Roaming Around Romania
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
I'm thrilled I've got clients heading to Hungary and Romania this summer because beyond Budapest there's a whole world of off-the-beaten path gems that await in Eastern Europe. My guests are traveling by land with Intrepid Travel, plus many wonderful river cruise lines like AmaWaterways sail the lower Danube through these majestic and mysterious lands. Who's ready to explore Eastern Europe?
Virtuoso article below from 10/19/2021 by Amy Merrick can be found HERE.
The story of a spontaneous road trip through Transylvania.
Romania was calling: gently whispering of needle-topped castles rising from the mist, jauntily carved wooden churches with folk-painted murals, wildflower meadows dotted with shaggy haystacks, piles of antique embroidered textiles and blouses drawn from a gypsy fable. I steeled my nerve and lugged my battered bag to the train station.
I hadn’t planned to go at all, and I had no itinerary to speak of, curled up in a navy-blue velvet sleeping car on the overnight train from Budapest, with only one night booked in a spartan yet serviceable hotel in the heart of Transylvania. It was a time of limitless possibility, unburdened and untethered, when a simple sentence could swerve a trip off its tracks, to a new city or country or continent entirely.
The previous weeks had been spent louching around Hungary with my sister, soaking our way through tiled bathhouses along the Danube and sampling Sacher tortes in Viennese cake parlors. She’d invited me to join her there on a whim, as I’d been nearby in France for a brief spell of work that would keep me going, humbly, for at least another trip or two. I traveled then, and now, for the lure of the traditional, the obscure, the charm of architecture and craft, and for a spark of natural beauty. Romania had these in spades, as romantic and remote a place as I could imagine, still cloaked with a certain European ease.
Blearily arriving in Brasov after a 13-hour night train, I blinked at my bravery. A sober, Saxon, red-roofed Transylvanian city blinked back, spiked with Orthodox cathedrals that hurled their spires into the overcast sky, the Carpathian Mountains rising precipitously upward on all sides of the valley. Tucked away in the distant, cloudy peaks was Bran Castle, Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the ominously beautiful home of Count Dracula, perched on a stone-faced cliff.
“We have no cars with the navigational system,” the man behind the counter proffered apologetically. “But don’t worry. Romania has not so many roads.” With this benediction, my card was swiped and my fate was sealed: a solo road trip returning to the capital city of Bucharest in two weeks’ time. If the cracks and crevices of the Romanian countryside were to be explored, public transport would never do.
I motored north through Transylvania, plotting my route as I went, stopping at gas stations for Wi-Fi and questionable mayonnaise triangle sandwiches, which, while unappealing in themselves, gave me a sense of comfort. Along the two-lane highway, tractors, trucks, and horse carts jockeyed for position. Fields of sparkling wildflowers rushed past, interrupted by small villages tenderly planted with hollyhocks and roses, dusty cottages occasionally punctuated by long-vacant Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks. Romania was not a soft-focus idyllic fantasy, but instead a patchwork of modern life, manual agriculture, folklore, history, community, and the ravages of a postcommunist decline.
The well-preserved city of Sighisoara shone, splashed in chalky colors of canary, cherry, pistachio. The UNESCO walled center was unfathomably cheerful, knotted with medieval alleys that led to cafés, hotels, and antique shops stuffed with the kinds of Romanian delights I longed to find: ceramics encircled with large handpainted flowers, crisp hemp linens. A kind shop owner suggested a gorgeously rustic private farmhouse in Mesendorf for the next several nights, instead of the cheap but clean motels where I’d been bunking. She also passed me a Post-it with the address of someone she knew who might have more antique textiles, which were rapidly capturing my heart and suitcase.
Maramures‚ nestled along the border of Ukraine, capped the northern pinnacle of the trip. Studded with enchanting wooden churches whose vertical, thrusting bell towers felt as if plucked from the pages of a dark fairy tale, it’s the last remaining place in Europe with seemingly more horse-drawn carts on the road than cars, where residents wear the same style of clothing they have for several hundred years – dirndl skirts and kerchiefs knotted under chins. The only signs of the twenty-first century were the spiked heels and shortened hemlines of the fashionable youth. As I inched my way toward the village of Breb, I happened upon a folk-dance competition with crowds as large and raucous as any football game’s.
Romania’s spell wasn’t simply the physical beauty of distant orchards heavy with glaucous plums, the meadows of freshly shorn hay stacked into hand-sculpted mounds instead of mechanized rolls, or flocks of enormous white cranes beating in the treetops and barn eaves, but also the raw and tenuous beauty of communities still clinging to a way of life that is fast disappearing.
In Sic, on my way back down south, I gulped and knocked on the door of the textile dealer whose address was scribbled on the Post-it. Zsuzsanna welcomed me into her home and insisted on installing me in her milky-blue plaster cottage, despite my half-hearted protestations. The next morning she walked me through her peerless collections of antique textiles, some rustic, some refined – embroidered, striped, knobbly runners, tea towels, tablecloths, napkins, pillowcases – their ilk sitting starched, unused, and forgotten in painted dowry chests across Romania. The younger generations didn’t want these handmade things, woven by mothers and grandmothers for brides who had long since moved on, hurtling toward the modern age and away from Romanian customs.
My suitcase heaved with treasures, a growing dowry of my own that I would save, carefully ironed and folded, for a future home in a city and country, which at the time was utterly unknown to me and still several adventures yet down the road. A treasure chest to be unpacked one day, when spontaneous solo road trips to far-flung countries would feel like a distant dream, when the ache for comfort would wear away the sharper pangs of wanderlust. Lovely, domestic souvenirs to not only remind me of a Romania rapidly vanishing into the present, but that also recall a past self and the fearless spirit of adventure.
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