find some food.
The owner turned out to be another Russian looking and sounding chap who told us 'you stay in another place, not here. I take you'....alarm bells again! We piled into the back of his car and after 5 minutes we pulled up outside a concrete house with a tall solid iron gate- double unlock and we were into a courtyard with an abandoned Larder, grass growing through it's windows; quadruple unlock and we were through the vault-like door. Turns out we had our own private little house, admittedly with a strange smiling Czech pensioner sat on the sofa for the first night of our stay, but after that it was all ours.
The next morning we trekked back to base camp of Trotters to enquire about getting out to the famous wine cellars. A word about Chisinau....you can see in the architecture that the city is trying to slowly pull itself out of the Soviet era, but it is very slow progress. The skyline is dominated by huge Communist concrete blocks of flats and Russian Orthodox churches with polished silver roofs glinting in the sun. The country is noticeably poorer than it's neighbour, Romania but in typical Russian-esque style people spend their money on branded clothes, expensive cars and mobile phones. The people, whilst not aggressive or mean, cannot be described as friendly- a smile is amongst the rarest commodities in Moldova. In fact one American guy said it ranked lowest in a global national happiness list!
Anyway, back to the wine cellar trip...A taxi picked us up at midday and we made our way out to Milestii Mici. Needless to say Moldova really is not geared up for tourism- the wine cellars are highlighted as the top tourist site in the country and our taxi driver didn't know where they were! We found them eventually and bought our tour ticket. After some waiting around for our tour guide to be bothered to come join us, we drove into a massive tunnel entrance. The temperature rapidly dropped as the tour guide explained that these were the biggest wine cellars in the world. The tunnels used to be a mine and after it was abandoned the wine makers moved in. The wine is stored, matured, processed and bottled under ground and all by women. The winery is 100% state owned by Moldova so I suppose everyone in there is a civil servant. We arrived at a door within the dark tunnel and the guide led us through to see where the wine was stored...all 1.5 million bottles of it! It was an incredible sight. She led us to the back to a false door left over from when the Russian Communists took over the country and alcohol prohibition was introduced. Behind the door, the wine makers hid thousands of bottles of wine which weren't discovered, the rest were destroyed, and so a bottle of pre-Communist wine is very rare in Moldova and fetches over $2000 a bottle. We made our way through to the tasting room where we sampled the white, red and dessert wines whilst being 'serenaded' by a man on a fiddle and one on an accordion. After a truly unique experience, we headed back to the city for dinner.
The food is meat, pastry and potato based mostly. Pork is plentiful and the cheapest so I have eaten a lot of pork chops. Yonna's favourite is the Chorba which is clear broth soup with potato, vegetables, meat and a lot of herbs in it. They also serve dumplings which are like Japanese Gyoza by much thicker and filled with pork, potato or cabbage. All in all the food was pretty nice!
The next day we took a minibus out to Orheiul Vechi- a monastery carved into the limestone rock face. It took us a little while to locate the secret door into the monastery but once we did we ventured down the dark stone steps into a cave with an altar and an old, white-bearded, robed monk guarding his candles for sale and counting his money. The star of the show was out the other side of the small cave where the door led out to a ledge which overlooked a vast valley between the white limestone cliffs. The view was breathtaking and we spent some time there taking in the men ploughing the fields with old fashioned machinery, shepherds guarding their cattle and horses grazing on the plains with their foals. This place is obviously preparing to be a tourist spot one day as we had lunch in a very fancy, huge hotel/restaurant which was lovely.
On our final full day in Moldova we took a bus out to Transdniestria- a self-proclaimed independent republic that sits between Moldova and the Ukraine. People at the hostel had talked about the area a little nervously as there are concerns that the Russians will repeat their actions in the Crimea in this area too. But we asked the owner and he reassured us that it was 'as safe as safe-box'....sounds pretty safe! After an hour we reached a border crossing (again this isn't recognised by anyone else as a country so a border guard is a bit of a novelty) where the Russian speaking guard questioned each person on the bus as to their intentions in the 'country'. He demanded our passports...we only had the photocopies with us....he refused to let us in...we pleaded, did the whole 'we're dumb tourists'....he refused to let us in....we stood looking at him for a while...he refused to let us in...we returned to Chisinau to get our passports! Take two and the crossing was fuss-free with our passports but I was a little perturbed when the border guard gave us a knowing smile and wished us 'good luck'. I was further convinced that we were never leaving when another man on the bus wished us 'good luck'! We arrived in Tiraspol, the main city, and there was pretty much nothing there! We had to change some cash as they have their very own currency and went for a walk around the streets for a while. The one thing they are known for is producing Cognac- we purchased a bottle of their best produce for 2 Euros and got back on the bus. I have to say I was relieved to cross the 'border' back out of there!
