Romania – Day 9 // Bacau-Home

Today we were up very early to head to our final destination from which we were due to catch our flight back to Liverpool.

We caught to first metro train to the northern side of Bucharest and found our bus. We got a few pastries in our bellies and had a sleep. The bus took about 3 and a half hours. As we were heading back toward to north now we were getting back into the German influenced part of the country.

We arrived around midday in Bacau, and went to the Lidl to make some sandwiches and made a big mess on the pavement with our overfilled, hollowed loaves of bread. After a feed we walked around the town and found it very unremarkable. We had some 8 hours to kill so ended up gently walking around to town, sitting in the sun and eating food.

Eventually we headed toward to airport, which took us a very long time to find du to poor signage. After attempting to walk in to a military base and a high school we found the airport which was one terminal, with some flight that day which funnily enough was too Liverpool. The airport had seen better days. The departure lounge had a number of gypsy families in there and we noted some negative feelings toward them from other Romanian passengers. The scene did feel like the whole airport was fake, and that at any point the image of the runway outside might fall over and turn out to be a background. But in the end we boarded our plan and got on our way home.

What a week! I feel like I’ve done even better this time in terms of making the most of avenues like couchsurfing and hitchhiking. We hitched over 1000km, spent 5/8 nights with couchsurfers, hiked 10km into the mountains and took one train and one bus. This was next level adventuring and an amazing learning time. Until next time, readers!

Romania – Day 8 // Bucharest

Today we left our hostel and went to explore Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. We started by heading for the old town. Bucharest had very striking architecture, most of which is either empty or graffito-tagged. It’s here that you get an impression of the state that the Romanian economy is in.

We walked around the old town for a while and ended up heading to the Palace of Parliament, which is the second largest administrative building in the world after The Pentagon in the United States.

We walked around the block to get a perspective on its size. Pretty, pretty big. There was a gallery in the bottom which we popped into before departing.

We walked north, heading back through the city towards a large park where we hung out for a while. The park was a bit of a ghost town, with all the ice cream and drink vendors being long closed and the gardens being relatively unloved.

We headed back into the city and bought some groceries. The city really started to come alive once the sun went down, as people flooded the streets on their commutes home.

We jumped on the metro and headed out to the east where we met Beatrice and her boyfriend who hosted us for the night. We made them dinner and talked all evening about living in Bucharest, quality of life and history in Romania and all sorts.
I tried to clarify what is perceived as a Gypsy, and how people clarify between the beggars/thieves/homeless/cheaters/dirty people that are often referred to as Gypsies and the Romani people, who are a cultural people who still live in a nomadic, community oriented way. It was very confusing, but one group holds a lot more favour than the other.

Stef and I were very tired and our hosts had work in the morn so we all turned in. Stef and I are up shortly before 5am to get to a bus to Bacau so we can catch our flight home. Happy days.

Overall, Bucharest was worth the visit just to tick it off. Many people we have met so far told us not to bother, and I can certainly see why. Had we had to sacrifice any of the days prior to Bucharest in order to make it I would have skipped it. But one day was more than enough .

Romania – Day 7 // Iron Gates

Today was a huge day. We left our room at 7.30 and walked down the road to the exit of Pitesti. Our goal today is hitch from to Pitesti to Orsula to see a giant face sculpture carved into the side of a mountain on the Romanian / Serbian boarder and then get to Bucharest for the night. Pitesti to Orsula is just under 300km and then back east 300km to Bucharest.

We got picked up shortly before 9am out of Pitesti and got driven around 40km to just outside a town called Slatina. From there we got quickly picked up again by an older man who had two other local hitchhikes in the car with him. It was about 70km to Craiova – our next stop, and by 11am we had already hitched 120km.

We dropped into a supermarket to pick up some bread and veges for lunch and continued on our way. We got picked up again by a Romanian man who agreed to take us 40km down the road to Filiasi.
The landscape was really beginning to chance now. The north is distinctive due to its German influence, where as the land was now beginning to get very barren, resembling the countryside in Southeast Asia. There were also oil fields and the music in the cars was making it feel like we were in Turkey or Arab lands.

