Surveying the mini-quagmire in front of me, I had two choices. One, take it easy and risk getting stuck in the undulating levels of mud. Two, set off at a reasonable lick, keep the revs up and slalom through it. I chose option two. Half way across the mud, the car bottomed out and there was a very unhealthy clonking sound from underneath.“Shit,” I swore.
“What was that?” Emma gasped.
“Ah…” Sasha winced with an air of finality.
I got out of the car to check what had happened. What had happened was that on bottoming out, the lowest point of the rear differential had clanged against a rogue rock sitting submerged in the mud, and our little donkey, our £1500 Honda CRV, was now bleeding rear differential fluid all over the road.
“Have we broken it?” Emma enquired, looking pained and no doubt imagining an enormous garage bill in our very near future. Pink liquid lay on the road like a slug’s trail, drip-drip-dripping its way out of the driveshaft.
“The car’s fine but for one small detail,” I decided, biting back four letter invective and wiping the heat of the day out of my eyes. “It’s just not going to have a 4-wheel drive option any more.”
We were in Maramures in Romania, and we had just suffered our first vehicular setback. Until this point, our Honda had performed admirably and without complaint, but “proper” off-roading was just not something it was designed for (its real purpose of course being to ferry young kids to school in SW1). As a Heywood male, I am unfortunately genetically pre-dispositioned to buy crap cars. My father had variously owned an Austin A80, a Triumph Herald, a Citroen 2CV, a Citroen Dyane, a clanking Volvo 280 estate, a Range Rover with no reverse gear and a Nissan Patrol that could only do 10mpg. None of these cars could hit 60mph, and most of them spent extended periods of time sitting on the family driveway awaiting their next trip to the mechanic’s. I inherited from him my ability to spot an automotive bargain. My first was a Renault 5 with a 750cc engine that had two holes in the floor and couldn’t accelerate uphill. I followed this up with, variously, an Austin Metro (possibly the worst small car ever made), an MGB GT (possibly the least reliable car ever made) and a rattly Peugeot 205 diesel that Emma and I picked up for the cost of the petrol in its tank and then gave to my father just before its drivetrain fell off (another top acquisition there Dad!). My brother Nick has fared no better. He bought that god-awful Metro off me just before its subframe collapsed (note to family members – it’s best to source your own, I think), followed it up with a Skoda that he left to rot in my mother’s garden and then an ancient Audi that he left to rot outside my London flat. In an effort, I suppose, to improve my luck – or at least halve my bad luck – I switched to two wheels for some time and pootled about on a succession of Yamaha/Honda bikes which I either crashed or drove into the ground, and on moving to London switched to scooters, the first three of which all got stolen. My fourth Vespa ended its life sliding sideways down the road in pieces after a close encounter with a double-decker bus and my fifth was knocked over in a B&Q car-park with just 12km on the clock (I wasn’t actually on it that time). And then I had bought this scratched, dented Honda with 140,000 miles on the clock. That’s about seven times around the earth already.
“It makes more sense to get a duffed up one,” I had explained to Emma at the time, “because then we won’t worry so much about the abuse it’ll inevitably suffer on our trip. If I’d bought a better one we’d go mental if even the paint got scratched. With this one we won’t care.”
If only that were true. One little knock and I had hobbled probably the most reliable vehicle I had ever possessed. That was the end of our mud-plugging already - it wasn’t going to be worth getting it fixed. The question was, would the now 2WD car survive the trip back to Monte?
We had come to Romania to see our friends the Ridgley family. We had first met them on Vis back in 2005 when we were doing up our house there, and in many ways, it’s their fault we’re out here now. They quit the rat race in 2004 and with their three kids (Sasha, Claudia and Angus) in tow, set off on a life change that would see them set up
Maramures was a real shock to the system. It’s a rural community as large as Norfolk that has been more or less unaffected by the 21st century. Or the 20th. Or the 19th.
