Romanian style

“Left turn soon, 90 degrees.”

I was hunched over an iPhone with a satnav app in the front passenger seat of a dirt-crusted Lancia rental. Peering alternately at the screen and in vain out the front window, we shuddered over the rutted Romanian highway. We were driving over a mountain just outside of Brasov and attempting to make our way through the mist that had set in over the increasingly obscured road. It was dense. So dense that putting the lights on high-beam simply revealed more whited-out nothing. Rob, a British second-hand clothes magnate, was behind the wheel. A driving enthusiast and keen to get back to Brasov as early as possible, he refused to slow down. In an attempt to avoid further imperilment, he had suggested I try to offer some rally-style instructions to improve his anticipation of the road.

Pigeons in Timiosara

 “Shit. Hair-pin right. Slow down.”

But the real danger was his compulsion to overtake on these winding, unlit roads. Roads that were frequented by horse and carts with no illumination whatsoever that rumbled slowly up and down the mountains carrying anything from hay and logs to families of walnut-faced gypsies. Roads with bush-shrouded corners of negligible visibility that the locals liked to hurtle around at breakneck speed.

This combination of circumstances led to a certain collective brainstorming, the net result of which was the resolution to do things like the locals. Do things Romanian style. This is a fairly simple change in attitude and it involves the conscious decision to throw caution to the wind and overtake wherever you want. On corners, blindly, swerving in and out of multiple trucks, and generally using that one thing a group of young men have in spades: brash stupidity.

View from Rasnov fort

This was the end of a long day’s drive along part of the Transfăgărăşan highway. For those not well-versed in Romanian road lore, this is the road Top Gear dubbed the best driving road in the world. Sadly, our attempts to drive the whole thing were thwarted by the fact that the high mountain pass that opens out into the sweeping valley with the most famous section was closed, rendering our grand pilgrimage slightly anticlimactic, even though we did get to enjoy the section preceding that winds around an enormous dam-lake.

It was an ambitious plan that had us ending up here. See an old fort at Rasnov, visit Bram Castle, and then drive indefinitely through increasingly dilapidated Romanian villages en route to this fabled stretch of tarmac.

The day started reasonably enough, waking up Rob and James—who had ended up at the same hostel as us in Brasov after Potato Mike and I met them in Cluj-Napoca—and asking if they wanted to join us for a casual day’s driving. Clearly the Potato and I are quality company, as they seized the opportunity. So after the rental man dropped the car off, we set out. The first fort was pretty and of ruin, and after a photo opportunity was taken we set off to Bram Castle, the most popular tourist point in Romania.

Jimmy and Stefan Stan

 This should have been all the warning needed for me to anticipate an over-priced, disappointing shit hole. Suffice to say, that is what it was. Over-restored, full of head bangingly low ceilings and uninteresting information and décor, it was a bit of a chore.

So we grabbed some sandwich makings from a supermarket and jumped in the car in search of the highway, the semi-tragic ending of which I have covered already. We assuaged any mild woes by that same night celebrating Thanksgiving for Potato Mike at a local restaurant where they sold meat plates, which, as the name suggests, involve a lot of protein. After this we met Big Joe at the hostel and went out to try and find something to do. As a group of five men, this first involved drinking at a bar and discussing, amongst other things, poo and hookers, before the evening end with us taking photos with Romania’s pop idol of 2011, Stefan Stan (a Romanian doppelganger for Sydney’s Tony Ly) after watching his incredibly cheesy set.

Church.

My journey through Romania started out of Belgrade, where I had returned to after Budapest. A rather uptight city where people are fervently religious, the young men aggressive, and the women of classic Balkan styling, it is not one of my favourites. The highlight of my brief stopover here was meeting a cool Dutch couple, Bram and Anouk, after the three of us made the same mistake of getting to the walking tour an hour early due to a confusing flyer. We bonded over a coffee and after tottering around the city enjoyed a burek and made plans to try to find somewhere interesting to go in the evening, given that Serbia allegedly has the best nightlife in the world.

The place we ended up going to, despite having some rather cool light projections on the wall, left me feeling rather indifferent. It didn’t help being constantly bustled into by shaven-headed youths, the attitude of whom I think is best reflected in their walk. It involves a flexed back and shoulders to appear as large as possible, with the option of rolling the shoulders forward to appear more menacing. Preferably one’s hands are in one’s pockets such that your flared elbows add to the total space you occupy. Meanwhile the actual walking motion involves a wide-set gait, kicking out your feet aggressively to punctuate each manly stride.

Our rally car

Leaving Belgrade to enter Romania is a drag. I was trying to meet Potato Mike in Cluj-Napoca, but the only place I could get to was Timiosara, a small town near the border. Even this small feat involved catching a bus to Vrsac, a town near the Serbian border. During the bus ride the landscape became progressively more impoverished as we left the Eastern-European glamour of Belgrade behind, passing through a land of shepherds where we slowed and stopped for cows to cross the road, overtaking tractors and horses and carts laden with pumpkinesque gypsies.

Fancy projections in Belgrade

At Vrsac four of us were ejected and told to walk along the highway until we found the train station, at which point after a two hour layover we could catch a train to Timiosara. Thankfully we were able to fill this layover by going to a nearby supermarket, replete with all of our luggage, and collecting some supplies to make some snacks for the train.

