Leaving Chisinau

Another blogging... Er... i mean border post. And this one, between bulgaria and turkey, is notorious for taking a while. I didn't get to blog at the romania/bulgaria border- as they are both EU, and so are we, the formalities consisted of glancing at our passports. But now, i've plenty of time to recount the adventures of the last few days.
Leaving chisinau was fun. Both times. As there is only one bus per day, and it leaves in the evening, i thought we could make better time leaving in the morning and hitching to Varna. I should probably thought harder about imy hard it was to hitch in Romania a few years ago, and realised that moldova would be worse. But i was itching to hitch, so we set off. Following the directions on hitchwiki got us our first ride reasonably quickly. A trolleybus to the bus station on the edge of town, then join the army of hitchers standing at the trolleybus stop. It was all a bit confusing when you're used to having the road to yourself. But a nice guy who spoke excellent english picked us up, apparently stopping just for us, and drove us to Hincesti, a small town in the middle of nowhere, Moldova. Knowing we wanted to in to romania, he dropped us at the bus stop / hitching place, where we again joined the crowd. It wasn't so easy this time though. More local traffic, a smaller road and the disadvantages of being a foreigner with luggage made things hard. The system seemed to be that people would wave their hand at every passing vehicle, some of which would stop. Everyone would crowd around, and either people would get in, or someone would shout the destination given by the driver, or both. The system for the minibuses was more or less identical, except sometimes the destination was written on the front of the bus.
We had some problems with this system. For a start, the language and geographical knowledge barriers. It was hard for us to recognise the town name, and then work out if it was somewhere that would help us. By that time it was usually too late. And it reduced hitching, one of my favourite means of transport, to the same experience as waiting for a bus, except without knowing when or if it would come or where it would be going if it did ever come. Not so much fun, really.
We decided to wall up the road a bit, to get away from the local's hitching place, but it didn't help, really, and the 40 degree heat was getting to us, so, eventually, for the first time in my hitching career, we gave up. We walked the kilometre or so back into town, got out more moldovan lei from a bancomat and started asking about other options. I'm so glad romanian is occasionally comprehensible. The first lady told us the bus station was a long way away and we should take a taxi. Next was a nice conversation with a taxi driver, half in Italian (it took me a moment to work out why i was understanding so much of his romanian!) who sang his son who works at the train station in chisinau to tell up that the only way to get to romania was a bus that would stop in Hincesti, but only if you had already bought your ticket at the bus station in Chisinau. At that second, a bus to chisinau went past, so several of the locals who had got involved in our plight threw themselves in front of it for us, and we took it right back to the very bus stop we had started from 4 hours earlier.
We paid our ridiculously expensive bus fare (226 Moldtan Lei! Each! Our hotel was not much more than that for both of us! But, to keep it in perspective, the MOL is about 10 to one to the Aussie dollar... ) to Constanta and settled down to wait the hour and a half until the bus. At some point we thought to ask what time we would arrive in Constanta, thinking it could be fun to find accomodation late at night on arrival (no, of course we hadn't booked anything in advance!). We were only slightly horrified to discover we were about to spend 11 hours on a moldovan bus, and wouldn't arrive until the next morning. It's only 545km! But then you have to allow time for border crossing, and the bad roads and the bus driver who was either just learning how to drive (he was getting what looked like instruction from the second driver for the first hour or two) or was attempting to give up a very smooth ride by going at a max speed of 20kph forwhat seemed like most of the journey. Still, at least an overnight bus solved the need for accomodation. And it started to rain just as we were getting on, which turned into the most impressive storm i'd seen in a while, so i'm glad we weren't sleeping out that night. It's the only rain we saw on the whole trip.
The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful. Several terrible movies dubbed in the amusing lektor style, frequent alternations between getting rained on or having the hatch (the bus's only ventilation system, it seems) closed and spiflicating, and the border. Thanks to my gps on this phone, we discovered that the bus took neither of the highways i had marked on this map, but rather a smaller road that runs between them. No idea why, but it wasn't the only bus at the border. We had an hour or so at the moldovan exit point, then something similar at the romanian side, although i really have no idea, as i pretty much slept through it. In fact, i slept really solidly the rest of the way- better than i ever have on a bus, i think, and arrived in constanta feeling actually slightly alive and ready to do things like work out where to sleep that night, and what to see in Constanta!