Kara and Nate [Ep. 3] Mongol Rally – Rick climbed into a car with a Romanian stranger named Don, who promptly drove him to a farm to fill a jug of wine before attempting a border crossing that had already turned them away once. That is Moldova: a country so rarely visited by outsiders that the border guards at that crossing had never processed an American vehicle before, except for the day before, when this same group was denied entry. For the nine-person team piloting Big Bertha, a retired Colorado school bus shipped across the Atlantic, getting into Moldova was never guaranteed. Getting out with a story this good was never part of the plan.
The border crossing that almost did not happen twice
Day six of the Mongol Rally opened with Kara and Rick spending two hours hunting down a printer willing to laminate a copy of their vehicle registration on thick paper, the kind that might pass muster with border officials who had rejected a digital version the day before. Insurance was another problem: they had been told it could be purchased at the border, which turned out not to be true for Moldova. Rick pre-bought the insurance from his phone while Don, who had picked up a second Romanian companion somewhere along the way, worked on the guards in the queue ahead.
The mood swung hard. A message arrived in the rally group chat: a Canadian team had just been denied at the same crossing over registration paperwork. Then the guard handed the laminated sheet back to Rick, apparently satisfied. Then he handed back the insurance because it was the wrong type. Then the title disappeared into the booth. For several long minutes the bus sat blocking the lane while officials conferred. A guard walked back out and asked for more time, explaining this was the first American vehicle they had ever seen at this crossing, except for the day before. When Don’s animated conversation with the guards finally produced a pointed finger aimed into Moldova, the reaction from inside Big Bertha was complete disbelief.
Don refused gas money for the return drive. He refused anything. The team had paid 30 for the insurance. Nobody was trying to take advantage of anyone. As Nate put it: ‘I mean, this guy’s just driven half an hour out of his way. He spent two or three hours with us at this point. He’s involved all these people around. He won’t take a penny.’
What Moldova actually looks like when you get there
The drive to Chisinau rolled through vineyards, sunflowers, and hills that nobody on the bus had thought to expect. They parked Big Bertha in a central lot near what turned out to be the first hotel ever built in Moldova, a Soviet-era building with reviews averaging 5.9 out of 10, one guest filing a rating of one out of ten with the summary ‘Everything. Starting the staff and ending the breakfast.’ The rooms were dated, the tub was deep, there was no shower curtain, and the glass in the windows still had the slight wave of old manufacture. Everyone voted to stay. When expectations are set correctly, as one member of the group observed, the place rated 10 out of 10.
Before the group had finished parking, a man from the bus tour company next to the lot walked out with beer, wine, and cheese and hosted an impromptu welcome party in the parking lot. A local woman named Carol stopped to say she watched their content and could not believe they had come to Moldova. The team wandered into a street festival, where a couple of local women jumped in to teach them a circle dance they never quite mastered. Dinner was at a restaurant the parking lot host had recommended, where most of the table ordered placenta, a Moldovan savory pie with fillings like potato and mushroom that one person described as ‘a savory funnel cake,’ and the wine pairing was considered perfect.
Day seven brought the central market, operating for over 200 years with more than 2,500 stalls largely run by grandmothers, where a vendor handed over two cucumbers without charging for them and a brief argument between two women over the ripeness of some cherries played out as what Kara called ‘grandma drama.’ That afternoon, a winery about 30 minutes north of Chisinau took the group underground into a former limestone cave converted into one of the world’s largest wine storage cellars, 75 kilometers long and holding 11 million bottles. The tour moved by small train through tunnels past bottles dating to 1902, past Angela Merkel’s personal collection, past Soviet-era stock from 1953 still sealed and slowly evaporating. Five women are employed full-time turning bottles by hand, a process that takes 10 weeks per cycle. The evening ended in a cliff-side town that archaeologists say has been continuously inhabited for over 30,000 years, at a rock tunnel restaurant where a table of side dishes, each priced at five dollars, arrived in portions large enough to feed everyone.
The bottle from 1902
In the deepest part of the underground cellar, behind glass, sits the oldest bottle in the collection. It has been there since 1902. The mold on the outside has had more than a century to settle.
Moldova kept the team an extra day beyond their original plan, a detour that nobody on the rally had built in and that only happened because Don drove Rick to a farm first. The next morning, with the Soviet hotel checked out and Big Bertha fueled, the conversation turned to what was coming next: Transnistria, a region on the border of Moldova and Ukraine that considers itself a country, that the United Nations does not recognize, and that reportedly feels like a time capsule of the 1950s Soviet Union. The border situation there was, by all accounts, completely uncertain.
