Ukraine

Ukraine

By roychinnorNo Comments
The drive from Chisinau up to Siret was a nightmare, but as with any disaster film there was a hero. The journey started out well, leaving at around 8:30am in light traffic. The route out of the city, so often the worst part of any driving day, was easy to find and follow. I decided I would wait until we had cleared the city boundaries before topping up with fuel. The first couple of service stations I tried didn’t know whether their fuel’s content had 5% or 10% (E5 or E10) ethanol and to be perfectly honest I don’t think they even knew what Ethanol is. Eventually I found a garage around 15 miles out of town that had E5 fuel, so we filled up. Most of the East European countries still have pump attendants and there is usually a scramble for who is going to do the honours. I’ve even had the situation where one attendant would fill the fuel...
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Moldova

By roychinnorNo Comments
Before I start with my first impressions of Moldova here are some passing observations on the Western area of Romania which I drove through driving from Constanta on the Black Sea coast up to Oancea on the Moldovan Border. A vast part of west Romania has no mountains, like those I had become accustomed too, but is a plain. Much of the drive was spent gazing across landscape at the same level as myself, but unusually I could see all the way to the horizon. At times the view was blocked by the wheat and maize growing right up to the roadside, but at other times the full landscape was visible and you could even identify the meandering rivers by the corridors of reeds. During the morning (it was Sunday) many villagers were returning home from the church morning service. There were occasional individuals, but more often couples strolling and chatting. Most notable were the many pairs of female friends together, clearly...
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Constanta

By roychinnorNo Comments
Forty-five years ago, 1977, my MG Midget was produced in Abingdon and I took my wife and children on a holiday to Constanta, Romania. I have just spent the past day and a half revisiting and walking around Constanta and it is a very different place. In the late seventies, the “Iron Curtain” countries started to open up to western tourists. The Black Sea coast has some great beaches and the great tsunami of tourists, flocking to Spanish resorts, had peaked and were eager to try new locations. Our holiday was booked for June/July period, I don’t remember the exact dates, and we had an anxious period after a seriously bad earthquake in the January that had affected a large area of the country. However, we were told it was fine to go ahead and so landed in the first Communist governed country we had been too. My memories of Constanta from then are of drab concrete block buildings, gangs of women...
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Let’s Drive For A Change

Let’s Drive For A Change

By roychinnorNo Comments
From several possibilities I chose today to go to Pella, as I was to find out, the birthplace of Alexander the Great (not the one I wrote about in Albania). There are a number of archaeological sites to choose from in this area and I chose this particular one because the tourist information I saw confused me. It referred to Pella being a port city, but the sea is some 20 miles away as the crow flies, so it would require a massive tidal difference with many buildings and roads disappearing under water every day, or a very long pier! Of course neither was the case, but for once land has pushed back the sea, a very rare occurrence. Anyway Pella is only 15 minutes’ drive from my hotel so I went straight to the museum which I hoped would sort things out for me. First impressions as I approached it were not terribly favourable as the building itself looks classic...
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North and Central Macedonia

North and Central Macedonia

By roychinnorNo Comments
Having kept at least one day ahead of the rain all the way to North Macedonia, it had to catch-up with me sooner or later. And didn’t it just. The weather forecast in Tirana the evening before we left was for rain from 08:00am until 18:00pm for the next day. After all the good-byes (I had got to know the staff at the hotel in Tirana very well in just 48 hours) it was almost 10:00am when Bridget pulled away and we headed towards Macedonia in brilliant sunshine, again. The journey was abnormally smooth and easy from the driving point of view, even finding the correct road out of the city, which is so often fraught with wrong turns, etc. The route was through beautiful mountains (Parku Kombëtar Shebenik – National Park) to the Albanian/North Macedonian border. So far so good, then the Macedonian border official demanded that I buy a Green Card (an international insurance). I said “No, my UK insurance...
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