Romania - Transylvania and other stories

We cross into Romania and go to Timisoara. This is the small city where the 1989 Romanian Revolution started. It's a tatty, student town with many of the tourist sights under renovation.

 Once out of the urban areas, one small village runs into the next. The roads are potholed and the new highway East towards Bucharest stops and starts as construction continues. We share the narrow roads with cars, trucks and horse-drawn carts. Drivers are crazy, overtaking madly on blind rises and corners. Through towns, the road is lined with Saxon style houses built up against the street, with no gardens and enclosed courtyards, to form a solid walled defence. Many people have set up stalls to sell the produce from their gardens and small farms. There are truck-loads of ripe watermelons everywhere. People are preparing for Winter already, chopping up huge logs into firewood in the streets outside their houses. It's noticeably poorer and undeveloped compared to the rest of Europe.

As we head towards Transylvania and Dracula country, the hills become more undulating. We visit Sibiu and camp in the hills outside Ciadora. Next we stay in Sigisoara, another Unesco site and birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. It's a pretty town and we do see a lot more tourists. This is castle country- Pele, Rasnov and Bran; THE Dracula Castle, with all the surrounding tourist tat. For the record, Bram Stoker based his Dracula Character on the real Vlad, who apparently never came to Bran Castle at all. Anyway, it's still all spooky fun.

We planned to camp in Siniaia, a mountain resort popular with locals on weekends. It's a Friday afternoon and it's madly busy so Bucharest makes it onto our agenda after all. Finding a scruffy Irish pub means we can see the Super 15 Rugby final and spend a very pleasant day in Bucharest, which is less scruffy than we expected. We enjoyed the vibe in the Centro Historico, sampling local wines and traditional grilled meats and polenta.