After a wee while the guy we were with started to say that he wanted a large amount of money for the ride, and after picking up some more people we decided we would get out as soon as possible. About 20km from Filiasi we pulled over to drop the others and we go out, giving him 5lei. He tried to get us to give him more but we walked away and he drove off.

We felt good to be out of there, and a good thing we did because 10 minutes later we got picked up by an older gentleman who was driving all the way to Timișoara, the route to which runs through Orsula. He drove us all the way and we gave him 20lei/£4 for the trouble. We had made it the whole 300km from 9am to 2pm. We were very happy.

We went to a gas station to get coffee and check couchsurf messages to see that we had an offer of a bed in Bucahrest tonight, which only added to our feeling of success. In the line for coffee we got talking to a guy who had just been living in London, and were able to ask him for the information about trains from Orsula to Bucharest – the next of which left at 5.10pm, giving us plenty of time to go to the sculpture and get back.

Orsula is a port town on Denube river which acts as the boarder separating Romania and Serbia. In fact we were so close to Serbia that our phone providers welcomed us to Serbia.
We walking into the village and got managed to find a man to take us out to the statue. We agreed on a price and we were off on the final stretch to today’s epic mission.

We got dropped off and managed to make sure we understood that the driver would wait for us. We walked down the road and suddenly there it was – Chipul lui Decebal, supposedly the second largest in the world, presumably to Mount Rushmore.

 

We sat under the bridge and ate our lunch gazing up at the huge face for some time. We had a wee walk down the road before heading back to the driver who then took us back to down and dropped us at the Train Station where we got our train tickets for around £15.

Seven hours later we were in the capital. It was midnight and we want to a hostel. The train made us nearly kill each other so we drank a bottle of wine to unwind and went to bed.

Romania – Day 6 // Hiking/Pitești

After a very restful sleep in Claire and Nicholas’s lovely home we were up at 8.30 for breakfast with them. Claire pulled out a map and invited us to go hiking with them for the day. Stef and I had been wanting to get into the mountains so this was an exciting opportunity.

The four of us jumped into their car with their lovely rescue dog and drove from Ghimbav, through Râșnov and Zărnești to the Piatra Craiului mountain range. We drove for many kilometres into the national park and, after solving a little car trouble, parked the car and started trekking into the range.

Between 12pm and 4pm the four of us walked 10km through forest, fields and rivers all under the gaze of the huge snow capped mountains. The air was chilly, the views and autumnal colours out of side world and the mountains were breathtaking. We stopped half way for some homemade hummus and bread. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

After arriving back at the car Nicholas and Claire drove us to the nearby town of Bran, where we started our next epic leg of the journey – hitching to the Romanian-Serbian boarder to see the Iron Gates. We wanted about 30 minutes, trying to get a ride with the local farmers before being picked up by a young Romanian mother who drove us for two hours to a town called Pitești.

She gave us yet another new perspective on life in Romania, saying that it was very hard to make a good living in the current economy. She was a trained psychologist working with kids and was finding life hard. She said there were big problems like Romania not having enough GPs because they all leave to work elsewhere in the EU because they can earn more. She seemed troubled – constantly ignoring her phone calls from what we assume is her sons father. She was very nice to us though and I think we bought a little bit of happiness to her day.

By the time we arrived in Pitești it was dark and we decided we would stay here the night. There is really nothing to see or do here, we walked around for a bit to see what was going on. We found a night market and I got a chance to try Mici, a traditional dish similar to Kofta. It was very nice.

We eventually decided we would go find a hotel as there was no hostels to stay in and we weren’t hearing from any couchsurfers. We found one just out of the city and got a room for £10 each. It smells like bad perfume and reminds me of some of the places I stayed in Thailand last year. Weird but hilarious. The hitching continues tomorrow.

Romania – Day 5 // Brașov

A rough start this morning. After only 3-4 sleep we were up, wine on our breath and getting ready for another busy day. Irina prepared some lovely eggs which we munched down with coffee and bread like adolescent boys, only with more giggling and less grunting.

