After a fraught first few days with Romania's roads I feel like I've worked out the country now. On the one hand, the red A-roads that I wrote about in a previous post aren't always stuffed with trucks; it's only those A-roads that are heading towards Bucharest. When Bucharest isn't involved they can even be quite pleasant. And the difference between really thin white roads and really, really thin white roads was clearly in my mind. I discovered this when one of the thinnest ones turned out to be a perfectly decent country lane, while one of the thickest was a four kilometre mud track through a remote field. Basically you just have to take each road as it comes and deal with it.
A few people commented that my first ramblings about Romania made it sound grim. It really isn't. I've seen some great places. The centre of Sibiu is like a pretty Austrian city. Brasov is a vibrant town with brash, Hollywood-style lettering spelling out its name on its local mountain. And Sighisoara's medieval architecture made it feel like it was straight out of a horror film. But not in a grim way.
And then there are the people. Although I get a lot of empty, what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here stares, I also get a good share of waves and cheers. As I passed through the city of Deva, one teenager even greeted me with "Benny Hill Show!" I'm not sure what the comeback is with that one. Do I gather a load of pretty young girls, put on a pair of stockings and chase him around a park? Well, I didn't.
Some of the heartiest greetings have come from Roma travellers sat upon their horse-drawn wooden caravans, often in trains of five or six. I wondered why this was. Maybe they realise that I'm doing exactly what they are. We've both got all our belonging with us and we're both constantly on the move. The difference is that I'm moving because I want to and they're moving because they're usually being hassled by the police.
In the Carpathian Mountains, in the heart of Transylvania, lies a village called Bran and on its edge is a scary looking castle, the sort of place Christopher Lee would rent for his holidays. At the entrance to the castle's grounds is a small market aimed squarely at the foreign tourist. They sell vampire mugs and vampire hats, vampire balls and vampire bats. You pay 25 lei (about 5 quid, which is fairly expensive for Romania) and climb the stone staircase to enter the castle. Inside they tell you about the history of the place, about the life of Bram Stoker, and about the history of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Stoker's Dracula. Nowhere do they mention that Vlad actually lived in this castle. And that's because he never did. This place is merely a triumph of marketing over historical fact. The only time Vlad saw this mountain fortress was when he tried to smash it up in the late 1400s. Maybe. Even that isn't certain. It only got billed as Dracula's castle because it looks scary. If looking a bit evil is enough cause to claim it as a vampire's abode, we could have scores of tourists queuing to get inside Michael Howard's head.
The real home of Vlad, or at least his birthplace, was Sighisoara, the medieval town I mentioned earlier. The problem is that his actual house is little scarier than a semi-detached suburban home. So the tourists flock to the fake castle of a fictitious vampire and the Romanian tourist industry rubs its hands and says "fangs a million!"
