Since Lonely Planet has better writers, I hope they don’t mind me borrowing their intro to Romania: “Traveling in Romania, the EU’s newest member, is like being somewhere between an eternal Halloween and the Led Zeppelin IV cover that features a twig-carrying farmer. Even in cities where Audis zoom across highways under video-camera speed traps, Romanian life is defined by its sweet country heart. Most anywhere, you’ll spot horse-drawn buggies crossing the (often cratered) paved roads – up green mountains, past cone-shaped haystacks and herds of sheep – which bounce along as if the roads themselves are aliens to the land. And then there’s that Dracula thing. Many visitors, lured by bloodcurdling tales, make full trips out of Transylvania’s castles and lovely medieval Saxon towns like Sighişoara, where the ‘real Dracula’ (Vlad Ţepeş) first grew his teeth. But travelers limiting themselves to chasing vampires will miss so much.”
Unfortunately, we only had 5 days so we limited ourselves to Transylvania. We had decided to take Tracy’s mom on our next doll delivery trip (more here) and thought Romania would be a great choice in a few ways. One, the problems of their institutionalized orphans has been well-documented. Two, we read about the scenic countryside, and three, we love mountains and Romania is blessed with lots of them.
We’re not much for big cities so as soon as we landed in Bucharest, we picked up our rental car and headed for Brasov, a small city in the middle of Transylvania. Brasov made a real nice hub from which we branched out each day. The nice thing about renting a car is you can explore the countryside and find those off-the-beaten path areas that we love. And Romania, or specifically, Transylvania did not disappoint us. It definitely lives up to Lonely Planet’s description. Fortified churches, medieval castles, Saxon villages, horse-drawn wagons, beautiful mountains and farm fields, cone-shaped haystacks… We saw it all. It’s what we imagined Europe to be like 40 years ago. It’s quaint and charming yet still has most of the comforts of modern life and is definitely not overrun with tourists. The only thing that was somewhat disappointing was the food. Of course, we travel on a limited budget so we don’t always try the best of food, but we did get tired of the ubiquitous pizza on every Romanian menu. It seems to be a post-Communism rage there. I don’t know if this phenomenon is in any way related to the fact that the Romanian language sounds a lot like Italian.
We left thinking we’d love to go back someday and spend more time. Of course, we also want to explore so many other places that we haven’t already been so we’ll just have to see.
