23 Oct,2025 By Fake Travel News
When the world is ending in six hours, where do you go? For travel blogger Maria Torres, the answer was simple: the only European country she hadn’t checked off her list…Moldova.
The hotel lobby in Chișinau smelled like Soviet-era carpet and stale coffee. Maria wheeled her carry-on past CNN explaining the asteroid’s trajectory. Six hours left.
“Checking in?” The clerk’s name tag read Marina.
“Yes. Torres.” She handed over her passport.
Marina typed something into a computer definitely running Windows XP. “You are the only person who checked in today. Most people are leaving. Because of the…” She gestured at the ceiling, where an asteroid hurtled through space.
“Right. I know.”
Marina studied her with that particular Eastern European expression suggesting she’d heard every stupid thing you could possibly say. “You are Maria. Like my name, but without the ‘n.’ Marina looked curiously through the pages in her passport. “Many places. You came to Moldova to die because you needed to finish Europe, yes?”
Maria’s face burned. “How did you—”
“I work in hotel. Everyone who comes to Moldova is finishing something.” Marina handed over the WiFi password. “But this is maybe stupidest reason I have heard.”
Maria went to her room, opened her laptop, stared at the blank screen. Her 847,000 followers deserved a final post. She typed “The Last,” then deleted it.
Downstairs, she found Marina reading behind the desk.
“I need recommendations. What’s the most authentic experience I can have here?”
Marina looked up. “Everything is authentic when you are about to die.” She checked the clock. “I am finished with my shift. My family left this morning. Is just me. And you. And the asteroid.”
They walked Stefan cel Mare Boulevard under the trees. Wide and tree-lined, some people crying, some laughing, some just walking like them, going nowhere because there was nowhere to go.
“So you are travel blogger,” Marina said. They were standing by the Triumphal Arch. “I googled you. Very successful. Seventy-three countries.”
“Seventy-four now.”
“So you have been everywhere. Do you have anyone?”
The question landed wrong. “What do you mean?”
“When you decided to come to Moldova to die, who did you tell? Who said ‘Maria, don’t go, stay here with me?'”
Maria opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
“I have never left Moldova,” Marina said. “I have same friends since I was six. My mother lives twenty minutes away. When the asteroid comes, I know exactly who I am losing.” She gestured around them. “All of it.”
They kept walking.
“That sounds nice,” Maria said quietly.
“Is nice. Also they know all my embarrassing stories.” Marina pointed ahead. “Cathedral Park?”
They sat on a bench near the Nativity Cathedral.
“Why do you talk like you are writing caption?” Marina asked.
“What?”
“‘Empowerment and independence’ like you are reading from website. You don’t talk like person.”
Maria’s throat tightened. Around them, people were saying goodbye. Someone playing guitar badly.
“I started the blog eight years ago,” Maria said. “After a breakup. Then it got popular. Suddenly it was my job. People expected me to always be somewhere new, having adventures.”
“And you liked it.”
“I loved it. Loved that I could just… leave whenever things got complicated.” She paused. “Until I realized I’d been doing it for eight years and couldn’t name a single person who actually knew me.”
Marina nodded slowly. “You have been everywhere and nowhere.”
Maria laughed. “That’s profound for someone who’s never left Moldova.”
“Maybe is easier to be profound when you stay in one place.” Marina’s smile faded. “You think I don’t want to leave? They pay me 300 euros a month. In Germany, I could make that in a week.”
“So why don’t you go?”
“Because if I go, who am I? Just another Moldovan cleaning German houses. Here, I am me.” She looked at Maria. “Same as you—everywhere and nowhere.”
“Come,” Marina said, standing. “I want to show you something.”
Twenty minutes later they were driving north in Marina’s ancient Dacia. The sky was fully dark now.
“Cricova,” Marina said. “Wine cellar. Sixty miles of tunnels. My grandfather worked there during Soviet times. If world is ending, I want to be underground.”
The guard looked confused when Marina spoke to him in Romanian, then shrugged—everyone was making strange choices tonight.
The tunnel entrance swallowed them. Lights flickered on as they descended. The temperature dropped.
“They named the streets down here. Cabernet Street. Sauvignon Boulevard.”
