I felt a little bit like James Bond!

According to the excellent Rome to Rio website(an essential tool in the armoury of any traveller) there are six ways to travel from the Romanian capital city of Bucharest to its Moldovan counterpart, Chisinau. A mixture of flights, buses, trains and cars. But I beg to differ. If you want to travel from Bucharest to Chisinau, you simply must take the old Soviet Union-era sleeper train.

For the princely sum of approximately £10.00 GBP, you get to ride on a slice of history and get a half-decent bed for the night. And maybe you will also get to feel as though you are a secret agent, hurtling your way through Eastern Europe.

I know it’s a cliché, but I really did feel the hand of history on my shoulder as I settled into my two-bed first-class cabin for the 14-hour journey through the night. I could only imagine who might have slept in this very compartment in bygone years. Senior Politburo members and Soviet Army generals perhaps?

The train was certainly dated, as you can see from the photographs, and the bed wasn’t the most comfortable ever, but this was an experience of a lifetime. As we neared the Romania - Chisinau border, my sleep was disturbed by border patrol agents checking passports and customs officers searching my luggage.

But the absolute highlight of the trip was the changing of the wheels! Yes, that’s right - the changing of the wheels.

The railway tracks in Romania are a different gauge to the lines in Moldova. Some say this was done on the orders of Stalin, who was worried about Russia being invaded from the west. Different gauge railway tracks would, in theory, slow down any invading forces. Whilst the story about Stalin may or may not be true, the different railway tracks certainly slowed my train.

In the middle of the night, somewhere on the border, all of the train carriages were split, raised from the rails and their wheels were changed! After a lot of clunking and clanging, we were on our way again.

I think it was the Soviet Union train and the Eastern Europe locale and the police and the passport checks and the baggage searches, all done in foreign languages, plus the crazy experience of the wheel change that made me feel like a spy! A Secret Agent! James Bond!

In fact, as far as I could tell, there were only two differences between me and 007.

ONE: I wasn’t attacked by a trained assassin from S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (which I was quite relieved about).

and

TWO: I didn’t get to make love to Miss World (I wasn’t quite as relieved about that! Although, to be honest, that wasn’t the only day in my life that I didn’t make love to Miss World!)

After the excitement of the border, I quickly returned to sleep and to my dreams of 007. I rose about 30 minutes before we arrived in Chisinau, refreshed and ready to add Moldova to my list of countries paddled.