Things you are likely to come across in Maramures:
- Horse drawn carts – they outnumber cars two to one. And the cars are usually Dacia 130s, which are exactly like ancient broken-backed Renault 12s.
- Old ladies in headscarves and patterned skirts hoisted up to their nipples (“You mean below their waist!” - Sasha) working the fields with manual tools alongside toothless men wearing wicker hats shaped like flowerpots.
- Haystacks and ancient oak chalets – they dot a landscape utterly unblemished by anything so modern as a block of flat or even a tractor. It’s a strange feeling – if the village faces passing us in the street were black or brown, we might have guessed that we were actually in a very green corner of Africa or Asia.
- Families living five to a room next to the cow-shed. Most houses have no plumbing; toilets are generally in a shack at the bottom of the garden. The average income would be around €50/month if income wasn’t such a foreign concept – most of the inhabitants of Maramures farm on a subsistence level.
- Chickens with hairy feet and Elvis troubadour hairstyles.
- Massive, ornately carved wooden gates that hide simple wooden huts behind them.
Borat-style music. It’s no co-incidence that the village scenes of Sacha Baron-Cohen’s piss-take were filmed nearby.
- Dogs. Lots of dogs.
And yet this remote, near-forgotten corner of Romania is barely a seven hour drive from Budapest, and part of a country that has already joined the EU. What phases you initially is that you just don’t expect to see such third world conditions in Europe.Ok, so it doesn’t sound all that enticing so far. But it was. Untouched pine and oak forests cover those green rolling hills, and a centuries old way of life has been so perfectly preserved, as if in a time capsule, that you can’t help but wonder at it. It’s a glimpse into another age without the need for quantum physics or a plutonium-powered DeLorean. The people are supremely hospitable and friendly and despite the evident poverty, there’s a real twinkle in the eyes of the residents there, almost as though they’ve discovered some secret to life that has eluded the rest of us. Even death can’t spoil their natural cheerfulness. In the Merry Cemetery in Sapanţa, intricately carved wooden crosses celebrate the lives – and occasionally, in more macabre detail, the deaths – of the local residents. Nevertheless, it takes cojones to set up a business and live here full time, which is what the Ridgleys have done (at least for the summer months when they’re not in Egypt). Unlike Skadar, there is no pristine lake or Mediterranean beach within easy reach to help you cool down in the sticky 35° heat (only a comically communist Butlins-style summer camp with the world’s most crowded concrete swimming pool in a nearby village), and winters regularly see the mercury dip below –15.
Undaunted, Duncan’s modus operandi of spending serious time researching all the property and land options had already born fruit with around 40 hectares and seven houses to his name - all, he assured us, purchased for a preposterously low price (by UK standards). He had also bought a tract of land near Brasov in the heart of Transylvania, a stunning area that we knew had already shot up in value several-fold in recent years. And we thought we were being ambitious! It was this sort of ballsy, fearless attitude that had so inspired us when we first met them four years ago. This was a family that had defied convention and had made their new life work, and it wasn’t as though they had had an easy ride of it. Their first project in Sri Lanka was put on semi-permanent hold when the whole family got caught up in the infamous 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, a story so dramatic that it eventually saw them featured on the ITV Survivors program. Not only did they survive but through sheer force of will and an eye for keeping their projects in tune with their surroundings, they had emerged on the other side with a successful business. Watching the Ridgleys, listening to their stories, we had become convinced that we could do something similar once the time was right and our finances were in place. We decided then and there that once we had secured a certain amount of capital we would take the plunge…and four years later, we’re still shadowing them.Of course, neither Maramures nor Budapest could entirely distract us from our own potential project. We had received an email informing us that all four owners whose consent we required for the purchase of “our” house to proceed had signed but we preferred to wait for confirmation that our lawyer had the document in her hands before getting excited again. In order to see how things were progressing, we decided to hit the road again on a three-day drive back down through Dracula country, back across Serbia (yikes) and back to Monte. We would just have to hope that there was no more mud involved…
P. Diddy was not going to be happy with Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen after his Changing Rooms experience
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