An automotive journey to the East.

~Beautiful Machines~

On a recent trip to Eastern Europe, my first voyage abroad, I found exactly what I had been led to expect: history and newness, exotic beauty, grime and grandeur. Best of all were the unexpected pleasures of the everyday. Each of the places I visited presented its own distinct flavor. To hear this and know it abstractly is one thing, but to experience it firsthand is to feel something unique and to learn something about yourself—just like everyone says.

In Budapest, our first stop, I saw my first Citroen C3 and Class A Mercedes, my first Alfa Romeo 147 and Audi A3, and more exotic rigs—the Lancias and Ladas and cute, lovingly maintained Soviet-era Trabants.

Every nation displayed its own charms, its own frustrating quirks, and its own brands of automobile. Of course, there’s the architecture, the food, the art, the music, and there are the wonderfully helpful people and snakey scam artists, who all project various degrees of something like a national character, which can be gleaned even in a few days. I appreciated all of this stuff beginning the instant I landed, just as I expected that that I would. But I had not expected to be so pleasantly distracted by the automotive variety I found in the Balkans.

As my sweetheart and I crossed the ancient bridge over the Danube from old Buda to Pest, and walked the narrow streets of the city center under once-white 18th-century carved-stone buildings stained black with decades of car exhaust, I could not stop enthusing over this strangely beautiful Peugeot or that tiny VW Punto, or this never-before-seen Alpina or that long-forgotten Rover.

This continued after we arrived in Romania, which, as it happens, is all about the Dacia—they’re everywhere, mostly dead-on copies of a circa-1975 Renault, a model that was produced there for decades. The other Romanian national vehicle is the horse-drawn cart, which rolls on Dacia wheels.

In Belgrade, Serbia, owing to some weird Balkan tic of political economics, we found mostly the Skoda, a Slovenian vehicle. The insane Serbian drivers risk their necks and menace everyone on the road in these cute little rigs.

I became particularly fond of the Skoda after renting one for a reporting trip to war-torn Kosovo. On the big highway south to Pristina, I pushed the little yellow cutey up to 140 kilometers an hour to keep out of the way of hundreds of big German supercars with Austrian plates driven aggressively by exiled Albanian Kosavars on their way home to family weddings—it was fun!

Once we got off onto the two-lane country roads of mountainous Kosovo, which wind past farms and through pretty, timewarped villages populated by people who scowled at us, taking us for Serbians in our Belgrade-plated car, we found more Skodas.

In Ljubljana, Slovenia, there were of course plenty of little Skodas, but it’s as everyone says—Slovenia is the most European of the Eastern European states. It was the first Balkan nation to bolt the Soviet empire, thus inspiring the dissolution of Yugoslavia and helping to precipitate (in a genteel, Slovenian way), the violent nationalism that has its neighbors still palpitating in poverty and hatred. But that’s another story. The cars that cruise the picturesque cobblestone streets of Ljubljana and race the groomed highways toward the Slovenian Alps are pan-European: Audis, Volvos, Alfas, and Fiats galore.

~Ο~

Fiats have always held a fascination for me. Years ago, when I was an auto mechanic, I worked alongside a brilliant, drug-addled Texan who had a thing for Fiats, and I fell in love with their Italian design, their high-revving dual-overhead-cam engines, and their blue-collar pedigree; I came to see them as a poor-man’s Alfa, which is exactly what they are for much of the world. In Ljubljana, there seemed to be dozens of models of Fiat on display, each one stranger than the last.

On the last day of our visit, we decided to rent a car to take an excursion to the Alps. I was pleased when the super-friendly rent-a-car guy informed me on the phone that he had a Fiat available—a Fiat Idea. (By then it did not seem strange that the Italian car I was to rent in Slovenia had an English model name—English is truly the lingua Franca in the Balkans, as everywhere.)

The Idea, as it turned out, is simply the dorkiest looking car I’ve ever seen. So we drove to Lake Bohinj, a glacial gem tucked beneath soaring, cloud-shrouded peaks, populated by attractive, outdoorsy hipsters from all over Old and New Europe, in a lame mini-minivan.

The car was comfortable—driver and passenger sit erect, in a very salubrious position, with shoulders, hips and feet aligned, behind a vast windshield that is positioned before a vast dashboard—the effect is dorky in the extreme. The silly little car made us feel like a couple of big American dorks.

~Ο~

Little is big in Eastern Europe, and mostly it works. Gas there is absurdly expensive—it is sold by the litre, which is about a cup-and-a-half, and a tankful costs about the same as a fancy meal for two, with aperitifs and appetizers and salads and entrees and two bottles of good wine and espresso and desert. So most Europeans, who love to eat, drive tiny cars, unless they are much too rich.

People who have been on a journey abroad often bring home stories about how much better certain things are in whatever lands they have visited, and I realize that this is widely regarded as utterly boring and pretentious, but…in my travels I witnessed some traditions that I would love to see adopted in our nation, including ubiquitous outdoor dining, five-week vacations, and ubiquitous town squares and pedestrian malls. I would also love to see on our streets the impressive variety of cool small cars that seem to thrive everywhere but here. The Citroen C3, with its peel-back roof, reminiscent of the 2CV. The hot little Alfa 147 GT. The super-mini Mercedes. Even the charming little Skoda. And no more SUVs.