Not so much. I doubt there are any vampires in Transylvania, but there are Australians. Australians everywhere. More on them later.
I wasn't primed for a great start in Romania. I'd developed a cold in Budapest, and I had an overnight train to Brasov (Brash-of, the 'h' is invisible) that night. Remembering my miserable sleep-depriving, head-crunching, insulin-losing experience on the ride from Florence to Vienna, I was braced for a disaster. I was particularly concerned about coughing, spluttering and sneezing my way through the night with another person in the cabin: sick people in dorm rooms are not exactly popular. So I made a last-minute dash into a pharmacy in Budapest and asked for some cold and flu medicine. "No problem", the pharmacist said. "Is ephedrine okay?"
Ah... yeah? Sure. If you're offering.
With symptoms suppressed more aggressively than a President trying to shut down an FBI investigation, then, I had a pretty easy night on the train after all - almost too easy. As I was leaving the Schengen zone, I had to go through passport control. I'd been nervous about this, but it was remarkably uneventful. The train stopped on the border, a Hungarian border guard walked up and down the carriage stamping passports, then the train moved a couple of hundred metres and a Romanian border guard walked up and down the carriage stamping passports. He took a little longer than he might have liked with me, though. I'd fallen asleep between Hungary and Romania, and been woken when he knocked on the door. Then I fell asleep again as he checked my room mate's passport, and he had to wake me up to show mine. Then I fell asleep and had to be woken again before he gave it back, and I was so groggy that I just put it who-knew-where. Ephedrine is awesome.
My room mate was a fellow whose name I'm quite sure I didn't get right, but it sounded like 'Elsibio', and that's vaguely Shakespearean enough that I'm going to run with it. Elsibio is from Moldova, studied in Brasov, lives in Budapest and works as a Hungarian and Romanian to German, Italian and Spanish translator. Add in the English he used to speak with me and he has six languages at his disposal: a new record for this trip.
English was very much the sixth of the six, so he used mime to fill in the gaps. At some point the conversation turned to how there are many Hungarians living in Romania, and he explained how this came to be - Hungary lost territory to Romania after World War I - by holding an invisible map of Hungary in front of him and using his other hand as a pair of scissors to cut parts off if. Later he was trying to provide some directions, which involved pointing left, miming walking with his hands, pointing right and walking again, a bit longer this time to indicate that I should go further. I could visualise his map of Hungary a bit better than his map of Brasov, alas.
The first thing you notice when you arrive in Brasov is that it has its own Hollywood sign:
It certainly puts the 'Brash' in Brasov. There's a ski resort somewhere behind that mountain called Poiana, and Elsibio had recommended it as a place for a bushwalk. I jokingly asked if there were bears in the woods and he said "bears, yes, of course, there are bears!". Perhaps not Poiana, then.
I suffered a minor heart attack upon arriving at the hostel and finding that my passport wasn't where I routinely keep it. At least this time it was nothing that frantically throwing everything all over the reception room floor, only to eventually find it in the next pocket over from the one it belongs in, couldn't fix. Don't try to store important documents when under the influence of Ephedrine. But I checked in safely enough and headed off to to use the bathrooms.
Oh dear.
I'll start with the showers. They were clean enough, but the hot water only worked part-time. You have to run the water for a good two minutes before it would start to get warm, at which point you have maybe two minutes. If you want to take longer - if a shower is perhaps a valued little luxury in an otherwise spartan approach to travelling - then you needed to start the cycle over again. Meanwhile the drain was entirely overwhelmed by the task demanded of it: as you're showering the basin at the bottom of the shower is filling up, and after three minutes or so you're in ankle-deep water. If you're conscious enough of this you'll turn the water off in time, but inevitably people either didn't notice or didn't care, because the bathroom floor was routinely flooded by over-flowing shower basins.
The water made drying and dressing oneself a delicate task. A good hostel bathroom will have a little changing cubicle directly next to the shower, so you can dress in privacy. If they don't have that, they'll usually at least have segregated bathrooms, so you can still dress without causing too much of a stir. My Brasov hostel had neither, so there was nothing for it but to hang your clothes over the door of the shower - carefully balanced to avoid them falling into the lake forming around your ankles - and then waiting for the lake to drain away so you could dry yourself and get dressed without leaving the shower. Quite a painstaking and time-consuming process.
Better than the toilets, though. Each one had a sign warning that the plumbing was bad, that there was a risk of blockage and over-flowing (quote, "on your sexy ass", unquote) and directing guests not to flush toilet paper but to use the bins provided. I won't bother describing the accompanying smell. It's not that I doubted the severity of the threat - witness the showers - but this was an edict with which I could not in good conscience comply, on account of its ickiness. Frequent flushing was the order of the week.
Bathroom horrors aside, I enjoyed my time at the hostel well enough. The people I found here were a very different crowd to those I'd met previously: in a Western European hostel, with their tight visa restrictions and high prices, everybody knows where they're going next, when they're going and what the plan is for each day they have available in their current city. There's a few other people who are roaming at length, but most are on short trips numbering in the days or weeks.