I arrived at my hostel in Timiosara feeling a little worse for wear, but when a German asks you if you want to go to a Romanian rock gig, you don’t say no, and so I found myself watching Travka Okean at a bar of a location entirely unknown to me. From here we followed a small fat man into an unmarked building that looked like a flat, on one level of which we opened an unmarked door to find a biker bar full of men in leather jackets who stared quite pointedly at four backpackers with no real explanation for why they were there. We weren’t in too much of a hurry to leave, though, as the bar had a swing in the middle of it, sold hotdogs for less than 1 euro and beers for even less.

Haunted dog

Timiosara, once I got to see it in the daylight, is a really pretty town. Full of churches and large squares perfect for lounging in whilst enjoying a coffee, but other than that not too much is going on there. So at 5am the next morning I set off for the 6 hour train ride to Cluj-Napoca, on the taxi ride to which the driver had only two questions once he found out I was Australian: how much is petrol and how much do taxis charge per kilometre.

At Cluj-Napoca I was met with a city shrouded in fog, as well as Potato Mike. We celebrated our being reunited by going to have some traditional Romanian food, some stuffed, rolled cabbage with ice-cream scoops of polenta and chunks of pork knuckle and a dollop of sour cream. This of course comes with the obligatory free glass of firewater to warm you as you come in from the cold.

Fog in Cluj

Cabbage is quite popular in Romania. In ensuing days Rob would tell us of how he ordered a side dish of cabbage with a meal one night only to receive a bowl of raw, shredded cabbage. When he inquired about it to the waiter, he seemed upset that Rob was not savouring this local speciality. Speaking of Rob, in his  work as a second-hand clothes middleman, from charity bin excess to shops all of the world, he explained that even mismatched shoes have a market—he sells them by the ton to Pakistan.

With Cluj being a student town, the nightlife is frequent and cheap. So it was that we met at the hostel Gazel, a Japanese guy who had been staying in the town for three months now, spending all day sleeping and all night partying. One night as we lounged around before heading out, he fortified himself for the evening by eating a packet of BBQ chips and necking warm Jagermeister straight from the bottle. 

The local tipple. 96%,

 After spending a night with Gazel the only appropriate recourse is to retire to Samsara, one of the coolest tea houses to which I have been. Opening at the appropriate hour of 2pm, the beats are mellow and the beverages healing.

The allegedly haunted forest Grigorescu borders the town. While the grim Romanian trees provide a certain Transylvanian atmosphere on their own, the little shanty villages with chained up dogs, roaming livestock, and destitute scrapheap sheds are far more eerie to behold. Not quite as eerie but more difficult to navigate are the botanical gardens. Heading here for a quick nose around, the dense fog combined with my less-than-stellar sense of direction found me lost and unable to get my bearings, my scaling of a tower just shrouding me more deeply in fog. Eventually I jumped a fence into the adjacent university’s observatory to get access to a street and work out my location.

Samsara with a pickled Potato

Entirely unrelated to arcane Transylvania and a scathing indictment on my priorities in life, it is telling that perhaps one of my favourite things about Romania is the ever-present pretzel. Pretzel shaped or round, filled with jam or festooned with salt and seeds, one can buy them for 1 lei, which is basically free, and warm from the oven that churns them out all day, there is little more a man needs during a cold walk home. These little hole-in-the-wall bakeries also sell all kinds of pastries by the 100g, both sweet and savoury, and are little beacons of hope in the bleakness of near winter and fog.

Our last stop in Romania was Bucharest. We travelled down here with Rob and James having heard not the greatest things about the city, but with high hopes for a hostel with a bar and apparently a free Jacuzzi. When we got there, however, they claimed they only had one spare bed, which was a problem as the Potato and I had rocked up without a reservation thinking off-peak winter Bucharest would hardly be popular. Eventually we ended up squeezed into a 12 person dorm by throwing a mattress on the floor. Despite the fact that there should have been a locker in the room for one of us, our lockers ended up being out in the hall. The beds had sheets clearly designed for a different mattress entire and the door had no lock. These were not salubrious surrounds.

Jammy

 Moreover, the bar was temporarily closed and in its absence there was no common area, so we commandeered a couple of couches in a hall as our drinking quarters and struggled to see the 100 strong capacity of the hostel reflected in the 10 same faces that wandered around, one of which numbered a Spanish-looking gentleman who seemed perpetually shirtless. Also numbered in our fellow travellers was a haggard looking American who without an ounce of irony responded to Mike’s inquiry as to why he’d come to Bucharest, “Just yoloing around.”

The lake around which the highway runs

Bucharest, by the by, claims to be Parisian, even going so far as to emulate the boulevards and Arc de Triumph of gay Paris. Sadly, it is closer to a concrete armpit, dirty and with craterous footpaths. Massive glitzy stores alternate with grim grey buildings against a grey sky stained with billboards. The old town, the only vaguely nice area, is packed with shitty bars and shittier restaurants. All in all, don’t go there.

What the fuck, Bucharest

 Nonetheless, this was where I was to celebrate the ticking from 11.59pm to my birthday, so in order to tolerate it the Potato, Rob, Jimmy and I got rip-snortingly drunk. This is only really worth noting because Rob and Jimmy went straight from being out to the airport before having to somehow work their way home, something that was no doubt a chore.

Some bad men in an ugly city

I celebrated the night of the 25^th by catching a night-train to the middle of nowhere Bulgaria from where I pen this rambling missive.