Where the hell is Transnistria?

Moldova. We'd all been looking forward to Moldova. It's not that we knew much about the place. Most people have only heard of it because it's one of those footballing nations that put out a team of shopkeepers and bus drivers and still manage to hold the England team to an excruciating 0:0 draw.

We hadn't even done any research on it. It just sounded like a place that was going to be an adventure. And it didn't disappoint. Right from the moment we got through the border (at the second attempt) we knew this place was different. In contrast to the green valleys and towering peaks of Transylvania, we were now in a parched and dusty landscape where the temperature was the far side of 30c. But it was beautiful in a different way. In an isolated way. In the feeling it gave us that the adventure was really starting.

The only visible road was the one we were on. There were no street lights, no road signs, no roadside barriers, no road markings and no signs of life in any direction. The only sound was a gentle breeze blowing through a sunflower field and Charles pissing like a racehorse in the corner of it. After 4,500kms of riding on mostly tarmac roads we'd finally made it to the fun zone.

It didn't matter that the road surface was like an army training ground. It didn't matter that the only thing we had to drink was warm fizzy mineral water which had been heating up in the van all day. It didn't matter that the Sat Nav had gone mental and thought we were in the middle of the sea. It didn't matter because we were in a country where none of that stuff mattered.

Basically we were in a massive playground. For any bikers who have ever done green-laning in this country you'll know how few places there are to take a bike off-road legally and even then you're likely to incur the wrath of some militant ramblers who'd rather skewer you with a fencepost than see a perfectly good pile of mud ruined by a tyre track.

And yet in Moldova, those mud tracks that go straight up the sides of hills and through the middle of a cornfield ARE the roads. There is more square foot of tarmac in your average Homebase car park than we could find on our meandering travels through this place.

The villages were just how we'd imagined them. Women in headscarves selling produce at the side of the road (we couldn't imagine who to as we hadn't seen any other traffic), horse and carts, and toothless old men sitting around in Xmas jumpers watching the world go by. Or in this case 3 craps mopeds and a Transit.

Let us remind ourselves there were only 3 crap mopeds at this point, since Charlie's bike had to be ditched in Romania after he'd spectacularly left the registration document at home. His misery was only compounded by the fact he was stuck in the hot van while we went to great pains to tell him how much fun we were having, and to rub it some more, we decided from now on to do as the locals do and ride with no helmets.

Eventually caution got the better of us and the helmets went back on when the road surface got rougher than a checkout girl in Aldi. As it turned out the T80's were surprisingly good off-road and this was the first time on the trip we'd been able to outrun the Transit. Surprisingly good that is as long as you didn't hit anything bigger or harder than a cowpat. The further we got the more confident we got until we were soon maintaining speeds of almost 35mph.

And then the inevitable happened. One of us finally found a pothole bigger than the bike itself and hit it full on. Despite momentarily leaving earth's gravity, Oz did manage to land and stay upright although his arms and legs had swapped places. This led to wild claims that he actually meant to do the jump and was feeling particularly smug with himself for not crashing until we pointed out that his top box had flown off during the impact and was now lying in the road with its contents of camcorders, cameras and lenses lying all over the place. 4 cable ties later and we were back in business.

With all the distractions of the day we had kind of lost sight of where we were actually going. We were it seemed, totally and hopelessly lost. So in the end we resorted to the most basic navigation method and used the sun to head in an easterly direction. That actually works pretty well in Moldova bearing in mind that you can just keep going straight and if that means riding through a field of bewildered goats then you just do.

Unbelievably we came across not only a roundabout, but a road sign, and not just in Cyrillic but in English also. This is just as well otherwise the "Bender" joke would have been lost on us. Needless to say, from that moment on it was our mission to enter Bender from behind.

To do that all we had to do was penetrate Transnistria, a country that only exists according to itself and with officials who have a particular disdain for Western tourists. After a succession of navigational disasters we found ourselves riding an old roman road up a steep hill. As we crested the hill we could see a town ahead of us down in the valley, the only problem was we didn't know what town, or even what country it was in.

Our suspicions should have first been aroused when we passed a statue of Lenin. And then when we passed a building so ugly it was offensive. The clincher came when Kaspars got some money out of a cashpoint and it spat out not Moldovan Lei, but Rubles. This was not good. This meant we'd somehow slipped in to Bender without permission and the Transnistrian border guards were not keen on being violated as we were about to find out.