They drove deeper. Carved limestone walls lined with enormous barrels and dusty bottles. It smelled like earth and fermentation and time.
Marina parked in a wide cavern and cut the engine. Silence.
“Now we walk,” she said.
They followed a narrower passage branching off the main tunnel. Here, the ceiling dropped lower, the air grew colder. Rows and rows of dusty bottles lay in careful racks carved into the stone. Some labels were faded beyond reading. Some were in Cyrillic.
It smelled like earth and fermentation and time.
Marina pulled out a bottle, blew off dust. The label was Cyrillic.
“From 1974. Year my mother was born. All the countries that don’t exist anymore—Yugoslavia, USSR. Their wine is still here.”
Maria felt something crack in her chest. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I was enough.”
“I know.” Marina set down the bottle. “You know what is funny? I stalk travel bloggers. Late at night. I watch their stories and think—that should be me. And then I hate myself for being stuck here.”
“You’re not stuck—”
“Yes I am. Different stuck than you. But still stuck.” Marina’s voice echoed. “You run away from being known. I stay because I am afraid of being nobody. Two kinds of nowhere.”
They sat on the cold stone floor. Maria pulled out her phone. Fifty-seven comments. The cathedral photo would be perfect with a filter. She could write something about finding light in darkness.
She opened Instagram. The caption box blinked.
She typed: “In Chișinău at the end of the world—”
“What are you doing?” Marina asked quietly.
Marina stood up. “I’m going to walk further. You can come if you want.” She disappeared into the darkness.
Maria looked at the phone. At the photo that would get thousands of likes from people who didn’t know her name.
She hit delete. Turned off the phone. Followed.
She found Marina crying in a cavern where several tunnels converged.
“My grandfather. Last thing he said: ‘Marina, wine gets better the longer it stays. People are not wine.’ I think maybe he was telling me to leave. That staying too long makes you bitter.”
Maria sat next to her. “Or maybe some things need time and darkness to become what they’re supposed to be.”
“Maybe.” Marina wiped her eyes. “We should go back up.”
They ended up at Valea Morilor Park. People had gathered, looking up…beautiful park, not a bad place to die.
Marina took Maria’s hand. “What do you think happens after?”
“I think I wasted a lot of time.”
“Everyone thinks that.”
The sky lit up. Explosions. Bright flashes high in the atmosphere.
Everyone’s phones started ringing.
“They did it! The Americans destroyed it!”
The crowd erupted.
Marina was laughing, bent over. “Oil drillers. They saved the world with oil drillers. This is most stupid timeline!”
And then Maria was laughing too, because the world hadn’t ended and that was somehow the funniest and saddest thing. Now we all had to figure out what came next. The celebration in Chisinau lasted all night.
Marina stood in Maria’s Portland apartment, holding coffee.
“This is terrible. Americans don’t know how to make coffee.”
“You’ve said that four times.”
They’d been planning this visit for weeks—Marina’s first time leaving Moldova. Maria had offered to take her to tourist spots. Marina said no thanks, she’d rather just hang out.
So they hung out. Making terrible coffee and watching bad TV.
On day five, Maria found her scrolling through Instagram. Maria’s old posts. Santorini. Bangkok. Marrakech.
“These places,” Marina said. “They don’t look real.”
She kept scrolling. “Maybe I was wrong. In Chișinau. Maybe you were not running away. Maybe you were running toward. And I was just… staying because I was scared.”
Maria sat next to her. “I don’t know what I was doing.”
“Nobody knows.”
“You know what is weird?” Marina said. “Three months ago we thought we would be dead. And now I am in America complaining about your coffee.”
“Yeah,” Maria said. “Weird is the right word.”
This moment wouldn’t make a good Instagram post. Nothing aesthetic about it. Just two people on a Tuesday, one complaining about coffee, both still figuring out what happens after the world doesn’t end.
Maria picked up her terrible coffee and sat next to her friend.
Outside, Portland drizzled. Inside, two women who’d met at the apocalypse sat together in the middle of their regular, complicated, unfinished lives.
And Maria Torres—for maybe the first time in eight years—wasn’t trying to be anywhere else.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Chisinau, Moldova, you can visit the following link: 10 Things To Do In Chisinau, Moldova And Why To Visit. – Away With The Steiners
