Day 101: Entering Transylvania

The night train from Sofia to Bucharest wasn't as bad as I'd feared. At the beginning it was packed, hot and more than a little odorous and I was ready for the worst, but after the first couple of hours everybody got off at local stops and I was alone in my car (as all the other people going to Romania were smart enough to get beds). Despite what I would have thought was a more open border than Turkey/Bulgaria the border crossing took a ridiculous 4 hours, during which the sun rose.

By the time we finally pulled into Bucharest it was around 9:30am, which was more than 3 hours late. I had originally considered spending a few hours in Bucharest looking around, but I was tired and the train station was swarming with rather pushy people trying to sell/beg/scam, and so I reserved a seat on the next train to Brasov and continued on my way.

Brasov is a mid-sized city in the Transylvania region of central Romania. I picked it to visit mostly on the suggestions of other travellers who said it was a beautiful, historic city with lots of hiking and natural scenery around, all of which sounded good to me. A good starting point for hiking was obvious as I found my hostel.


The hostel itself is a bit interesting. There was only one other staying in it last night, and the place is run by one guy (and his mother, who comes in to cook breakfast for us). They do have a pretty amazing shower though. It has 7 nozzles around the outside, and various modes for the shower turn them jets or mists so that it feels a bit like going through a car wash.

After missing our on hiking in Bulgaria I was eager to start exploring around the hills surrounding Brasov. I did a quick walk through the historic city center first, then headed towards the hill with the Brasov sign and started looking for paths the hostel owner had told me about. There are 3 or 4 different paths that take different routes of different difficulty up. I couldn't read the sign anyway, so I just took the first path I found. It was a very steep, difficult one that gave me a good workout, but it was also very fast getting up because of how direct it was. I managed to somehow jab my toe with something thorny hard enough to make it bleed, but it wasn't hurting so after stopping long enough to clean it I carried on to the top.





The way down took much longer as the path this time was much gentler but longer, crossing back and forth all the way down in a zig-zag. Once back to the city I explored some more and had a pizza at one of the many restaurants near the central square. I spent a couple hours back at the hostel then went out with the other person staying there so he could get some dinner and I could drink. Prices are a bit deceptive because the value of the currency is so low. My dinner, for example, cost about 20 lei (including a beer), which sounds like quite a bit, but $1 is about 3 lei, so really it was only something like $6, which for a large meat ("carnivore") pizza, bowl of pretzels and pint of beer is pretty darn cheap.

I'll include pictures of the city with my next post. Trying to break things up a bit.