Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  The barmaid returned from the fridge with my beer and change, a wad of leu banknotes of some heft. After I squeezed them into my pockets, it looked as though I’d taken part in a successful heist. The bar was empty save for an older gentleman two barstools over. He was hunched over an identical beer and wore a lilac linen shirt, the first two buttons of which were undone, revealing tufts of thick, white hair. His face was dimpled but possessed a quiet dignity, like a rusting but seaworthy boat.

  “Do you know the exchange rate to euro?” I asked him.

  He rotated towards me on his stool. “I’m not sure, my boy. But I think you’ve plenty there for a good few tipples yet.” I’d not been called “my boy” for some time, possibly my entire life, in fact. I detected a slight accent.

  “Irish?”

  “Welsh.” He smiled. “But that’s another lifetime now.”

  I took the first pull of cold beer. “How long since you lived there?”

  He scratched at his neck. “Well, erm… It was back in…” He paused, observing something on the bar. “I had my first company. That was in, ah…” His voice faded out. Not as if he was unsure, or had forgotten, but as if he had such an abundance of past to draw upon that it would be like trying to drink the ocean armed only with a straw. “And then I sold that, and then it was, well, certainly at least twenty years now, lad.”

  “What did your company do?”

  “Well, that’s an equally long story, isn’t it.” His tone sauntered upwards at the “isn’t it,” as though he’d been considering making this a question but then thought better of it, presumably because only he knew its answer. “I made my money in logistics, shipping and trucking and so on. Yeah, made a man of me it did. Then I sold it all and hit the road. That made more of a man of me. What are you doing in Chişinău, my boy?”

  I gestured behind me with my thumb to the few freshly showered members of our group, who had draped themselves over the lobby’s sofas, red-eyed and staring into their phones. It was a rare moment of Wi-Fi and they intended to indulge. “I’m on a group tour,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, a group tour. I see.”

  There was a pause in which I think I was supposed to defend the merits of group tours, but didn’t. He took another sip of his beer. “I’ll give you a piece of advice now, laddie—get yourself down to Africa. Forget all this group-tour nonsense.” He flapped a wrist back in the direction of the others. “Buy yourself a ticket to Africa, anywhere there, doesn’t matter. One way, naturally. Then just go-o-o.” He paused. “Africa will sort you out. Make a man of you.”

  He’d quickly deduced that I wasn’t a man. I’d have to get better at hiding it. I felt the grip on my beer bottle tighten. “Spent a lot of time there, have you?”

  “Yes, before I started my, what was it now… second company. In Africa there’s, well, a certain spirit that’s lacking where we are from. There, you can be anything. Can make anything happen. It’s far better than being out of your skull here with your group-tour buddies.”

  I flinched. “I’ve been to Africa.”

  “Oh, have you now.” He smirked. “Group tour, I suppose?”

  I looked back at my travelling companions. They were shambolic, disrespectful. Many of them were low-functioning alcoholics. Yet they struck me as honest. They knew who they were. They were without pretence. They just wanted to have a good time. Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s problem. They didn’t lecture people they didn’t know, at bars, on how they should be living. The man saw that I was slipping from his grasp. “You think you need it, I know. But trust me, I’ve been around the block once or twice now. And then a few times more. You don’t. Just throw yourself out there, and it’ll be fine. You seem to have a good head on your shoulders. Why not use it?”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I said, standing up from my stool.

  “Well, you live as long as me, you get an idea for these things.”

  I dug my nails into the soft flesh of my palms. I didn’t want to show him I was annoyed. I was annoyed. “Thanks for the advice,” I said, passing him to return to my tour friends. The older man continued drinking alone. This man knew nothing about me. I knew nothing about him. Regardless, based on the fact that I was on a group tour, he’d felt comfortable giving me condescending life advice that reduced Africa, a continent of fifty-four countries and 1.1 billion diverse people, into a giant shortcut to a purer, more noble existence.

