How not to travel # 3 or is it 4....

Safe in the knowledge that we had a night train booked back to L'viv at half eleven we thought we'd try and find some of these famous wineries. We didn't want to fork out 30 odd quid for an organised tours. Plus, I hate organised tours :
"everyone follow me and my poxy flag" "can I look over here" "sorry no, that's not part of the program". Anyway, it seemed easy enough, just grab a marshrukta from the far end of central Chisinau to a town called Cojusna 20 minutes away. I expected to find a little, touristy (ish) town with signs posts to the vineyard, not the middleofnowhereseville where we were eventually dropped off.

There was nothing there. Hardly any people, not even many dogs, which is unusual for Moldova. Any people we did see just stared at us curiously. I think it's safe to say that we were probably the only Scottish people in history to walk around that part of the town village. Somehow we had to make our way back to the main road, which we did after walking an hour and a bit back the way we came in the fierce heat. We then had to turn up the main road and walk 2km to find the place. Similarly to Ukraine people over and under-take on the roads in Moldova. This didn't fill me with confidence as we walked on the gravelly side. Neither did the memorial flowers and photographs that were scattered, like milestones, along the verge.

We never found the vineyard, it apparently doesn't exist and/or is under renovation. Two and a half hours later and with some camera-strap patterned sun-burn, we headed back to Chisinau. Thankful that we'd be leaving in a few hours.

We headed back to the hostel, embarrassed about our failure of a day. We bid fair-well to the Italian, the Bulgarians, the Snoring American and the Slovakian and Modlovan hosts and taxied it down to the 'Gara' to catch our night train. The train was waiting at the platform when we arrived so we found the conductor to ask what carriage were in. He took our tickets and shook his head, handing them back.

Our train wasn't leaving for another half hour, so maybe this wasn't it. Thankfully another train pulled in with Moscow written on the side, the one we wanted. Another rejection from the conductor. This time he was on the platform and gathered us round to look at the ticket. "Look" he said pointing at the time : 11:35. "Yes we said, pointing at the big clock" 23:00.
A heat of realisation start to crawl up my spine. "Fi, our ticket is for 11 am! not pm", "Shit".

It turns out that Lonely Planet had a typo in the train time section from Chisinau to L'viv. It had said "8 hours, arriving at 5am" so it made sense that the train would leave at 11pm. It should have said "18 hours arriving at 5am". We spent a frantic half an hour at the ticket office explaining our problem to a non-cooperating old woman who couldn't find the key to her desk. We kind of knew from start what we'd have to do, though - go back to the hostel, embarrassed by our second failure and beg for a space on the floor.

This is all we could at the moment. There were no trains for the next 2 days.