We got an early bus to take us across the border into Romania the next day. A journey that should take a couple of hours due to the distance, took a good 8 hours thanks to the convoluted route, multiple stops, checks at the Moldovan and Romanian borders including a bag search and the bad road conditions. Oh and the bus hit what we assume to be a dog at very high speed....we heard a bang, the driver stopped, checked for damage and then carried on regardless.
We arrived in Suceava in the Moldavia region of Romania late afternoon and met up with Jonny's workmate, Karl, who has relocated out to their Romanian office. The next morning we set off in Karl's car to tour the UNESCO sites of five painted monasteries. We hadn't really acknowledged that it was Sunday so the first one we rocked up to was like stepping back into a Medieval sacrificial ceremony with monks dressed head to toe in black, chanting and women on the floor praying vigorously, some crying. The five monasteries we visited were all beautiful- all set within their own walls with rose gardens. They were painted externally and internally with religious scenes, much of which had lasted since the 15th century. Cluj was a good five hour drive away so we set off in the afternoon on an epic and sometimes scary car journey. Karl has mastered the Romanian driving well but no one can account for the madmen that overtake on blind corners on mountain roads. Nor can they avoid the police cars, one of which stopped us on the drive. There was a bit of panic as Karl had forgotten all his documents in Cluj but after a slapped wrist for very mild speeding the nice policeman let us off!
We're going to spend a couple of days in Cluj and meet up with more of Jonny's work mates out here before taking the train to Budapest where the adventure continues.
We had a very early start and thanks to Jonny's mum, made our 6am flight to Venice from Leeds. Unfortunately we couldn't leave the airport to look around so had to wait in there for a good 6 hours for our late connecting flight to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.
When we finally arrived, it was dark so we couldn't really tell a lot about the city. We wandered slightly lost trying to find the hostel when two rather large, rather Russian looking chaps directed us around the back of the buildings down a dark alleyway......suspicious. We cautiously followed their instructions and found the pretty miserable, grey, concrete entrance to 'Trotters Den' hostel. When we got up the steps an American guy told us that the owner had gone out and would be back in two hours! This wasn't really what we wanted to hear, feeling pretty tired from a day of travelling but we befriended another American guy and went to find some food.
The owner turned out to be another Russian looking and sounding chap who told us 'you stay in another place, not here. I take you'....alarm bells again! We piled into the back of his car and after 5 minutes we pulled up outside a concrete house with a tall solid iron gate- double unlock and we were into a courtyard with an abandoned Larder, grass growing through it's windows; quadruple unlock and we were through the vault-like door. Turns out we had our own private little house, admittedly with a strange smiling Czech pensioner sat on the sofa for the first night of our stay, but after that it was all ours.
The next morning we trekked back to base camp of Trotters to enquire about getting out to the famous wine cellars. A word about Chisinau....you can see in the architecture that the city is trying to slowly pull itself out of the Soviet era, but it is very slow progress. The skyline is dominated by huge Communist concrete blocks of flats and Russian Orthodox churches with polished silver roofs glinting in the sun. The country is noticeably poorer than it's neighbour, Romania but in typical Russian-esque style people spend their money on branded clothes, expensive cars and mobile phones. The people, whilst not aggressive or mean, cannot be described as friendly- a smile is amongst the rarest commodities in Moldova. In fact one American guy said it ranked lowest in a global national happiness list!
Anyway, back to the wine cellar trip...A taxi picked us up at midday and we made our way out to Milestii Mici. Needless to say Moldova really is not geared up for tourism- the wine cellars are highlighted as the top tourist site in the country and our taxi driver didn't know where they were! We found them eventually and bought our tour ticket. After some waiting around for our tour guide to be bothered to come join us, we drove into a massive tunnel entrance. The temperature rapidly dropped as the tour guide explained that these were the biggest wine cellars in the world. The tunnels used to be a mine and after it was abandoned the wine makers moved in. The wine is stored, matured, processed and bottled under ground and all by women. The winery is 100% state owned by Moldova so I suppose everyone in there is a civil servant. We arrived at a door within the dark tunnel and the guide led us through to see where the wine was stored...all 1.5 million bottles of it! It was an incredible sight. She led us to the back to a false door left over from when the Russian Communists took over the country and alcohol prohibition was introduced. Behind the door, the wine makers hid thousands of bottles of wine which weren't discovered, the rest were destroyed, and so a bottle of pre-Communist wine is very rare in Moldova and fetches over $2000 a bottle. We made our way through to the tasting room where we sampled the white, red and dessert wines whilst being 'serenaded' by a man on a fiddle and one on an accordion. After a truly unique experience, we headed back to the city for dinner.