  It seemed very obvious to me in this moment that, of course, you could “find yourself” in Africa, just as you could find yourself in Bolivia, or rocking in front of the Wailing Wall, or in your home town while out walking the dog. People who aren’t self-reflective in their everyday lives don’t magically uncover new modes of thought or hidden depths of understanding just because they swap Home for Rome or Gloucester for Gabon.

  I reflected on my current quest, if that’s what it was. I knew I didn’t want it to end with my sitting on a barstool, in my seventies, in Chişinău’s biggest hotel, giving life advice to people I’d just met.

  The next morning, the old man was sitting alone in the breakfast room. He smiled at me as I entered, gesturing at the empty seat opposite. I smiled back and then sat on my own, on the other side of the room. It was far too early for life advice. Just an hour later than agreed, Marius appeared to show us around the city. Chişinău turned out to be an interesting place, in an under-construction way. Everything in it seemed to be either really new and so not quite finished or really old and so about to be knocked down to become something new again, probably a shopping mall. Marius took us to see a church and the parliament buildings.

  “Is this the Măzărache?” asked Paul, looking up from his Central Europe guidebook.

  Marius’s eyes darted around as he bit his bottom lip. A look fast becoming his signature.

  “And what’s that building in the background?”

  Marius pulled at his hair and pivoted onto the back of his feet. Mike threw him a lifeline. “Is it the opera house, perhaps?”

  He relaxed his shoulders. “Y-e-s, that’s right, the opera house.” He said opera house as if hearing the words for the first time.

  For lunch he took us to a shopping mall’s food court. I thought back to Sergei, and his love of international shopping malls. Is this what they thought Western Europe was like? What they thought we liked? Shopping malls, luxury brands, McDonald’s? Is it? Maybe they were on to something. But that didn’t mean they had to stay on it, riding it through all our mistakes of modernisation.

  Growing tired of Marius and the group, that afternoon, I elected to wander around the city on my own. It was very pleasant, with a number of nice parks and the wide, flat streets I now associated with the Soviet Union. I strolled through the central park with its Triumphal Arch, Nativity Cathedral, and monument to Ştefan Cel Mare, the city’s most revered son for having defeated Turkish invaders in the fifteenth century. Today, about eight hundred thousand people call Chişinău home, although from their expressions, not all seemed happy about this—many preferred the poker faces I’d grown used to seeing in the Ukraine and Transnistria. Much of Chişinău was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in the favoured, imposing, Soviet style of the time.

  It felt as if the city was still trying to form its own identity, even though it had been independent since 1991. Outside the parliament were two separate protest groups, just a hundred metres from each other. One wanted to go West, and join the EU; the other was pro-Russian, and like Transnistria, wanted to pull East. The most striking thing about the city’s streets, like in Tiraspol, was that an entire demographic felt absent: people between the ages of eighteen and thirty. I’ve always been passionately pro-European. A world with fewer borders has to be a better world, right? A world where people are free to overcome the shortcomings of their birth and move, visa free, somewhere that might offer them greater prosperity. But then, I’d only ever lived in two prosperous European countries—the countries people went to, not the cou
ntries people left. Here, it became clear to me for the first time that there might be losers in the European experiment. Already so many of the young people here had left. What would happen if suddenly those people were offered twenty economically stronger places to relocate to, visa free? Sure, it’s possible that those people would send money back to their families, or would return one day, when ready to create their own. But they were not in Chişinău today, and as those two protester camps showed, they were needed. There was a country to build, a national identity to create. An important demographic, the one famous for its ideas and energy, had already voted with its feet.

  Moldova had its freedom, but it didn’t seem to know what to do with it yet.

  After two days’ exploring the shopping malls of Chişinău, it was time to move on to Romania, where the tour would end, or at least my part in it. I was counting down the hours but, first, there was the tricky proposition of an overnight train from Chişinău to Bucharest. I knew what that meant. I’d done two train rides with the group already. They were suitably excited about the proposition of a third. Since we’d arrived in Chişinău, during lulls in the conversation, someone would shout “Champagne Train!” Another would respond “Choo choo,” or make a crude train impersonation with circling arms, followed by a champagne-cork-popping motion.

