We want to remain in Romania!!

I think it’s safe to say that Romania is nothing like we expected and has quite possibly stolen our hearts. Every time we’ve said we’re heading to Romania people have given us warnings (watch out for the Romanian grape pickers, watch out for the Romanian gypsies, watch out in Romania they’re all thieving bastards!!) so far we have not experienced anything that gives us concern. The country is stunningly beautiful, it has an old charm to it. Everything is clean and tidy and people seem to take a pride in what they have. The streets are not littered with overflowing rubbish bins, plastic recycling is encouraged with large plastic recycle bins placed in the villages and the people we have met have been more than helpful.

I’m not sure we ever want to leave.

Saturday 23 June

We’re still at Camping de Ould Wilg and last night some of the campers came over to see why Keith was lying under the van and gave advise and tried to help which was nice. The garages are all closed now and won’t be open until Monday and we will have to go into the next big town which is Sibiu which is about 30 minutes away.  Keith is awake most of the night thinking!

First thing this morning Keith has the back of the fridge off and it’s in pieces, an hour later it’s all back together and working on gas, yippee.

Next he looks at all the wheels and he can see what the problem is. The wire attached to the brake pads has snapped off hence the reading that something is wrong. He has put the smoking down to being too heavy on the breaks, we had after all driven over 90km up and down a mountain. He’s happy that everything is okay.

We spend the afternoon walking around the village of Carta which is home to Romany Gypsies. It’s only small, not many people or cars around for a Saturday afternoon and it’s very, very quiet. We have a look around the Cistercian Abbey which is said to the oldest and most beautiful of the Gothic monuments in Romania, and it really is beautiful.

We pop into the village shop which is also the pub, we need some bread.  It would be rude not to have a drink whilst we’re here.  We choose our beers from the fridge and sit outside the shop right on the road side, everyone who passes says hello or tries to make conversation in broken English, hand gestures and lots of laughs. The local gypsy men arrive, grab a beer each and a quarter of rum between them. They offer the rum to each other to drink straight from the bottle, classic. One of the men who’s already drunk is trying to impress us with his very drunken interpretation of the words to a queen song lol.

Sunday 24 June

Keith is happy that the brakes are fine so we decide to leave and head to Sibiu.

We spend a couple of hours walking around the city which is lovely and a bit different the houses have eyes!

We climbed the Council Tower for fantastic views overlooking the city we could see for miles the buildings and houses are beautiful it’s a lovely place to visit.

Our campsite for the night is Camping Doua Lumi which is run by a Dutch couple. They pride themselves in flying the flag of the country of each of their guests at the front of the house. No Guernsey flag, the Union Jack or Cross of St George will not do so we give them our flag to fly alongside the Dutch and German flags.  Told them to hang the same flag up when someone from Jersey arrives lol.

We have a walk around the village of Blajel which has four churches, three shops and a pub, its a bit run down but its got a nice feel to it.  An old lady selling eggs from her garden.

Monday 25 June

We spend the morning looking for cheap fuel and gas, getting brake fluid, a vignette and bread.

I’m not feeling that great today really tired and my face is pulling so much to the left it’s making me feel very uncomfortable and I’ve got no energy.

We get to the city of Sighisoara and park in the carpark at the bottom of the town, it’s a small hike to the top but this is enough to make me feel even more tired.

We only spend an hour walking around we don’t get the feel for the place. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage and apparently claims to be the birth place of Vlad the Impaler. Vlad’s birthplace is still there, marked with a placard and now home to a very kitschy restaurant called Casa Dracula.

We eventually find a great free wild camping spot in the carpark in the Turda Gorge (Cheile Turzii Nature Reserve). There’s a new road being built in the area and Snooper was being a right dick trying to send us over a bridge that wasn’t even wide enough to get a horse and cart down. Keith is about to smash her teeth in.  We ignore her and go our own way and eventually get there, it was so worth it.

We’re not alone here a family of 5 scruffy very friendly ‘wild’ dogs keep us company by making themselves comfortable underneath Eugene to keep themselves cool.

We have a very quiet night could hear a pin drop and the dogs were really quiet.

Tuesday 26 June

By the time we’re up and dressed it’s gone 10am. I’m feeling much better today with tons more energy and my face seems to have relaxed a little.

We get our hiking boots on and head off along the path which runs through the gorge following the river.

It’s beautiful and so relaxing we don’t see anyone for over an hour.

We’ve chosen to do a 3 hour round trek. The paths are marked on the trees but somewhere we follow the wrong path and end up coming back the way we came.

