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Ingrid's world adventure - Romania
Staff member: Ingrid // Trip date: Sep 2011
Ingrid's world adventure - Romania
We really didn't know what to expect when we arrived in Romania and other than a small knowledge of "Transylvania" from the Dracula stories we had no idea where we wanted to visit. So our 12 days in Romania, unexpectedly turned out to be some of the best days we have had so far on our trip.
Once again we were using our Eurail Global passes to travel around Romania. In Romania most of the intercity services are all compulsory to reserve however this is all done free of charge at the ticket window. We never had any issues with availability on the trains we wanted to travel on, we just went to the ticket counter around 30 minutes before our train was due to depart, showed our Eurail passes and asked if we needed to reserve. Some of the services we took were small local trains which only carried 2nd class seats, had no air-conditioning and didn't need any reservation. But there were other trains which were just as nice, if not nicer, than some of those services you find in Western Europe. Big, spacious 1st class carriages, nice and clean and with plenty of space for luggage.
We definitely had one experience not to be easily forgotten with Romanian transport. That was when we decided to take the bus rather than the train from a small town in Western Romania to the major town of Timisoara. If you ever travel in Romania you will soon discover that whilst for the most part their train system is clean and runs on time, it is also very slow! Most of the train journeys will take 50% longer if not twice as long as the same journey by bus or car. This is purely due to the fact that the infrastructure for the train lines in small villages just isn't that comprehensive. But between major cities you will have no issues. We happened to be in a small town so we decided to try out the bus service as it was going to take three hours instead of four on the train. We regretted it a little later on, as we had a driver who spent the majority of the trip with one hand on the wheel and the other either holding a cigarette (it was a non-smoking bus) or on his mobile phone. And he wondered why all these cars kept overtaking him and honking their horns loudly as they went past....He was drifting constantly across the lines in the middle of the road. A little scary and I must admit I couldn't watch a lot of it and figured it was best to just go to sleep and pray you would still wake up alive and well at the end of it.Needless to say it was the only bus we took in Romania. We decided to stick with trains after that.
With 12 days in Romania we saw plenty. But a few highlights have to be mentioned.
Firstly - Bucharest. I would have to say out of all the places we have visited so far on our trip this one surprised me the most. It is an amazing city. Perhaps not so beautiful in some areas but the old town itself and the surrounding areas are just wonderful and we really loved our couple of days there. We could have easily stayed longer but we prefer to be in smaller areas rather than big cities if we can so we were looking forward to heading into Transylvania.
We of course had to visit the castle known as Draculas, Bran Castle. In fact, Vlad 'the Impaler' Dracul, whom Bram Stoker based the Dracula character on never actually lived in the castle at all. It was just a good place for Bram Stoker to based his story. Vlad visited the castle only once during his lifetime. So other than the souvenir shops you won't find any real information about "Dracula" at Bran castle. But still the castle itself is beautiful, perched atop a cliff in a lovely little town close to Brasov.
We did actually go out of our way to make a day trip to another castle which is rarely visited by foreign tourists in the industrial town of Hunedoara in Western Romania. This was truly amazing. A amazingly medieval looking castle which was also helped by the fact that there was some filming going on there at the time so there were people walking around dressed in full costume to help add to the atmosphere.
Something we never expected to see on our round world trip was Jousting. Yes the real kind with knights on horses and long pointy sticks. There was some kind of Jousting tournament happening in Brasov when we were there and we happened to hear about it through someone at the hostel. So thought we'd go along and investigate. It turned out to be some great entertainment watching the "Knights" battle it out with different disciplines in the arena.
Another one of our favourite things we did in Romania was again kind of by accident. Our hostel owner in Sibiu had suggested we visit this town nearby and to get there we had to take a bus to a tramcar. She said that if we wanted to waste a bit of time if we had to wait for the next tramcar we should visit this "little open air museum," close by. So when we arrived on the bus we thought ok lets go and see this little museum. Turns out it was not little in the slightest and we ended up not visiting the other town at all and just spent the whole day in the museum. It was in fact an entire village which had been created by moving different building and structures from across Romania over the years and rebuilding them to create a kind of old traditional town. We really enjoyed just wandering through the hectares of property and seeing all of the old buildings, they had everything from traditional water mills, to icehouses for fisherman, horse and carts moving things around the village, traditional Romanian wooden churches and even an old Ferris wheel, completely made out of wood. What we found even more amazing was the fact that it appeared people were actually living there as well. Whilst you were allowed to go into some of the house and they were just decked out with traditional artefacts like a museum in other areas there were gates at the back that lead to other houses which were private and were actually where people were living. We assume they were people who maintained the museum. But it was great as it made it seem more like a real working town.
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