My Brasov friends, by contrast, were free from the constraints of working around horrifying Western European living costs, and weren't much ones for planning. They had nowhere in particular to be, no particular time to be there and weren't particular about how they were going when they did go. They might go north, to Timisoara, south, to Bucharest, east, to Moldova or west, to Belgrade. They might go tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe the day after that. They'll probably get a bus, but they might try hitch-hiking first and see how they go.
A good third of them were Australians. Georgia and Eddy, two girls from Sydney, were on their way to Ukraine for a rave party. They were preparing to get a bus to Kiev - it was going to take about 30 hours - until I asked if they'd had any trouble getting their visas. "Visas?" They looked blankly at me. They looked blankly at each other. Nobody had mentioned visas, not until I mentioned visas. So maybe not Ukraine, then, and besides, Eddy hadn't figured out how to tell Georgia this but she'd recently found out the rave they wanted to go to was actually in Warsaw, not Kiev. And when they had time to sit down and reconsider their next move, it wasn't to Poland but to Prague, because why not Prague? Sarah and Callum - I thought his name was Tom until I learned it was a nickname, short for tomfoolery - also from Sydney, were lingering in Brasov until they decided where to go next, and finally discovered they could go and volunteer on a reindeer farm inside the Arctic Circle in Norway, with 40 sled dogs there to play with.
I also met a fellow Melburnian named Liam. Liam is also a Victorian public servant and is also on a leave of absence from work as he bumbles around Europe. Liam had the bed next to mine when I first arrived, and meeting him here, in a small town on the other side of the world, well and truly punctured any lingering illusions I had of winning intrepid traveller points. Luckily he compensated for my loss by being excellent company, and I was delighted when we tried to talk shop and I couldn't remember half of my department's portfolios. I've successfully suppressed even the most basic details of my job.
I haven't really been prone to hanging around the hostel for a drink, but the mood took me on my first night in Brasov. And when I went shopping for some scotch, I found a first clue to why so many Australians were in Romania:
Yes, that is a three litre plastic bottle of beer. It cost $2. My whiskey was a lot more expensive, coming in at about 60c per standard drink.
Along with Liam my drinking companions were Evan from Ireland, who eventually conceded that the International Rules series is unfairly tilted towards Gaelic rules and Jess from New Zealand, who is currently between working visa and facing the daunting prospect of having to go home. Present but not drinking were Shaun and Neil, Mormon brothers from Utah, who are travelling in between missions and medical school. Eastern Europe is the third leg of a trip that has already encompassed South America and West Africa, and may move on to Central Asia next. A fun group.
The Swans were playing the next morning at about 6:15. Suffice to say that between the scotch and the cold I had resolved - for the second straight week - to sleep in and watch us be humiliated at whatever time I woke up. And - for the second straight week - I woke up anyway, and obviously couldn't ignore the fact we were playing. And it worked out okay because WE WON ONE. We won! I'm not making it up. I saw it. Check the scores, if you don't believe me. I checked them multiple times, just to be sure. We won one and now we're making a late run for the top twelve. And I'm free to watch Swans games in Europe, after all. I was starting to worry it was my fault, but it's okay as long as I don't watch any games in Spain, France, Italy or Austria.
With just three hours sleep on top of being sick and maybe just a little bit hungover, exploring Brasov would have to wait until after I'd been back to bed. In truth, I didn't do much in Transylvania: across six days I really only went exploring for three of them. Partly that's because distances are long - Brasov is a good base, but most of the best things to see and do are in the wider region - and partly it was because after a packed schedule for the last couple of months I needed a break, and I took it. All I did in that first couple of days was walk around the old town and read a book.
There's something of a tale of two cities going on here. The outskirts, including the area around the train station, is all Stalinist-era concrete blocks. They're caked in graffiti, I suspect not because Romanian kids are more prone towards vandalism but rather that the city has more pressing demands on its budget than cleaning it up. The Old Town, by contrast, is pure postcard fodder:
No building has the same pastel colour as those next to it: I gather it simply isn't done. The whole area - which is Brasov's administrative, shopping and dining precinct, as well as home to its hotels and hostels - feels like a rapidly gentrifying Australian country town. Like Daylesford, perhaps, but without the pretentiousness. You can eat truffle oil pasta in a dark restaurant with a man playing the piano, but the pasta costs $6, not $36.
I eventually roused myself to make at least a half-day trip out of town on day three. The Bran castle - supposedly home to Dracula - is about a 45 minute bus ride from Brasov (passing through the village of Rasnov, which despite being a tiny fraction of Brasov's size refuses to be outdone and has a Hollywood sign of its own).
The previous night I'd been talking to a Romanian uni student, Katrina, and her mother (whose name I've unfortunately forgotten). They were on their way to Corfu, a 24 hour bus ride away, for what would be the mother's first trip outside Romania. She's been teaching herself English by watching television, and every time she reached for a word and I confirmed it was the right one she would pump her fist in the air in triumph. She and her daughter wrinkled the name of my blog out of me and... they didn't really get any of the jokes. Awkward.