By 9am the three of us were in the streets, Stef and I accompanying Irina to her office. We said our goodbyes and we carried on to go and find some cardboard with which we would craft the days signs. Tonight we would be staying just outside of Brasov but we spent the day hitching to sites and villages in the surrounding area.

Our first stop was one recommended to us by one of the bartenders we were chatting to the previous night. Lacul Noua was a small man-made lake located about 5 km from the city. As locals hitchhiking short distances between towns is rather a common occurrence we thought it would be easy to get a lift across the city. Within minutes of waiting we had passers by telling us to just get the bus. One woman was very persistent and while her intentions were good, after 15 minutes of not understanding her Romanian we were ready to figure it out ourselves.
In the end we got on the bus (without a ticket) and rode down the road to the lake. In the end it was a little lack lustre and we decided not to hang around. We walked back to the main road and got our signs out to head out of Brasov to a mountain town called Predeal. Within minutes we were picked up by two students driving home for the weekend.

  
Predeal was only about 13km up the road so after 20 minutes of small talk we were on the street again. There was a noticeable difference in temperature in the mountains, so out came the scarfs and gloves and we decided to treat ourselves to coffee and the addition of some mystery whiskey. This certainly warmed us up.
We walked down the Main Street and decided that there wasn’t too much to see here to we stuck our thumbs out and headed to Bușteni. It was only a few minutes before another student picked us up and we were there in 10 minutes.

We took a side street and headed up towards the mountains and into the forest where we stumbled across Mănăstirea Caraiman, an orthodox monetary founded in 1998. Not example and ancient sight but certainly a nice place in a nice setting.

      
We headed back into the forest and followed a path less travelled in the village further up the hill, with is where a gondola started up past beautiful rock faces and into the misty mountains. We see considering going up but given the cloud today we decided we wouldn’t be able to get the full experience, so we sat and ate some sandwiches with another shabby pal before heading down into the main town to get a ride to Sinaia.

      

We got picked up by a Polish mother and daughter who had just started on a few days holiday together. Sinaia again was only a dozen kilometres down the road so we were there fairly fast. We got out and started climbing the hill where we found Mănăstirea Sinaia, a monastery founded in the late 1700s. This was something special, the chapel was ornately decorated with paintings, carvings and metal work.

                
We popped across the road into a beautiful old building, now a Greek style cafe, restaurant and guest house only to get a coffee to keep us going. On arrival we were greeted by Ajax, the owner of the establishment, a Greek actor and member of the National a Theatre of Greece. He immediately gave us complimentary Ouzo, fish and bread and he proceeded to tell us how he came to own the place, about his family of actors and life in general.

We sat with him for about half an hour before saying goodbye and heading up the hill to see Peleș Castle, a neo-Renaissance castle built between 1873 and 1914.

We took this in before hitching back to Brasov and heading out to a Ghimbav, just west of Brasov, where we were spending the night with Claire and Nicholas, a French couple who had been living in Romania for 4 months.
Stef made a lovely dinner and we all spent the evening talking about travel, food, family and life. We sampled some local liqueurs before all heading to bed at a reasonable hour. Despite the 3-4 hours sleep last night we have done very well today. Caio.

 

Romania – Day 4 // Brașov

Today we got up, packed up and left our hostel with Chloe to have another walk around the citadel. We bumped into a couple of other people from our hostel who joined us for a walk around the church and graveyard.                

We walked down the hill into the town and found some more backed goods and a coffee at a local chain restaurant from where we stole a promotional table flyer to make into a sign to get us to Brasov.

We walked to the road out of town and within 15 minutes we were picked up by a Romanian with a great moustache in a truck who didn’t speak English, so we sat and giggled for the duration for the 130km trip from Sighisoara to Brasov.
By early afternoon, after a wet ride and witnessing several fresh road accidents we had reached our destination. We walked into the centre city and soaked up the sites. The old town sits directly below a large forest covered hill called Tampa, which we began to scale.
Our misty hill adventure took 2 hours to get up and back down and, despite the signs, we didn’t see an brown bears – although we did have a panicked moment when we heard strange noises on top of the mountain which turned out to be a large flag flapping in the wind. No bears, much rain. High spirits.

