Romania

A few weeks ago, we returned from a holiday in Romania. We've each written a bit on our visit.

Posted by Shelly
Romania is filled with churches, monasteries and roadside altars. The churches were primarily Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic. The oldest one we saw went back to the 1300s.


This Episcopalian church from the 1500s supposedly has the wife of the head mason buried (alive) in the walls. Local custom required masons to buried a loved one alive to ensure the success of their work.


This monastery in Maramures was the most beautiful site I saw in Romania. However I wondered why the only people we saw in the monetary was two nuns.


We also visited the "merry cemetery" in Maramures. From 1935-77, local craftsman Stan Patras carved all the grave markers reflecting the life of the person who died. It is also accompanied by a short humorous poem. Since Stan’s death, his apprentice has continued the tradition making about 10 markers per year depending on the mortality rate of the village.




Roadside crucifixes were at the entrance of each village.


We were surprised to see how much written Romanian we could understand.


We didn’t have much trouble communicating, but there was one disappointing dinner. After arriving in town one night Greg went searching for an Internet café and ATM and I went exploring. I found this great looking beer garden that was grilling meat. It smelled really good. After Greg and I met up again we wondered back to the restaurant and ordered the first thing on the menu. We read enough to tell it was a mixture of meat and salads. I assumed it was a mixed grill. We waited and waited and no one came out to grill meat. I started to wonder what we had ordered. Eventually our food came. We ended up with 2 giant platters of pork fat, cold meat, hummus, babaganoush, cheese, red peppers and tomatoes. This was not far from what we were eating for breakfast and lunch most days, and was definitely disappointing.


On our last night, we finally did found some delicious grilled meat.

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Posted by Greg

Lonely Planet has a page in its Romania guide devoted to driving. It’s a classic pro and con argument: One author says there’s no reason not to drive in Romania, the other says you’re crazy for even thinking about it.

Our initial impulse was to rent a car and drive around Romania. We’ve driven in a lot of interesting places where driving isn’t nearly as easy as it is at home – the Philippines, where traffic can be daunting; Japan, where it’s not easy to decipher road signs; Ireland, where roads are narrow and twisting; Palau, where the asphalt is made with crushed coral and very, very slippery when it rains. Then we read the No! Are you nuts? section of Lonely Planet’s driving debate:

“Driving in Romania is more treacherous than I’ve seen in 40 countries. Indeed, I strongly discourage it for visitors. … Despite the country’s on-book driving regulations, in reality the situation is lawless. The prevailing belief is that racing along at the very edge of disaster is the pinnacle of skilled driving. Romanians routinely risk death just to gain three seconds on their journey, even if they’re just going to church.”

If that doesn’t give you pause, I don’t know what will.

This single page made trip planning a challenge. I mean, we’ve driven in Manila, Tokyo, New York and Washington, for crying out loud. Could Romania really be that bad? But words like treacherous, disaster and lawless kept looming, bringing to mind our impending deaths.

In the end, the diverse range of places we wanted to visit dictated that we would rent a car. Some digging on the Internet found a car for €293, a princely sum given the weak dollar, but nearly €100 cheaper than the next-best deal.

(We chose Romania, in part, because the country isn’t yet using the euro, which meant it should be cheaper than traveling in the euro zone. In the end, while lodging was fairly expensive, the Romanian leu did turn to be a better currency for us dollar-denominated travelers. The rental car was the only thing we paid for in euros.)

Trip planning was still a challenge, though. If the roads were really as bad as what we had read – both in Lonely Planet and on the Internet – we weren’t going to cover very much territory. We decided, in a decidedly non-Shelly-like decision, to plan the first day’s drive north from the airport near Bucharest, see what the roads were like and then plan from there.

We’re roughly three hours from five different airports, and four or so from a number more. There is a small airport in town, but it’s almost always hundreds of dollars more to fly from here than from Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia. The best fare we found to Bucharest was a Delta non-stop from Kennedy airport, so our week began with driving through all of Delaware and most of New Jersey, then across Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens to the JFK long term parking lot.

Jet-lagged driving is always a challenge, and if Romania was really going to be as challenging as we had been led to believe, I really needed to get some sleep on the flight over.

I got precisely none, leaving me ready for bed about the time we landed in Bucharest.

Diet Pepsi, fortunately, is readily available in Romania, so fueled with caffeine, we headed north to Râşnov, about four hours north of Bucharest. I was ready for action, steeled for rough roads and prepared to race along at the very edge of disaster.

And I didn’t need any of it.

Driving turned out to be a big disappointment, at least from the perspective that I was in for a challenging week. Sure, some of the roads were a bit rough, but most have nice, smooth surfaces. Sure, passing on a busy two-lane road can be stressful, but this is no different than anywhere in western Europe. And, sure, the slow-moving horse-drawn wagons do tend to slow things down a bit. But none of this was a big deal. Romania is nowhere near the most challenging place I’ve ever driven.

Having a car allowed us to get to far-flung nooks and crannies of Romania that we never would have seen on a train. It got us to the “merry cemetery” near the Ukraine border. It got us to an odd resort town near the Hungary border. And it got us to a memorable drive on Ceausescu’s impressive Transfăgărăşan Road, Romania’s highest asphalted road.

We got on the road just after climbing 1500 steps to the ruins of what is considered, by many, to be the most authentic “Dracula’s castle” in a country that is lousy with things named after Dracula. (Most places labeled as Dracula’s castle or the Dracula hotel or the Dracula restaurant have, in reality, nothing to do with Dracula. But the castle ruins near Curtea de Argeş are said to have been the home of Vlad the Impaler, who was the inspiration for Dracula. [Vlad’s surname was Drǎculea.]) It was probably because we had just climbed 1500 steps, but we somehow missed a fairly important sign on our way up the mountain road.


The road was spectacular. Twisting and winding through miles of pristine pastureland, through tunnels and across soaring viaducts and through a rushing river, full of spring snowmelt. It was on our way up the mountainside that we encountered not one but two different flocks of sheep being driven to their summer pasture. One particularly large flock had at least five shepherds and a dozen dogs, blocking the road until traffic came along, at which point the shepherds and dogs would clear a lane of traffic for the car.


The higher we got, the more spectacular the scenery. Trees become scarce, water cascaded down over the road and traffic thinned out, especially traffic coming down from the peak.


A few more twists and turns and we found out why. A passing motorist rolled down his window and warned us that the road ahead was closed. Around another turn, the road narrowed to one lane as an enormous, 7-foot-high snowdrift blocked one, and eventually, both lanes.


We turned around, found a place to stop for lunch, and then drove two hours back down to the bottom of the mountain.

Where we saw the sign reading “închis.”

Closed.