Lost Highway

I'm on the road. Currently in Moldova, writing this en route to the Orhei monastery outside Chisinau. Up until now several countries have been undertaken with neckbreaking speed, and until I get to Romania I'm not really planning on slowing down anywhere. I could use a day with a book, my feet up and a bit of quiet, though, the contrast to how I usually travel is like night and day.

Estonia was a pure transportation stretch and hence didn't bring much of interest. After very few hours of sleep the night before I actually slept through most of it. Day 1 ended as we reached one of Latvia's national parks where we set up camp with the tent Deb and David so kindly bestowed on us (thanks you guys, it works like a charm!). The morning after we had breakfast with a stork. Seriously.

My first couchsuring experience on the surfing side of things took place the following night, as we hooked up with American Jimi who lives and works in Latvia. He had just moved house with his wife, and showed an outstanding amount of hospitabiliy taking in a couple of unknown surfers on his first night in a new house (and WHAT a house it was!). We also got to hang out with the dog and Jimi's daughter, both lovely.

The next morning we started our career with police confrontations a bit sooner than expected when Florentin ran a red light (typical!) and was presented with the doubtful honor of receiving his first ever ticket. Since then there has been so much going on I'll not bore you with a step by step recollection of it all. A few key notes on the countries, however:

Short on Estonia:
Early morning ferry with already drunk Finns. Pancakes in Tallinn. A lot of road. Drivers starting to get a bit impatient. I mostly slept, but woke up as we passed a motorcycle passanger who had fallen off the bike. Aparently he seemed to be doing well.

Short on Latvia:
GREEN! They've had a bit of rain this summer, and I guess that explains the abundant greenery all over the place. Oh, and the gardens, they are lovely. It looks like the Latvians really put a lot of pride and love into the tending of their green spots. Storks are everywhere, as are speed-crazy drivers. Riga is quite nice, but has little on Tallinn in my opinion.

Short on Lithuania:
A little field'ier than Latvia, but still green and nice, and I got my first swim of the trip following one of many detours. We spent a night in a hotel in the centre of Vilnius, in the squeekiest bed ever - kept me awake most of the night (Florentin.. again!) - but the breakfast was good and we found a bookstore that sold Lonely Planet guides. Most important.

Short on Poland:
Another transportation stretch - we knew we wanted to get from Vilnius and as far down into Poland as possible in one day, with Lublin being the priority target. A day of driving later, we checked into a hotel in the old town that made up for the lack of good breakfast with excellent location, good service and a good bed. About here it started getting really, really hot. I almost had a heat stroke opening the car doors the next morning. Went for swim no II in a packed lake somewhere on the way to Ukraine. Insane amount of ongoing roadworks in this country!

Short on Ukraine:
The border crossing into Ukraine was a bit of a wild card. I was not one hundred percent sure we had all documents needed to get across, but as it turns out we were fine. A ridiculously young border guard asked me some questions about our camping equipment, listened somewhat half-heartedly to my answers before plunging into the core of the matter; "Any drugs?". When I could satisfy him with a clear "No!" in response, the rest was pretty much just paper work. And we got a stamp! Alas, by this time it was so late we ended up emergency camping on some dodgy backroad that set a new world record in the amount of potholes per square meter, and we got a zillion mosquito bites setting up the tent. First destination L'Viv took a while to figure out, but once we had it nailed this city became the first proper full-blown sightseeing session of the trip. As I am not the happiest of campers when temperatures are high and no water is to be found, this was all a bit too much for me. Sleeping arrangements were made on a hillside of a FSC forest that was supposed to hold bears. We saw none. The next day was spent driving to Kamyanets-Podilskyi, a smaller town in a natural park quite close to the Moldovan border. We spent a night in a hotel there, came across a Shell station (Yay!), accidentally reset the km reader for the trip (checking a fuse.. but we managed to calculate our way back to 2098 km so far), and again did a bit of sighsteeing in extreme heat. Ukraine became the by far champion country in numbers of nights spent as we were a bit time-confused the next day (reset the clock as well of course) and decided to go swimming and camping one more night instead of rushing across the border at dusk.

Short on Moldova (so far):
The border crossing was rather uneventful. Five desks where people wanted the exact same documents and answers to the exact same questions took about one hour, and the only unexpected event was a CO2 tax for non-Moldovian cars of 30 moldovan Leu, which we didn't have. Fortunately my relentless storing of money in all kinds of pockets turned up a 5 Euro bill in a jacket, which they accepted (even got change!) and we were free to go. Moldova has the biggest sunflower fields I have ever seen. They stretch so far all you can see is yellow. Beautiful.

As said, this is being written in the car while driving along one of Moldova's main highways as quickly as the endless potholes allow us. Roads have been pretty shitty since Southern Poland, but nothing like we expected when it comes to aggressive drivers. In fact, Latvia was by far the worst in that respect, since then it's been manageable (of course it helps to drive a car that accelerates ten times as quickly as the heaps of junk metal they drive down here (although there are really expensive cars around as well)). The road police has given us a couple of scares, as they are pretty much all over the place and will jump at the chance to squeeze some money out of a foreigner. After the first ticket we have, however, managed to get out of it with just being stopped one more time, also this deserved as Florentin made a dodgy left turn onto a main road. There's a first time for everything, including bribing police officers to let you go without a fine. 'Nuff said.

"Guide the cars, you've got the keys, farewell to mediocrity.
Kicking off the cruise control and turning up the radio,
got just enough religion and half a tank of gas,
come on, let's go!"
Bon Jovi - Lost Highway (Lost Highway, 2007)