Very early in the morning, I dashed downstairs for a short notice trip out to the border. The day before I had been feeling a little deskbound until I received the word that seven Seamen were being extracted from Odessa and that they were now on the way to the border with Moldova. The vessel was Russian owned but aside from the three most senior officers onboard, the seven crew members were Filipino and Indian. It was the ‘Odessa 7’ that I had to meet at the border.
I set off from the hotel in a brand-new Mercedes Sprinter nine-seater van. My driver, who I am calling Alexei Sale, because of his stunning resemblance in every way to the UK comedian (google him if you don’t know who he is) and he seemed like a decent guy. Not only did Alexei look like him, but he also sounded like him and had the dead pan delivery of his namesake. I was to test his sense of humour in the hours to follow with my numerous requests for quick comfort breaks – in my defence I’d had a few nervous cups of tea whilst waiting to leave.
Leaving Bucharest, I was quite impressed with the Centro district of the city, which had the usual unbelievably expensive luxury shops, opened for 000.01% of the population and I saw a number of busy restaurants and bars that if I ever had the time, I wouldn’t mind checking out. It’s minus three degrees now and everything is covered in a layer of fine snow. I loved the twinkly lights in the trees evoking a mini Champs Elysees feel and it really did look lovely. The local boy racers were making the most of the icy roads and they’re drifting around the central roundabout at ridiculous speeds with the Police looking admiringly on.
Alexei and I were sniffing each other out like two dogs circling each other to see how we are going to work together and I’m pleased to note that he grins and nods to my first (of many) “Eeeesss Naiiiice” Borat references. He then feels comfortable enough to start blaming Gypsies for all the countries current woes and I know he’s going full on Romanian Gypsy hater on me. Hopefully, there’s no sneaky mankeeni wearing or manly wrestling contests going on at any stage of the trip.
I had taken the opportunity to hurriedly empty the mini bar of snacks before I left and we munched along in a companionable silence for a while. It’s going to be a 24-hour round trip at least and I’m beginning to feel like it might be an interesting trip.
I had brought one of the fantastic Marriott pillows with me and acquired a blanket from housekeeping and so it didn’t take too long for me to sneak down to the back of the van and stretch out. By the time I had woken it was dawn, minus seven degrees and we were hurtling through the countryside towards the border with Moldova. Alexei claimed that I snored (I probably did) throughout my recent eyelid inspection and I tried to make it up to him with a few more Borat gags. He gave me such an Alexei Sayle side eye, that I had to ask him if he knew who he was. He nodded, said ‘the young ones’ and that he’d lived in London for a couple of years.
We arrived at the Romanian/Moldova border in the very early hours and I reached for my outsized Australian passport stuffed with numerous visas and handed it over. Alexei rolled his eyes at the look on the border guards face as he grimly thumbed through each page rotating the various stamps 180 degrees, all whilst making us stand outside in the biting wind. Once through that checkpoint, we were at the Moldova side. I whipped out my skinny and rarely used UK passport and we breezed through formalities with a shouted ‘look out for the gypsies’ warning ringing in our ears.
Moldova is a small agricultural country and I’d like to say that it’s beautiful, but I cannot, but only because we were head down barreling towards the border and everything was a blur. We passed through many quiet farming hamlets with people trudging towards their places of work down the frozen muddy roads. Eventually, we arrived at a field with several parked buses, half a dozen cars and people feverishly erecting tents. We knew that our team across the border were four hours away at least, so we decided to get some shuteye. This time Alexei snored. A lot.
We awoke to a woman screaming just outside the bus and I could see one middle aged lady flailing her arms and clearly in extremis. I asked Alexei what was going on and he listened for a moment before telling me that she’d lost her husband in the fighting two days before. She had brought her two ‘boys’ 18 and 19 years old with her to the border in the hope that she could get them out. He also told me that she would have known that the authorities would stop them and turn them back to fight, but that she had tried to get them out anyway.
Sure enough, they had taken her boys off to fight and she was understandably beside herself. She had plenty of kind people wanting to help her and the ICRC (Red Cross) people quickly put her into an ambulance and drove off. Before we collected our people, we saw another two similar incidents, with small, confused children standing around whilst their Mums completely lost their minds. Thankfully for all, they were quickly helped and led away.
In the three hours we had been napping, a small, tented city had been erected behind us. It had a proper field hospital, canteen, showers and toilets, as well as rows of very smart looking inflatable tents. The inflatable tents were especially impressive as they are double walled and therefore easier to keep warm, but I still wouldn’t want to have to sleep in them for any length of time.
Alexei had just begun an ‘I was stabbed by Gypsy’ story when my bladder forced me to get out from under my blanket. I’d been hydrating myself in the previous days to make up for my dehydration during the flights to get here and that was severely testing my bladder control. By this time, things were becoming critical and so I excused myself and trotted over to the row of original primitive thunderboxes that had been put there in the early hours. They were predictably horrific, but needs must and the poor buggers arriving needed the new clean facilities more than I did.
We got a call that our people were just approaching the border point some 4km down the road and even though the refugees were being bused from the border, it wasn’t cut and dried that they’d be able to get through in short order, so we talked our way past the Police barricades, we parked up and closed in on the relatively clear crossing point. I say relatively clear, because there was quite a queue on the other side, just not on ours. As ‘cash is king’ during these situations, I had a large amount of money to hand over to a contact who brought the group to us, but they had to turn around and drop the evacuees in order to get back to Odessa before the curfew forced them to sleep in their van by the side of the road in questionable safety. I ended up bringing the cash back to much ribbing from my colleagues but it went down successfully the next day.
Our people walked across the border with their bags and we were able to load them in the van. I’m still trying not to show faces, but this hopefully gives you an idea of our pick up.
They were tired and compliant in the way that people who know they have no control over their destiny are, but after a good meal in a warm restaurant nearby, we hightailed it back to Bucharest.
This was only one of the constant 24 hour runs to and from various border crossing points, but this one was mine, it was 27 hours long and it’s going to stay with me for a while.