The obvious suspect: Vlad Tepes and his palace.
Romania feels like something of an outlier. In the midst of countries with Slavic languages, written in Cyrillic script, its Romance language owes more to French and uses the Latin alphabet. This oddness is a little difficult to explain, even at a historical stretch: the province of Dacia, lying beyond the Danube, was one of the longest-lasting conquests of Trajan, Rome’s greatest military emperor, and for some reason that association has stuck, for all that Rome and its successor states vanished long ago.
What is immediately obvious as you walk around Bucharest is that the Soviet era was a dreadful wrong turn for the city. There are many examples of absolutely gorgeous architecture – western styles given native Romanian twists – that have spent the decades since World War II, when the Romanians were on the side of the Axis, elegantly crumbling. As they crumbled, massive Soviet edifices sprang up, some of them featureless and uninspiring, others blank copies of Parisian grandeur, such as the monumental Parliamentary Palace, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon.
Photos can’t capture just how huge and out of place this is.
Nicolae Ceacescu’s dictatorship attempted to turn Bucharest into a metropolis and only managed to gather far too many people together, turning a city that had shown signs of becoming the Paris of Eastern Europe into a sprawling space that you could spend all day trekking around. There’s so much to see here and so much to fall for, but the omnipresent feeling that it’s still trying to recover from Ceaucescu and the economic turmoil that followed his ouster and execution.
Escaping isn’t all that hard though, and it proves well worth it. Less than two hours on the train brings you to the foothills of the Carpathians and the town of Sinaia, where the Romanian king Carol I once held court at Peles Castle. Navigate through the tour groups that cram every corridor and you’ll find a mix of German, Italian and Romanian decor to enjoy, as well as rooms as richly appointed as any to be found in Europe. Though given the amount of love lavished on this one building created for the benefit of a single family, the extravagances of royalty become a little harder to support.
Huge fuzzy dogs – much needed on mountains.
Thankfully, Sinaia offers one of the best ways to escape: a cable car gondola to 2,000m up in the mountains above. There, if the cloud cover is kind, you’ll be able to view the valley below and others as well, and get an idea of how it all fits together. And if the cloud cover isn’t kind, you’ll at least have massive dozing mastiffs and sheepskin wraps to keep you warm while you sip your hot chocolate.
But Bucharest on the Danube plain remains the draw and the hope of the nation. Crumbling that old architecture may be (and the city’s Old Town is tacky enough to outdo Dublin’s Temple Bar), but there are signs aplenty of a desire to preserve just what made the city special and to incorporate it into the new spaces springing up as those Soviet monuments crumble in their turn. Should the future be kind to Romania, and it navigate the space between Russia and the EU with care, there could yet be a golden age here, and this lovely city be even more worth visiting than it already is.
Follow the Lime Green Railroad to the Wonderful Wizard of Uncertain Destinations…
So, I’m doing it again. One year after Greece, four years after the Trans-Siberian and six years after Norway, I’m once more taking an August-September travelling holiday, hitting a bunch of new (to me) locations. Once again, rail is the medium for my peregrinations, and this time the locale is as much of the former Soviet Bloc as I can fit into three weeks. (No, I’m not visiting Belarus as part of this trip, and as much as I’d like to drop in on Ukraine, it might be better to leave that for later too.)
That map above gives the general outline of the trip: Krakow, Poznan (briefly), Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava (briefly), Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Veliko Tarnovo, Bucharest, and then … options. This is one of those trips where the early stages have been nailed down and booked, whereas the latter ones are more reliant on train availability and everything that goes before. Which, even though it might rub my obsessive compulsive tendencies the wrong way, is still appealing. Not knowing exactly where I’m going to wind up probably won’t do my mother’s blood pressure any favours, but I’m happy enough to keep a loose leash on the days ahead.
One of the nicest of things about this trip is that I’ve never been to most of the countries I’ll be visiting—the only ones I’ll be returning to are Germany and Austria, and even there, Berlin or Vienna will be entirely new. In fact, once this trip is over, the only European nations remaining unchecked will be fall into three groups: the Russian fringe (Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and maybe Moldova), the Balkans (Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia), and a scattering of others (Switzerland, Portugal and most of the microstates—Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, San Marino, and Monaco). Which brings me close enough to a complete collection to prompt a few more holiday ideas at least.
