Slovakian Auto Bizarre

To buy a car, or not to buy a car. That is the question that preoccupies all backpackers when they travel to Eastern Europe, right? Ok, maybe not. Typical backpackers might settle for travelling on buses, overnight trains, discount airlines etc., but Elise and I wanted to do something original. Turns out that the idea to buy a car, drive it 10,000 km around Eastern Europe and sell it back again is so original that it seems no one has ever done it before! Ahhh, such trailblazers we are.

Warning: do not attempt to this hair-brained scheme unless you have hook-ups at European auto bazaars or you are filthy rich. In the latter case you’d be better off renting anyway. Yes, renting is very doable if you have the cash, but once you’ve forked over your life savings for the insurance coverage in countries like Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, you’ll realize that for the same dough you could have spent a year in Southeast Asia eating caviar and foie gras whilst getting fanned with giant palm leaves by beautiful women (or men).

Buying a car in Europe and getting full insurance coverage for every country seemed fairly straight forward and affordable when we researched it from back home. There was even the prospect of selling the car for a profit at the end of the road. I began to realize it was a bit of a crack-pot scheme when our idea garnered looks of astonishment and disbelief from locals and other backpackers alike. Turns out you need to be a resident of the country where you buy the car and you can’t sell a car in another country before un-registering it in the first country. Furthermore, you can’t register the car in the first place until you do an emissions test and safety certification. Then you can go about getting your insurance coverage. In other words, it works pretty much the same way as in North America. Duh. So there I was, sitting in a hostel in Vienna for three days straight in the sweltering heat calling every auto bazaar from Munich to Budapest, looking for a way around.

I caught a break when an ex-colleague of mine in Herzogenaurach, Germany got in touch with his colleague in Kysuce, Slovakia who had purchased a used car from a guy in Bratislava who owns an auto bazaar (www.rhr.sk). Romco (pronounced Rom-cho) is his name, selling cars is his game. Apparently, Romco was willing to sell us a fully certified, legitimately registered car with full insurance in Eastern Europe - AND buy it back after three months! Well, turns out Romco speaks no English and neither does anyone else at his auto bazaar. After several very short conversations in Slovak with, (which were mostly just non-sensical utterances by me followed by long and awkward pauses on the other end), I finally got a hold of The Elusive English Translator, Jana. (Big shout-out to Jana here!!). Jana, who happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Romco, was gung-ho for us to buy a car and willing to translate the deal. Knowing only the price of the car and nothing else, we took off on a bus to Bratislava first thing the next morning.

Long story short (too late), we spent the evening in Romco’s office along with two other Slovakian men drafting a bilingual Slovak-English legal document outlining the sale, complete with conditional clauses and legal jargon (Shore-C, I could have used you!). Romco managed to find a way to circumvent the system and basically give us a short term lease with a massive security deposit. The end result is that Elise and I are the legal owners of a stunning 2001 Mitsubishi Space Star (what kind of a name is “Space Star”?). Let me just say that this tinted-out beauty is way too expensive and nice for our purposes. I originally assumed all we could get over here was a car that was made in a country that doesn’t exist anymore! But hey, we didn’t come all this way to do things half-assed. Let’s just hope it holds together in the Turkish backcountry.

G