Anyway, I asked them if it annoyed them, as Transylvanians, that the only thing anybody knew about Transylvania was...
- "Dracula?", Katrina rolled her eyes.
- "It isn't true!", Katrina's mum.
- "The guy who wrote it never even visited Romania!", Katrina again.
I guess it annoys them.
The historical inspiration for Dracula is Vlad the Impaler, a 15th century ruler whose name hints at his reputation for bloodthirstiness, but is also somewhat ironic because vampires ought to be very, very careful around sharp instruments. Bran Castle was already around when Vlad was sinking his teeth into the region but there's no evidence he ever visited, let alone lived there. The castle is living on its infamy, rather than its intrinsic interest: it's less a castle than a reasonably big house, with furniture belonging to the time when it briefly housed members of the royal family in the 1930s, and aside from climbing up a secret passageway hidden inside the walls it was all rather boring. The only suckers here are the tourists.
I had a more satisfying, if very long, day trip the following day to Sighisoara (Sig-a-shwar-ra), mostly because of the look of utter delight on Katrina's mum's face when I mentioned it was a powerful recommendation. The train takes two hours and 40 minutes to cover the 120km from Brasov: all the trains in Romania are this slow, though you wouldn't pick it to look at them:
Many of the stations require people to walk directly on the tracks to reach the train, and toilet facilities on board varied from dubious to you don't want to go there. On one train I went to lift the seat only for the entire bowl of the toilet to start lifting up with it, so I decided the seat could stay down. The sedate pace left plenty of time to watch rural Romania go by outside the window. Every little village has a station and a stationmaster who would stand outside at attention as the train passed, regardless of whether it stopped. Many of the houses in the villages were single room brick cottages; some had partially collapsed at the back but had tarps up and were evidently still inhabited. Farmers use horses and carts to transport produce or tend to crops, and there's no fences so shepherds have to watch over their flocks of sheep. It's all very quaint and picturesque, but I refuse to romanticise poverty: I have no doubt those farmers would dearly love to have utes to help them sell vegetables further afield.
Sighisoara itself is much like Brasov, with Stalingrad slowly crumbling around a medieval inner core of cobblestone streets and pastel buildings, this time within a walled citadel built on top of a hill. On the way I followed a bustling crowd into a small produce market that was roughly half vegetables and half flowers: the people here might be poor but I suspect they get their five serves of fruit and veg in rather more often than I do. I bought some almonds and went on my way. Vlad Dracul (father of the Impaler)'s house is here, and you can visit the room where his infamous son was born: the rest of the building is now a pizza restaurant. I didn't go in because I suspected the room looks like any other room. The Old Town is almost entirely given over to tourism, with two out of three shops either restaurants or souvenir stands. But it's very pretty. I went up the clock tower, where I was reminded of just how far from home I am:
My final day trip was to Sinaia, a village in the Bucegi mountains that is home to the Peles Castle, the former summer residence of the Romanian royals. Unlike Bran it's actually an interesting building, in an incredible setting, and well worth the trip:
After getting there I bumped into my dorm mate Hati, a young Korean woman, whom I'd gotten to know in trying circumstances the previous night. Before she arrived we'd had a mouse in the room, so we all promptly threw out any food we had and tried not to think about it any further. But Hati screamed when she first saw it, and no amount of reassuring her that it wouldn't climb into her bed could calm her down. Eventually it disappeared into a small hole in the wall, and I stuffed my sock into it so it couldn't come back and Hati could relax. I washed that sock very thoroughly.
We were told that we couldn't roam the castle on our own but had to join a tour, and somehow or other we got tacked onto a group of Italians. What is it with me and getting mixed up with Italians? The tour was tedious: the English-speaking guide would say a sentence about how the heating worked, or where the stained glass windows came from, then the Italian tour leader would repeat what he said in Italian before they moved onto the next uninteresting factoid. I ranged ahead as far as I thought I'd get away with. I don't like tours.
After finishing in the castle Hati and I began walking down the hill, me to the train, Hati to the bus she'd booked back to Brasov. Except she didn't know where the bus left from, or what time it was going. She didn't seem too perturbed, but I talked up how unfortunate it would be to end up stuck in Sinaia and how cheap the train was, and she eventually followed me to the station. Along the way we took a wrong turn and set a dog off barking. Hati squealed and fled. "At least it wasn't a mouse", I said, by way of comfort. Not sure if it helped.
Transylvania was a relatively late addition to this trip, and I'm glad it made the cut. I might not be the most intrepid traveller, but I think us Australians are in the vanguard, and that the region is about to become immensely popular. It's like Provence without the prices. I want to go back: though hopefully by the time I do the locals are much richer, and the truffle oil pasta costs $16, not $6.
the incredible travel adventures of an Australian in wonderland. better than the telly
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