For now though, an Eastern European Odyssey is the order of the day. Preparations have been made, maps have been consulted, and tickets have been booked where possible. And as many considerations as I can consider have been considered.
Rail Travel: As mentioned, rail is the way to go here, and the resource worth relying on is The Man in Seat 61. It’s served me well in the past and it did here too, though booking tickets beyond Vienna has proved less useful than just showing up at the station in person. Sleeper services will be taken of wherever possible, and there might be a brief river trip between Vienna and Bratislava if the Danube isn’t too drought-stricken. When I get to Bulgaria and Romania though, my timetable will be at its most flexible. It’s just a pleasant coincidence that my options will be opening up as Europe reaches its most alluring.
Accommodation: The open nature of the latter end of my travels means that I can’t book too far ahead, but even if I could, I’m going to be taking a leaf out of my Greek odyssey: stick to booking a day or two ahead of time, using the Booking.com and AirB&B apps on my phone. Sleeper services are to be preferred, but hostels and B&Bs are just as valuable, mostly for their showers and laundry facilities. If I’m travelling light, cleaning my clothes will be a necessity at some stage.
Flights: Normally, the two things I’d book first would be my flights there and back. Well, I’m flying into Kraków to kick things off, but where I’ll be flying back from? That’s still undecided. I’d like to visit Moldova (because why not, when you have the chance?) but flights back from there are at least twice as expensive as from neighbouring Romania. So we’ll see. I have a ticket tracker running using the Kayak app, and the sudden availability of a cheap option may well determine how and where my journey ends.
Technology: Technology-light is the rule of the day. As in Greece, nothing more than my phone is to be brought. Even my new Pebble Time is getting dropped in favour of a Timex Weekender with a battery that lasts five years instead of five days. This will make it a little tricky to update the Travel section of this site as I go, but I’ll do my best. Those long train journeys will definitely give me time, at the very least. Still, my poor old iPhone 5S is suffering from geriatric battery syndrome these days, so one more piece of tech is needed. I’ve bought myself an Anker Astro E7 external battery, and having tested it for the past week, I’ve deemed it good. At the cost of a little extra weight to my backpack, I should be able to keep my loyal iPhone, and more importantly its camera and booking capabilities, running for as long as I need them.
Reading Material: This is an issue. Travelling light rules out carrying more than two books, and with one of those slots taken up by a Lonely Planet guidebook, that leaves little wiggle room. A friend has loaned me an ageing Sony eReader, but that runs up against both the low-tech rule and my personal preferences. I might rely on second-hand bookstores instead, or just read on my iPhone. (The latter option might seem a poor one, but I’ve read the Bible and War and Peace on my phone before, so it is an option. Maybe Moby Dick this time…)
Writing Material: Of course, without reading to take up my travelling time, and assuming that staring out the window can only occupy one for so long, writing will have the field to itself. So pens, some ink refills, and a notepad or two will be packed. How much I’ll get to write (beyond the requisite journal of my travels) remains uncertain, but the idea of letting my brain wander on the Danube plain is a huge draw. Even when I’m not strolling the city streets, there’s be imaginative highways and byways to explore.
Missing: What will I be missing while I’m gone? Well, not a huge amount. As the next category shows, the timing of this trip has worked out rather well. The start of the Pro12 rugby season and a few pre-World Cup friendlies is about the height of my sporting interests. Missing the Irish Craft Beer Festival stings a bit though. As for work, it’s been packed away for the next few weeks, and when it comes to keeping an eye on the state of the Internet, that’s something I could do with less of.
Returning: On the other hand, within a week of my return, I’ll have the return of Doctor Who, the start of the Rugby World Cup, a new niece to be a godfather to, and one of those birthdays with a “0” at the end of it. So I’d better be well rested when I take off from somewhere near the Black Sea (presumably). Because I’ll be hitting the ground running.
The Clarity of Now 