  This good-natured joviality was shattered when Chris returned from the train station to inform us the overnight train had been cancelled. Instead, we’d have to take an overnight bus to Bucharest. Twelve hours, no beds. I immediately thought of the night bus from Wuhan. The group greeted this news as though hearing about the death of a relative they’d met once at a BBQ—someone who had seemed pleasant enough but whose loss would not linger.

  “Boozebus?” someone tried, after a quiet moment of mourning. There were some murmurs, one half-hearted honking sound. It was okay, but certainly no Champagne Train.

  That afternoon there was to be a wine-tasting trip to Mileștii Mici, the world’s largest wine cellar housing an incredible 1.5 million bottles of plonk. I decided to skip it. I’d spent enough time in the company of this group and alcohol to know how poorly they mixed. They were like a quadruple gin and stupid (in Transnistria it is thing). Probably Mileștii Mici would lose its world record by the time the group had plundered its vaults.

  Predictably, creatures of habits that they were, the group returned from the wine tasting in a dishevelled state best described as sozzled. I found them rosy cheeked and rolling over each other on the couches in the hotel lobby.

  “Boozebus!” shouted Jen.

  “Boozebus,” the others replied, in unison. The Moldovan wine had certainly raised the spirits. I looked around. Two people were missing. “Where’s Anne-Sophie and David?”

  “We still have an hour to the bus,” said Pierre, with a wink.

  “Boozebus,” Jack corrected.

  “Boozebus, thank you, Jack.”

  Jack burped. “Pleasure.”

  I took a seat next to Pierre. “How was the wine tasting?”

  Pierre blinked, slowly. It looked as if he’d recently teleported into this body and wasn’t sure yet how to operate it. “It was. Good. The guy.” He paused for a blink break. “Said. We were supposed to spit it out. Though.”

  “Idiot,” added Mike.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t though?”

  Jack chuckled. “Too fucking right we didn’t.”

  We arrived at the bus a few minutes early. The group found the nearest off-licence and enthusiastically loaded up on essential provisions: beer, wine, and vodka. Just one more bus ride and it would be over for me. I couldn’t wait. They weren’t horrible people, but they were horrible to travel with for more than a few hours. They didn’t want to travel, just drink in front of increasingly exotic backdrops.

  The bus driver was a broad-faced, hostile man with lightly pockmarked cheeks and a nose trying to compensate in breadth for what it lacked in depth. He didn’t speak English and so had to try to stop the group from bringing their alcohol on board wordlessly—with defiant, open-palmed, cross-shaped-arm gestures that made it clear the bathroom was out of use, and no alcohol was permitted. In short, that this bus was to be, in no way, a Boozebus. Jack brushed passed him, a bottle of red wine hidden inside his puffy coat. “Whatever you say, chief. No problem.”

  The driver returned to his seat, satisfied he’d been listened to. More smuggled bottles appeared from the innards of coats and bags. “Anyone got some cups?” Jack asked, relieving the bottle of its screw cap, which bounced to the floor. No one had any cups. “Oh well, fuck it,” he said, raising the bottle in the air. “To the Boozebus!”

  We were seated at the back of the bus, spread left and right across the aisle. The bus filled up. The singing got louder. More secret stashes of alcohol were raided and the driver came back several times to try to confiscate it. He didn’t succeed, and then it was time to depart. The vehicle was now nearly full with locals, most a few decades older than we were. I felt sorry for both them and myself. I knew what was coming, what had already started, actually. If they thought they were going to get any sleep, they’d have plenty of hours ahead, awake, to realise how wrong they’d been.

  Thirty minutes into the journey and midway through a group rendition of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” one of the locals, a squat man in a brown flat cap, rose from his seat at the front of the bus, turned to us, and gave impassioned, shouted pleas: “Shhhh” and “No!”

  The group jeered. “Sit down, you chump,” yelled Jack. The driver stopped the bus and came to the back again, in search of bottles the group were never going to give up, either.

  “Hello, boss,” said Jack. “Lovely driving up there. Lovely.”