The gorge is beautiful and it’s quiet an easy walk although in some places we have to hold on to the wire that’s been hammered into the rocks. The path in places can be slippery from years of footsteps over the rocks making them very shinny and slippery. The gorge is home to lots of different species of butterfly and we try our very best to capture them with the camera, they are quick.

We’ve had a good day and decide to staying another night.

Wednesday 27 June

It rained most of the night and is still raining this morning. Keith is a little worried about getting out of the carpark which has a small incline. We manoeuvre Eugene around the potholes and the rocks and end up with the passengers side on the wet muddy grass with the wheels spinning half way up the incline and we can’t move forward. We reverse back down, re-position, foot to the peddle and we’ve made it, phew!!

We’re off to the Turda Salt Mines dressed in our winter clothes. We’re edging our bets today using Tomtom, Snooper and Google Maps to get there which upto now have been absolutely useless.

The Turda Salt Mines is an enormous underground salt mine which dates as far back as the 17th century which was used for everything from a cheese storage center to a bomb shelter in WWII after excavations stopped in 1932 and has now been converted into an incredible amusement park. Inside there’s an amphitheater, a bowling alley, lake and even a ferris wheel.

We wondered through the corridors of amazing natural salt patterns and each had a lick of the walls lol. The salt is supposed to have healing properties to help with breathing problems. We opted to take the old original staircases up and down the mine, that’s a lot of steps. Keith found going up a bit tough (he’s asthmatic) along with a number of other people that had stopped to catch their breath, it’s obviously not instant healing lol. We went down to 400 feet before reaching the lake with paddle and rowing boats, the queue was too long for us to wait for a boat so we didn’t do this.

The place is an incredible use of an unusual industrial space.

It’s still raining when we leave the salt mine. It’s a 3 hour drive to our next campsite, Camping La Danut. The rain doesn’t let up and makes driving along a very bad road even more difficult, Keith can’t see the pot holes and at times we have to drive either in the middle or the other side of the road.

We see the campsite and from the road some guy is waving to us indicating the driveway. We spend the next 15 minutes in the rain having a conversation with a Romanian who speaks no English and doesn’t even know what language we speak or what country or part of the world we are from. It turns out the owner of the campsite is not here and the guy is a tourist who’s staying in his caravan, he shows us where everything is, it’s all thumbs up, he’s happy, we’re happy.

The campsite is in a field at the bottom of a ski chair lift, unfortunately they only operate in the summer so again we miss out on the chair lift ride. The clouds are rolling in and the thunder is getting closer so we settle down for an early night of crap films, duvets and blankets back on the beds.

Thursday

The rain has stopped although it’s misty but it could be the clouds. Rain and flash floods are forecast for the next 3 days so we’re not sure what we’re going to do.

Before we leave the campsite we have a Skype interview with Karen for a house sit in the Dordogne in September which we get, yeah 10 days of being in one place from the 8th September.

This morning we’re going to the Scarisoara Cave which is said to be a giant ice block hidden deep in the forest of the Apuseni Mountains, standing at 22 meters width and 700 meters length, it’s the largest underground glacier in Europe and second largest in the world.

To get to the cave involves walking down a very well worn metal staircase which leads to a subsided listing wooden staircase, the health and safety police would have a field day here that’s for sure, but we go down all the same lol.

For lunch we went to one of the many food stalls, one was selling pancakes, very big thick pancakes. The cook spoke English and explained the flavours to us, blueberry, cheese and salt. I had a delicious blueberry pancake, Okay I’ll have a cheese one says Keith. She gives him the pancake, not as thick as mine, he takes a bite, no cheese. Is this cheese, yes cheese is salt, salt is cheese. Errr confused, just eat it Keith lol.

Whilst at the Glacier we talk to an English family that we had seen yesterday at the Salt Mines, they recommend that we visit the Bear Cave which isn’t to far away so after lunch we set off to the cave which is on the other side of the mountain. 3 hours later we arrive after having to reverse 3 times up a single track road because bloody coaches were coming up a 3.5 ton road.

The Bears’ Cave is considered to be one of the most incredible places in the area. It was accidentally discovered in 1975 and opened to the public in 1980. It has some incredible stalagmite and stalactite formations, we’ve been in some pretty cool caves but thought this one was pretty spectacular.

Entry into the cave is as a group with a guide, who unfortunately only speaks Romanian. Amongst our group was a Romanian lady who spoke a little French and English. The French were trying to understand what was being said so she tried her very, very best to translate. Keith and I listened to her story “a couple of million years ago some people got trapped in the cave and they starved to death because they only had beer and had to eat each other”  30 minutes into the tour we suddenly realised that what she was saying “millions of years ago some bears were trapped in the cave and starved to death”, absolutely nothing to do with beer lol.

