Vadul lui Voda

When my plane landed in Moldova two years ago, the last things I expected to do in this country were playing frisbee and drinking beer on a sandy beach, followed by eating pork and beef barbecue at a private camping ground. But that's what seven other volunteers and I did last Sunday at the closest place Moldova has to Martha's Vineyard.

To celebrate the beginning of summer and the end of two years of English teaching, seven of the volunteers I came with (plus the Ukrainian fiancé of one of them) went to Vadul lui Voda, a resort town on the bank of the Nistru River. None of us had ever been there, and we couldn't find a working telephone number to make reservations anywhere, but that didn't stop us from going, based only on the three pieces of advice we had received from another volunteer: take a 130 or 131 rutiera, there's a place with blue cabins named after some kind of flower that costs 70 lei (less than $6) per person, and you don't need to make reservations anywhere. Two years ago I would have wanted more information, but these days that's enough for me to green-light an expedition.

First we stopped by the central market in Chisinau, where we bought several pounds of meat, barbecue skewers, plastic plates, fruits and vegetables. Then we hopped on the rutiera, which took us 20 km away from Chisinau in 40 minutes for the price of 8 lei (try going 20 km anywhere in America for 65 cents). Miraculously, given the meager amount of navigational information, we found the exact camping location that the volunteer had told us about, and we rented two sparsely-decorated cabins with a table and grill between them for 490 lei ($40). After settling in and marinating the meat, we headed to the beach.

The beach at Vadul lui Voda is a small feat of Soviet engineering; tons of sand were dumped decades ago in order to create a beach that's wider than the river it edges up to. On the other side—which, upon checking a map later, I discovered was not actually part of the Transnistrian separatist territory, despite being on the left bank—stood scores of trees in perfect rows, creating a backdrop to the river. The river itself was split in half by buoys; the near side was for swimming and the far side was speedboats and jet-skis. Also on the near side was a large boat that blasted music and announcements in Russian, from which I parsed that they were conducting river tours in x number of minutes and they had пиво, or beer.

We had our own beer, which we had bought from a stand near the beach for 30 lei ($2.50) per two-liter bottle, an exorbitant price by Moldovan standards. We sat on the beach and poured ourselves ice-cold beer, which attracted some sort of small bugs that loved to jump inside our cups. After 15 minutes, a lot of the volunteers went swimming, but I passed, since I had recently cut my foot and didn't want to risk infection. Instead, I sat on the beach, drank my beer, and reveled in seeing hundreds of very attractive Moldovan girls wearing flattering swimsuits made of less material in the back than what would be considered normal in America.

We threw around a Frisbee, and were joined by an eight-year-old boy who spoke no Romanian and would always dive for the disc, covering himself in sand. After a couple hours and a few liters of beer, the wind picked up, creating a small sandstorm and clearing the beach in a matter of minutes. We went back, barbecued, drank more, made a late-night trip back to the beach (I can proudly say that I have peed in the Nistru), and returned to the cabins to get some sleep.

The next morning, we ate more leftover barbecue and then headed back to Chisinau, unanimously agreeing that we wanted to come again sometime before we leave Moldova. There's not much time left, though; as of that Monday morning, I had only 59 days left of Peace Corps service.