The Romanian invasion of Britain was called off yesterday. At the stroke of midnight Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union and, according to the scaremongers, a ragamuffin army should have been flocking to Britain in an armada of buses, trains and planes.

Instead, Romanians stayed at home to celebrate their accession with European-themed new year galas and a power-cut-threatening explosion of blue and yellow lights. A far cry from the days of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu — executed 17 years ago — who punished Romanians for using light bulbs stronger than 40 watts.

“Nobody wants to go to London apart from you,” said the man from Eurolines Coach Services, “so we have cancelled the bus.” The photographer Petrut Calinescu and I had travelled for a bone-shaking 28 hours from Bucharest, from New Europe to Old Europe, in the hope of making the connection from Cologne to London Victoria and seeing the first of the invaders tred on British soil.

“I prefer working in Belgium than in Britain,” said Razvan Pavel, a chain-smoking fellow passenger. Pavel, 29, is a trained accountant who works as a delivery driver in Brussels. “I get €1,200 and can save €500 a month,” he says. “The average wage here is €250, so you can do the arithmetic.”

Working in Britain might have brought him a higher wage, but the high living costs have steered him and many other would-be immigrants away. As we climbed on the bus — the only one that supposedly connected with a new year coach to London — scores of Romanians were setting out on equally long journeys to Avignon, Dortmund and Liège. Later in the day buses were heading for Spain, Italy and Greece, the favourite work destination of the Romanians.

More than two million Romanians work abroad and so far only a few thousand have chosen Britain. There is no big Romanian diaspora, no network that helps out with beds or jobs.

It was 5 o’clock in the morning at the central bus station, just opposite a 24-hour McDonald’s; a dwarf was sweeping away litter and the Gypsies, high cheekboned with swirling ankle-length skirts, seemed to be taking only the coach to Switzerland. The word seemed to have gone out to steer clear of the EU for now.

Our bus odyssey across the continent put us in touch with the tensions, hopes and dreams of modern day European migration. As we talked and drove our way through Transylvania and beyond, the question that gnawed at us was how modern Europe would be able to deal with the poverty gap opened up by enlargement.

08:30, Saturday Dawn broke over Brasov as we stopped for our first cigarette break. Once an industrial centre, now a bruised township. Three dogs yapped as we drew in. A Gypsy controlling access to the grimy men’s toilet was selling lavatory paper by the sheet. The bus station, once marginal to the town, had become its fulcrum. A board showed the connections across Europe, and crucially to Moldova. One fear in the West is that Moldovans — the poorest of the poor in Europe — will claim their right to Romanian citizenship and head west. Hundreds of thousands have asked for the appropriate forms; officials emphasise that it could take them years to get EU passports.

10:30, Saturday Florian Petrescu has joined us from Targoviste. “It’s the place where Ceausescu was killed in the Christmas revolution,” he says cheerfully. He is 43, cagey about his job and on his way to join his brother, a chemical engineer in Germany. “I’m a pensioner,” he says. “My time is my own.” Romania has a mass of young pensioners. Women who work for 20 years can retire at 50.

Steelworkers are regarded as hardship cases and qualify for early retirement. So do ballerinas and flautists.

11:30, Saturday At a stopover in Sibiu, which is the European Capital of Culture for this year, Pavel explains the upside-down economics of Romania. “Rent is high, almost Western standards, and food is pricey,” he says. “I work abroad because I don’t want to live with my parents all my life. I want to save for a flat.” The average wage of €250 is misleading. The rural poor earn well below that but can make ends meet; they grow enough food to eat and sell and often live in inherited farms. They are unlikely to shift west; it is the urban middle class that is on the move.

13:00, Saturday Over a stomach-curdling lunch of Ciorba de Burta, tripe soup, Mr Petrescu admits that he used to work for the Interior Ministry, “but not the secret police — not me!” Now he wants to use his short stay in the West to mobilise support for a doctor falsely jailed for rape. “He was set up by the police because he had complained about corruption in his clinic.” Mr Petrescu is hoping that the European Court of Justice will take up the case.

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