  “Really great,” Chris added. “Sterling work. Stay up there.”

  The driver reached across Chris and tried to remove the bottle Jack had nestled between his right arm and the window.

  “Oi! What you doing?”

  “No,” the driver said, red in the face. “No!”

  The scene degenerated into a light farce of amateur wrestling as the two grappled over the bottle. Unsuccessful, the driver climbed off Jack, stood up, and smoothed the creases in his shirt.

  Jack raised his palms. “Easy, fella.” He freed the bottle from the nook to the right of his hip. “You can have her. I’m just not quite done with her yet.” He unscrewed the cap and downed what was left, then handed the empty bottle to the driver. The driver began groping around our seats. As soon as he reached for a bottle, it would disappear, passed to another group member under or over the seat, leaving him shouting, grappling, and out of breath. After a few minutes, to placate him, Chris rounded up some empties. “There you are. That’s the last of them.” He winked.

  The driver sloped back to the front. He’d made his point but knew it wasn’t very sharp. A few locals clapped him sympathetically anyway. In retaliation for his treatment, he turned the heating up to maximum. The bus became a furnace. I put my hand up to the nozzle above my head and felt enough heat escaping to cook meat. I stuffed the hole with some tissues.

  The group re-retaliated, if that’s a word, with an even louder drinking song, about a highwayman, and the passing around of the last bottle of Transnistrian cognac. “Boozebus, Boozebus,” they shouted.

  The locals were horrified but powerless. Sitting in my row, in the opposite window seat, was a Romanian man in a tight, striped blazer far too smart for a Boozebus. He’d been slurping generously from a metal flask hidden in his inside pocket. He rose from his seat.

  “I AM THE DEVIL INCARNATE,” he shouted, in perfect English.

  The bus fell silent. The group turned to observe this strange man, now singing in Romanian.

  “Boozebus!” Jack roared at him.

  He swayed, nearly fell, steadied himself with one arm on the headrest in front, took a swig from his flask with the other, met Jack’s gaze, and let out a primal howl of “BOOZEBUS!”

  Music to their ears. �
��Boozebus, Boozebus, Boozebus,” the group chanted in response. He was in.

  Two hours into the journey, the bus stopped by a large corn field. Four men waited there by the side of the road. They took the only vacant seats, in the back row, behind us. They were speckled with mud and wearing heavy work shoes. They looked to have just finished a day’s hard labouring. Now, they had been thrust, unwittingly, into the back of a Boozebus warm enough to fry eggs, behind a man claiming to be THE DEVIL INCARNATE, and surrounded on all sides by eleven drunk, offensive foreigners singing Irish drinking songs (and one with his earplugs in, quietly seething).

  “I AM LUCIFER, HEAR ME ROAR!” said the devil incarnate. I groaned like a wounded animal. So it was moments like this that they made Ghanaian moonshine to forget. “Do you have any drugs?” I asked my neighbour, Paul. “I’d kill for some sleeping pills.”

  “I have some Valium. It’s a muscle relaxant. That might help.”

  Anything was worth a go at this point. My muscles were feeling extremely tense. As was my brain. Possibly because it was being cooked by the rotisserie oven above my head.

  The devil incarnate rose to his feet once more. “I WILL KILL YOU. I WILL KILL YOU ALL!” he shouted.

  Chris raised his can of beer. “Cheers to that, pal.”

  Another rendition of “Boozebus, Boozebus, Boozebus,” rang out. Jack got up to use the out-of-order toilet. Collapsing back into his seat, he reached for what was left of his red wine. “Well, boys, if she wasn’t out of order, she is now!”

  David’s head appeared from the row in front of me. “Gang, I’ve got another one. Who would, like, win in a fight between a Mongol horde and four hundred bears?”

  The local man from the middle of the bus, who had become a quasi-spokesman for the locals, despite not being able to speak the language of the people he was negotiating with, stood up for another stab at diplomacy. “Shhhh. No!” he shouted loudly, one finger in front of his mouth. “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”