                  
After getting back into the city we decided to check out some of the nice pubs we had seen before our accent. And sat and had beers in a few different establishments before heading off to the home of Irina, our host for the night. We went via the supermarket and arrived with wine and a meal to prepare.
We got aquainted over locally brewed spirits and cultural exchanges, learning more about the history and attitudes of Romanians. We enjoyed a lovely evening which after the third bottle of wine somehow had gotten to 4am, so this post will be shorter than usual for this reason.
Day 4 was a success all around.  

  

Romania – Day 3 // Sighișoara

This morning we woke up in Noemi and Ana’s Sibiu apartment. Ana went off to classes at 7.30am and the rest of us slowly pulled ourselves together and were out of the house by 8.30.

Noémi had decided she would rather spend the morning with us that attend her engineering lecture, so we had a guide for the morning. We walked into the historic district which we had explored last night and found more local baked goods, this time a filled with sauerkraut and mushroom.
We went to a café and downed some coffees and chats while we waited for the drizzle to subside. One it did we headed to Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary and paid a pound to climb the bell tower and get a great perspective on the city.
We walked the streets some more before leaving Noémi and catching a bus to edge of town and starting the hitchhike to Sighisoara, or original destination from yesterday.

 Within 15 minutes we were in a car with 3 Romanians who didn’t speak English with Romanian hip hop blasting through the stereo. We got dropped off in a town called Mediaș, which is half way between Sibiu and Sighisoara. We slipped the driver 10lei (depending on who you are picked up by it is customary to give a little money) and walked through the city.
We stopped at Lidl and spent 3 pounds on some food for lunch and enjoyed our most hobo like dining experience thus far, picnicing on a manhole cover in the lidl car park with a stray dog for company. Food included eating canned fish and cheese with our fingers with a loaf of bread. Class.

  
We continued walking through Mediaș, deviating briefly to walk through a 19th century cemetery. We found the road out of town, which was right by the historic district. As we were doing well for time and we’d never be here again we figured we’d take some time to have a look around.
Within minutes of getting into the old town we were approached by an elderly lady who, for the sake of the reader we will call Claudia, who gave us a broken German tour of the old town.
We were with her for about 20 minutes before we said goodbye and made our way back to the road. Once at a good spot we weren’t stood on the street more that three minutes before we were picked up by a pair of German tourists in a rental car. They told us we smelt like fish, at which point we realised that our culinary decisions do in fact affect other people.

      
Our new German friends were heading to Sighișoara via a tiny village just off the highway called Mălâncrav, which is basically exactly what you might expect all of Roman to be like. Horse and carts, tatty houses, forests and mist. A really beautiful wee stop.

    
We drove another 10 minutes down the road and we got dropped in Sighișoara. We walked up to the citadel as the night got dark. Given that this is the home of Vlad the Impaler we figured that dusk would be the best time to explore the historical centre. As the rain got heavier and the mist settled in we definitely felt and eery vibe to the city.

                           
We eventually found a hostel in the old town. We had turned up at the hostel with food to cook from the supermarket to find no kitchen, so ordered some cheap food from the menu, thinking we could order a basic pasta and add the ingredient from our planned one pot pasta. However the cream we had bought turned out to be yoghurt, so that didn’t really work. We laughed, we cried, I ate it anyway.
The rest of the evening was spent in the shelter of our hostel with a new Australian friend Chloe drinking red wine.

Romania – Day 2 // Sibiu

Today we figured we would start early and make the most of our time on Cluj Napoca. We got up at 6am, wrapped up warm and snuck out in to the dark streets to catch a taxi up to Tāietura Turcului, a forest on the outskirts of the town which is meant to be the most haunted woods in the world. 
It was still pitch black when we arrived and, despite being skeptics we were both a little on edge. The forest was very quiet and as we walked through it the sun began to rise and we found some great spots from which to watch the city light up. 

        
        

  We walked back the way we came and got a cab back to the house (£3 for 25 min drive) for 8.30 to meet the girls for a coffee before they headed off to their classes. 

