The Man Who Pays His Way: Why Romanians are sitting on a Glod mine

Emily, our editorial assistant, handed me a scrap of paper bearing a sequence of numbers and letters. "There are five places in Romania named Glod," she said with more than a hint of weariness, "but I think this is the one you're after."

Last Sunday, on a journey through Romania, I checked out the coordinates Emily had recommended: 45.14.29N, 25.27.02E. They turned out to be the latitude and longitude for a village in the southern foothills of the Carpathian mountains. Strangely, the settlement is officially no longer known as Glod, but Moroieni – and you may know it better as Kuczek.

The reasons are rooted in Hollywood. The makers of the outrageous spoof, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, sought a location that could serve as Kuczek, the home town for the Kazakh television reporter, played by Sacha Baron Cohen – the Glod father, if you will.

Kazakhstan itself was too far and too expensive. The Romanian village of Glod was nearer and cheaper. And according to the film's director, Larry Charles, it provided the perfect setting: "We didn't have to pretend we were in Borat's village, we were there."

To judge for yourself, take a plane to Bucharest, then a bus to the gorgeous Alpinesque resort of Sinaia, and call Ciprian Vlasceanu (his mobile is 00 40 722 817 984). Ciprian speaks excellent English, drives a Renault taxi and, as of last Sunday, is open for Borat business. He had never been asked to take a fare to Glod before, but is now happy to quote a price of 100 Romanian lei (about £22) for the run there and back and a tour of the location.

The half-hour journey carves a spectacular course over a mountain pass, then descends through the pines that cloak Bucegi Natural Park in a green-blue haze. Ciprian rejected the oft-repeated assertion (at least among Britain's popular press) that Glod means "mud". Instead, he claimed – clutching his side by way of demonstration, at the same time as overtaking a lorry on a blind bend – that "glod" translates as the discomfort associated with stitch.

We raced down a steep-sided valley on the main highway between Sinaia and Targoviste, past picnicking families and roadside vendors selling strange-looking fungi.

The name of the village has been changed to protect the innocent: shiny signs now welcome visitors to "Moroieni". For anyone who has seen the film, the location is unmistakeable. Homes in various stages of repair straggle up the hillsides from the river, while horse-drawn carts slow the cars and trucks for which Glod is nothing but an impediment. Elude the traffic noise and wander through the random pathways, and you feel you have arrived in a rural, almost feudal location from another age. The people (and their livestock) prove friendly, though they may resent the director's account of filming in Glod: "we realised we couldn't 'art direct' that village. You can't art direct the horses, pigs, and jerry-built huts."

Some residents are furious about the way their homes were portrayed in the film, and an opportunistic lawyer tried to sue the makers. Instead, they should celebrate the worldwide success of the movie, and the way that their village has transcended the other Glods in the Romanian pantheon. The locals are sitting on a Glod mine, and should capitalise on the film to draw people to a fascinating corner of the Balkans.

Romanis is scarred with skeletons of factories abandoned when the ludicrous charade of communist economics collapsed, and everyone realised they had been making shoddy products that no one actually wanted. While nature reclaims the foolish excesses of state Marxism, the country needs cleaner, more profitable industries – and since it already has a richly embellished mythology, tourism is the obvious candidate. Glod needs a visitor centre to welcome travellers, though not one that is run like the tourist office in the western Romanian city of Arad – where the only English literature is a brochure entitled "Come With Us To Bulgaria".

A Borat Bar and Grill would be a winner (local delicacies include bear and boar), as would tours of the village in a car hauled by livestock, as in the film. A Kazakh Hotel, done up as a bordello and featuring "the fourth-best prostitute in Kazakhstan" might be a tribute too far. But the memory of Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century prince who dispatched his enemies so painfully, can legitimately be invoked to provide an extra dimension. This was his territory, and very beautiful it is, too.

Tourists who are enticed here initially due to the film will discover a land where you can hike in splendid isolation for hours, go biking through virgin forest, or simply enjoy the tranquillity of Boratland. Praise be to Glod.

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