We have just finished travelling around Romania for almost a month on public transport and, having met a man on a plane (you worked in Arnhem and live near Bolton so you know who you are!) I decided to type up the diary that I have kept.
This will take a few weeks so here's a taster of the first bit - this has not been proof read so when the full version is posted it should be little tidier and there should be more of it.
Anyway - here it is....
As with all these things it started with an idea.
That idea was to spend a few weeks travelling around
Romania, climb a few hills and see some sights.
That was it. It was the same
mentality that we had adopted in 1989 when we travelled around Europe by train
on the old EuroRail passes, talking to locals and other travellers where we
should travel to and what we should see.
This trip had been undertaken just three months before the Berlin Wall
came down and four months before the execution of Ceausescu, on Christmas Day.
When we undertook the trip in 1989 all of Western Europe was
open to the train traveller without any major issues, although the different
currencies did create a certain challenge as you tried to calculate exactly how
much money you needed for your time in a particular country (many thanks to the
Bureau de Change in Oslo who got confused when we exchanged German Marks and
French Francs as well as Sterling and gave us far more than we should have been
given). The best you could hope for as
far as Eastern Europe was concerned was you could, if you had the right
passport, travel through East Germany to West Berlin. Beyond that the Communist East was just
something that you read about in the news and, certainly, not the sort of place
that you thought you would travel to.
All of that changed at the end of 1989/1990 and travelling
throughout Europe suddenly became achievable, although around the same time the
EuroRail system started to change and so this right of passage closed. We
did travel, by car, in 1990 and 1991 around Europe but, again, it was limited
to the Western part due to time constraints.
Ten years later we did manage to tour through some ex-Communist areas
and even got to Berlin before the whole of No-Man’s Land was built on.
So why Romania? In
2015 we were invited to join a Scout trip to the area near Brasov and were
introduced to a country that showed great potential for the independent
traveller, an interesting public transport system and a few good hills to be
wandered amongst (not the height of the Alps or other areas we had visited but
the prospect of bears is always a selling point!).
What we proposed to do was an Over 50s Independent Explorer
Belt based on the Scout Award that we had tried to achieve back in the 1980s but
were unable to do so due to bureaucracy (although the trips did take place, independent of the Scout Association) it was to travel, visit and absorb the culture.
The initial plan was as vague as many of our other tours and
sketched in the front of my diary was our timetable – it was along these lines;
21st July Fly
Manchester to Bucharest Hotel
booked in Bucharest
22nd July Train
to Sinaia Hotel
booked in Sinaia
To be confirmed
13th August Bucharest Apartment
booked
14th August Bucharest Apartment
booked
15th August Bucharest Apartment
booked
16th August Bucharest Apartment
booked
17th August Fly
Bucharest to Manchester
This vagueness was born out of a meeting with an Australian
we met in Heidelberg in Southern Germany;
“Have you been to Scandinavia?” asked out antipodean
drinking chum.
“No” we replied.
“You should, while you are in the area”
The following day we started on a 12 hour, 600+ mile, trip
to Copenhagen, followed by Stockholm and Oslo.
We saw places we had never really thought about visiting and it showed
us the benefit of picking up information from locals, and other travellers –
such information cannot be obtained while stuck in a car.
So our vague route plan before we left was to head North,
via some hills, towards the Ukraine Border – then head East towards the Black
Sea and then back to Bucharest. We would
pack a tent, sleeping bags and a stove.
Our budget was to be £50 each per day to cover food and accommodation
(although we hoped to bring the whole trip in at under £40 each per day).
To Romania.
Thursday 21st July – 2.15am and the alarm goes
off. Up and at ‘em! Fortunately, for once, all the gear is packed
and the rucsacs are neatly sitting in the living room.
Taxi is booked for 3am and we are outside waiting with 5
minutes to go. House key is safely
packed away (on a long red lanyard so we can find it) and we take a long look
at our broken gate, which we hope will be repaired whilst we are away.
Aughton Road is very quiet and the first car to pass is our
taxi which is creeping slowly along the road looking for house numbers –
surprised he didn’t spot us standing outside with two big rucsacs. Our first VW of the trip – a nice roomy
estate in which our gear fits comfortably.
The Particulate Filter Warning Light comes on – H
demonstrates that she has listened to her father over the years and explains
what they do and why they can be annoying – as we head up the M1 it goes
off. The driver says that it is booked
in for a recall notice anyway so he will get it sorted then (we are not told what
the recall notice is and are too polite to ask). Any hopes of a sunrise as we cross the
Pennines are not realised but we sleep for much of the way anyhow – the radio
is going on about the Republican Convention.
Get to the airport way ahead of schedule, dropped off near
the entrance and head inside.
Airports are wonderful edifices, regardless of what time you
arrive it is always “open time” and the light inside is exactly the same
(outside the sun rises!). Check in at an
airport is always an experience whose enjoyment is dependant on (1) How much
time you have and (2) How tired you are!
Our queue is long but at least seems to have a logical progression, ie a
beginning, middle and end. The RyanAir
one has no such logic and snakes off in both directions almost as far as the
eye can see. With time on our hands (it
turns out that there is another Amsterdam flight before ours) we happily point
out, “Yes, this is the KLM queue” and, “No, that’s the RyanAir queue”.
As we reach the front of our queue (Team RyanAir are still
doing laps of the airport) we discover that most of our fellow travellers are
waiting for the 5:55 to AMS (we are on the 7:55) and the clock is most
definitely ticking away for them. The
KLM staff were getting twitchy as time was short and we are asked to step back
to let the others through, which of course we do – there are big warning signs
everywhere warning people about being late so I’m not sure why so many are
late. One of the passengers who we talk
to is from Qatar who is flying home having come over for his graduation
ceremony at Sheffield University – he is very taken with our plans and, at one
point, I thought that he was going to ask if he could join us.
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