The food is meat, pastry and potato based mostly. Pork is plentiful and the cheapest so I have eaten a lot of pork chops. Yonna's favourite is the Chorba which is clear broth soup with potato, vegetables, meat and a lot of herbs in it. They also serve dumplings which are like Japanese Gyoza by much thicker and filled with pork, potato or cabbage. All in all the food was pretty nice!
The next day we took a minibus out to Orheiul Vechi- a monastery carved into the limestone rock face. It took us a little while to locate the secret door into the monastery but once we did we ventured down the dark stone steps into a cave with an altar and an old, white-bearded, robed monk guarding his candles for sale and counting his money. The star of the show was out the other side of the small cave where the door led out to a ledge which overlooked a vast valley between the white limestone cliffs. The view was breathtaking and we spent some time there taking in the men ploughing the fields with old fashioned machinery, shepherds guarding their cattle and horses grazing on the plains with their foals. This place is obviously preparing to be a tourist spot one day as we had lunch in a very fancy, huge hotel/restaurant which was lovely.
On our final full day in Moldova we took a bus out to Transdniestria- a self-proclaimed independent republic that sits between Moldova and the Ukraine. People at the hostel had talked about the area a little nervously as there are concerns that the Russians will repeat their actions in the Crimea in this area too. But we asked the owner and he reassured us that it was 'as safe as safe-box'....sounds pretty safe! After an hour we reached a border crossing (again this isn't recognised by anyone else as a country so a border guard is a bit of a novelty) where the Russian speaking guard questioned each person on the bus as to their intentions in the 'country'. He demanded our passports...we only had the photocopies with us....he refused to let us in...we pleaded, did the whole 'we're dumb tourists'....he refused to let us in....we stood looking at him for a while...he refused to let us in...we returned to Chisinau to get our passports! Take two and the crossing was fuss-free with our passports but I was a little perturbed when the border guard gave us a knowing smile and wished us 'good luck'. I was further convinced that we were never leaving when another man on the bus wished us 'good luck'! We arrived in Tiraspol, the main city, and there was pretty much nothing there! We had to change some cash as they have their very own currency and went for a walk around the streets for a while. The one thing they are known for is producing Cognac- we purchased a bottle of their best produce for 2 Euros and got back on the bus. I have to say I was relieved to cross the 'border' back out of there!
We got an early bus to take us across the border into Romania the next day. A journey that should take a couple of hours due to the distance, took a good 8 hours thanks to the convoluted route, multiple stops, checks at the Moldovan and Romanian borders including a bag search and the bad road conditions. Oh and the bus hit what we assume to be a dog at very high speed....we heard a bang, the driver stopped, checked for damage and then carried on regardless.
We arrived in Suceava in the Moldavia region of Romania late afternoon and met up with Jonny's workmate, Karl, who has relocated out to their Romanian office. The next morning we set off in Karl's car to tour the UNESCO sites of five painted monasteries. We hadn't really acknowledged that it was Sunday so the first one we rocked up to was like stepping back into a Medieval sacrificial ceremony with monks dressed head to toe in black, chanting and women on the floor praying vigorously, some crying. The five monasteries we visited were all beautiful- all set within their own walls with rose gardens. They were painted externally and internally with religious scenes, much of which had lasted since the 15th century. Cluj was a good five hour drive away so we set off in the afternoon on an epic and sometimes scary car journey. Karl has mastered the Romanian driving well but no one can account for the madmen that overtake on blind corners on mountain roads. Nor can they avoid the police cars, one of which stopped us on the drive. There was a bit of panic as Karl had forgotten all his documents in Cluj but after a slapped wrist for very mild speeding the nice policeman let us off!
We're going to spend a couple of days in Cluj and meet up with more of Jonny's work mates out here before taking the train to Budapest where the adventure continues.
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