   
 

Noémi had only been gone a few minutes before she returned, having misread her timetable, so Stef and I gathered our things and we were taken on a tour through the old town. 
Cluj’s old town contains a lot of sneaky paved pedestrian streets with churches and bakeries, as well as the cities major roads which contain many on the cities larger churches and monuments. En route we enjoyed a local baked good, Palanetul Savuros – bread filled with cheese, ham, mushroom and tomato purée. Here it felt like being back in Europe, although a smoggier version. 

              

We went and had a coffee at a hip hop café (3 pounds for 3 coffees) before Noémi left us to go to her classes. We went a climbed a hill to get a perspective of the old town before walking, via a kebab to a good spot to get picked up to hitch to Sighisoara. 

    
We tried multiple spots before being approached by a local girl called Ania who took as to a bus stop and drew us a map which would take us to where we needed to be to have a better chance at a ride. She was a photographer and local street artist born and bred in Cluj Napoca. She took a photo of us and we were on a bus one stop to get to the point. 

Once there we saw many more people hitching so knew we were in the right place. After about an hour someone pulled over for us, who was going to Sibiu, a city we were due to visit anyway. So we improvised and got in with him and headed to Sibiu. 

Our drivers name was Darius, a former professional rugby player turned engineer who designs productions lines for multiple European car manufacturers. Over the course of the next two hours we talked about his work, family, Romanian history, religion and the old communist times. He had a lot of very interesting views about the state of Romania that I would have thought conflicted with the line of thinking of most Romanians. But then again he is the first Romanian I have met on this trip. 

      

He dropped us in Sibiu and we went to plug into wifi to get in touch with a friend of Noémi’s from last night, also called Noémi who studies in Sibiu and we knew was happy to have us. She was studying until 9pm so we had a few hours to kill so we went and familiarised ourselves with the old town, finding the main square and churches, very charming cobbled streets and more very sneaky little alleyways. 

               

 
We found a little place to have a sit down and have a drink and, as we were on track for budget so far, enjoyed a local plum brandy and dips, which came to know more than £6 between us. 
9pm rolled around and we went to meet Naomi at our prearranged spot, hopped in a cab and headed for her house. We met her housemate Ana and embarked on a classic evening of vino, food and giggles until the wee hours of the morning. 
Tomorrow we will run around Sibiu a bit before cracking on with the adventure. 

Romania – Day 1 // Cluj Napoca

Welcome back readers! It’s been two months since my Irish adventure and now I am embarking on a new adventure, this time with my pal Stefan. We are headed to Romania for a frugal living, pal making, good times fact finding mission.
We departed Huskisson street, each with a small, light backpack and a coffee in hand and make our way to Liverpool John Lennon Airport for our 11am flight to Cluj Napoca, the unofficial capital of the Transylvania region.

   
We arrived at 4pm local time and opted to walk into the city. The sun was beaming down and the air was chilly, which was a welcome climate after the stuffy plane ride.
After an hour and a half, passing through the industrial area and grotty soviet apartment blocks we arrived in the old town, which gave the city a very European vibe. Romania cultures themselves are some of the oldest in Europe, and Transelvania was a part of the Hungarian Austrian Empire until the end of WWII.

                
We found our way through the old town to our couchsurf host Noémi’s house by 7pm and had a brief chat before popping out to the Kaufland to get some food and wine for dinner. A handful of fresh veges, two bottles of wine, and french stick and a can of whole tomatoes cost us 28lei (6 pounds).
We got back to the house and started cooking some dinner, drinking wine and getting acquainted with our three hosts. All are girls of Hungarian decent living in Cluj for university. We were surprised to learn that there is a large population of Hungarian Romanians who speak Hungarian primarily, a hangover from when Transylvania was a part of Hungry.
The five of us giggled into the night, talked about our general route for the week, discussed local music and culture and made plans for the morrow.

      
An amazing introduction to a place neither Stef nor I know much about. We even managed to get a place to stay in another town through these girls. Safe to say we made a good impressions. We hit the hay early so we could make the most of tomorrow, first heading to Clujs haunted forest. Great times!