Friday 29 June

We set off early after a very quiet night. We don’t want to leave Romania but we need to leave the mountains, heavy rain and flash flooding is forecast for the next few days and we don’t want the road washed away as we’re driving through, they’re bad enough as it is.  We’re heading south to Arad which is close to the border with Hungry.

We’ve not driven very far when Keith says he can hear grinding from the brakes, if we see a garage we’ll stop and get them to have a look. We don’t have to go too far when we pass a car parts shop. The guy speaks English and can get us brake pads in half an hour but wants his mechanic to have a look a them before he orders them. He gets in his car and tells us to follow him to the repair garage just up the road. A little apprehensive as we’re taken into a small industrial site with about 20 men all staring at us as we drive up to the garage area. But we needn’t have worried, the mechanic got straight to work and was horrified when he took the brake pads off, they were practically falling to bits and right to the metal. Keith was even more horrified after only 2337 miles they shouldn’t have been anywhere near worn.  It looks like we were given very cheap brake pads in Greece.

We obviously get them changed right there and then, within the hour we’re back on our way. Only costing 200lei which is £39 fitted. Let’s hope we’re not doing this again in another 5 weeks.

3 hours drive down from the mountains to miles and miles of flat land and into very moody skies.  We are trying to outrun the rain but we’re heading straight into it.

By the time we reach the city of Arad it’s absolutely chocking it down it takes both of us watching the road and traffic to guide our way through the city. We had intended to stop for a few hours but decided to get to our camperstop instead.

15 km outside the city we find our free spot for the night in the carpark of the Hodos-Bodrog Monastery, one of Romania’s oldest monastic establishments which is still in existence.

We find a place in the carpark and make note of the loud speakers, what are they for? 15 minutes later the monastery is in full swing for the next 2 hours and don’t we know it. The monks are ‘singing’ over the loud speakers and believe it or not its an absolutely beautiful sound.  You can hear this on our Facebook page.

Once the rain stops we head into the monastery for a look around there’s hardly anyone here. Nothing is written in English so we’re not sure if we can enter the church, prayers are in full swing and we’re a little uncomfortable not knowing what the protocol is so we leave and head back to Eugene.

Over the next few hours the carpark becomes busy with cars and by 11.30pm the carpark is packed much to our surprise what are they doing here, where have the come from, either McDonald’s has a stall inside or this is a dogging carpark. 11.30pm on the dot it becomes clear this is a very religious monastery the ‘singing’ starts again until 2am in the morning!!  Have these monks got no consideration for us trying to watch Wolverine with a few Friday night vodkas.  By 2.15am the carpark is empty again and peace and quiet is restored and we can finally get some sleep.

Saturday 30 June

We’re awake just before 6am, the monks are singing again, pillow over our heads we manage to stay in bed until 10am, I know lazy but we are both feeling a little hungover as well.

We’ve decided to go to the Lunca Muresului National Park we’re not sure if we can camp overnight but we’ve got a campsite in mind if we can’t.

As soon as we get to the visitor center  we see two Kestrels sitting just feet away from us and they are not bothered by us at all.  We think they might have been hand reared because they stay in the area all day.

We’re were parked is a lovely bbq area which throughout the day and late into the evening are put into good use by the many families who arrive throughout the day.  Its got a lovely feel to the place.

The warden says yes we can sleep overnight.

We get the bikes out and head off along the path around the lake.  I get to pick some plums which are yummy.

Somewhere we take a wrong turn and end up in the ‘real’ Romania.  A huge shanty town, kids running around with no clothes on, rubbish everywhere, loud music coming from the houses, loads of dogs, cats and people sitting in the street.  They all look at us wondering what the hell we’re doing here and initially we feel a little uncomfortable, we say ‘hello’ in our best Romanian accents and they acknowledge us, absolutely nothing for us to worry about.

Back on the path we see loads of things, butterflies, green & brown frogs in the puddles on the track, swans, coots and ducks and beautiful red dragonflies.

Its a lovely place full of families using the bbq dotted around the park, the smell of the cooking is divine, we fit in with one of the families and make use of the bbq once they’d finished.

Don’t forget to LIKE our Facebook page and please feel free to share our journey with your friends, we’ve only got 3 followers on Polarsteps, thanks Claire for joining us, but would like some more lol.

I put a lot of effort into writing the blogs, trying to keep you all updated telling you where we are and trying to keep it interesting, so please let us know you’re with us.  The internet is a nightmare and adding photos is a right chore, but I do it for you lol.

A la perchoine

Shirena & Keith

Xxxxx