Romania blog …
In this Romania blog, we describe how Romania has been one of the biggest shocks to us on this European leg of our world tour. We simply had no idea just how incredibly beautiful it is, and how vibrant life is in Romania. Wherever you go in Romania it seems like there is some form of celebration ongoing – or maybe we just attract that kind of life 😉
In Romania, we were bitten in the home of Dracula! We experienced tent wars! And we saw the true madness of overhyping tourism! We realised that it is in fact impossible to sleep in Romania! And we realised just how difficult it can be to enter an EU country from outside!
We realised just how AWESOME a place Romania really is – really, it’s fantastic!
But there is a down side of Romania, but we’ll leave that to the end!
Bucharest
Bucharest is one of the best cities we’ve been to, just amazing! A real vibrancy to the atmosphere, with everyone seeming to be having fun. The Palace of the Parliament is an absolute must-see, just hilarious in its audacity. Just goes to show what a personality cult can do! It’s one of the heaviest and largest buildings in the world, and despite housing the modern parliament and many other museums etc, lots of it still lies empty!
EU Borders and customs – ROEXIT
So getting in to Romania from Serbia was an absolute doddle. Five minutes on the Serbian side, cross the bridge at Novi Sip, five minutes on the Romanian side and you’re in!
Having left Romania to visit Moldova and Transistria, (and inadvertently Ukraine!!) we returned to Romania. Wow, we had no idea just how long it can take to get through the border back into the EU!!! You really do have to feel for immigrants I kept thinking! Or Maybe it’s because we were so close to Ukraine?
Having also travelled the other way, into Moldova, with relative ease – at most half an hour, and that was including us messing up by not visiting customs! – we expected the same the other way. Great, we thought – we’d be able to travel halfway or more across Romania in order to get over to Croatia. Oh how wrong we were!
Over five hours it took to get back into Romania! We managed to jump some part of the queue, but then hesitated for an instant and joined what we thought was a queue of cars that led to a border point, but was in fact a queue of cars kind of near to a border point. Later we discovered that the queue next to us led to the the border point that was actually manned, whereas our queue was just a queue of cars where we had to get out and push in the border to see the border guard – nice! No wonder it was chaotic!
Luckily I’d relearned how to relax, chill and generally not care about such things 😉 This is a great skill to have by the way. The NHS drove it out of me, but I’ve got it back. It was quite amusing actually to listen to all of the blaring of car horns and shouting going on with the thousands of cars surrounding us. We were moving forwards – just at an unbelievably slow rate. And this was just the Moldova side! We had to get into Romania yet.
Five hours later and we had left Moldova! Passports had been stamped, car documentation had been registered. All we had to do now was get through Romanian border control and customs. Then we realised that the three lanes of traffic had to become one lane to get through a small road to then become two lanes on the other side. Ah, lots of pushing in and shouting and horns blaring – again! Zen was our friend!
On the Romanian side, the customs official was very thorough and very chatty at the same time. He was fluent in English and was clearly one of those guys who could do his job without thinking whilst having an intellectual conversation, putting me at ease and simultaneously gaining information from me!
Did I vote Brexit? Am I an EU lover? What kind of books do I read (I have a bag full of books)? Did I think Brexit was a good thing? It turns out that Romania is going through the same conversations that the UK had a few years back. We saw lots of graffiti complaints about the EU, and mentioning ROEXIT. The customs official meanwhile was for staying in the EU and for closer integration. We ended up having a lengthy conversation, whilst he went though all of our bags, sleeping bags, tent, boxes etc etc. No we didn’t bring in any narcotics, guns, alcohol or cigarettes! He was a nice guy actually. Maybe that’s why the queue to enter the country was so long! We entered Romania feeling strangely at ease after a long day sat in the hot car!
Camping in Romania
Romania is great for campsites – there are loads of them, and they’re generally good quality, friendly places and clean. We mostly camped across the whole country for this reason. In the main, people are generally lovely and respectful – except once – see below!
No sleep in Romania!
No sleep in Grumăzești
So after finally getting back in to Romania, there was no way we could get across the country to where we’d planned before it got dark. We needed to find somewhere to settle for the night. The mighty Park4Night app came to our rescue once again. We found a campsite hidden behind some houses which looked like it had plenty of room. Super friendly owners – took UK currency thankfully, as we had no Romanian Leu or Euros- nice! ‘Oh!’, they said after we’d paid, ‘btw there’s a small party on tonight – did we mind?’
Have we mentioned before how much the Romanians like to enjoy themselves. 2 am and the music and singing was blaring at festival level – I’m not exaggerating! Funny at first, tiring in the end! Do we attract this kind of behaviour or does it follow us around?
No sleep in Călacea
So very tired again, and we had to drive right across the country, through roadworks where no-one had thought to actually put signs up telling us what direction to actually go! Just bizarre. More crashes, more police and ambulances (see later)! Eventually we got to near the Hungarian border, near Arad. We found a small campsite on a small island, in the middle of a fishing lake, hidden in a wheat field – nice but bizarre! ‘It’s free’, the owner says – awesome! ‘You don’t mind these guys fishing near to you’, she says?
Lol! They didn’t sleep. Sure they weren’t very loud, but they were chatting away and rustling their jackets and sleeping backs right next to us all night long. They were a cheery bunch – we had a bit of a laugh, but ugh – no sleep – again!
No sleep on the Serbian border: Tent Wars!
So, having spent an awesome day travelling up and down the Derdap gorge, and having easily sailed through Romanian border control and customs, we settled on a nice little campsite just over the border, near the rock sculpture of Decebalus. Tent was up, we were all relaxed, we’d had small chat with some local Romanians on the site – nice! We decided to pop to the local supermarket to get some food for the morning. It was 9pm, and the site was pretty full -probably no-one else coming now, we thought – it’s dark after all – and the owner gave us the impression that we were probably the last they could squeeze in!
On returning, there was a Romanian guy trying to park where our tent was! He was arguing with some locals who were refusing to move their car – it was 10pm and they’d been there all day. We explained that we’d also been set up for most of the afternoon and that we needed our parking space. Tent wars ensued!
The guy wanted us to move our tent so that he could put his tent where ours was?!? We don’t speak Romanian, but I got some words that he wanted the shade of the tree on his tent. We again politely explained that we’d been set up for some time and needed to get some sleep. Oooh he got angry – boiling! Arguing with locals, stomping his feet. We explained that there was a large space to the side of us he could use, and we’d park really close to our tent to help! Shouty man’s wife? tried to calm him down. We explained that we’d be gone early and he could put his tent where ours was then. Not happy at all, stomping, muttering, cursing us, calling us Americans!?!
We let them get on with it. It was 00:30 by the time he’d put his tent up, covered it in loud plastic, and sourced large rocks to keep the loud plastic in place! No wonder he wanted shade from the tree with all that plastic – it must be boiling in there!
He was muttering all night and still annoyed in the morning. One of the locals came up to me, shaking his head, and pointed to Mr angry and told me that they all thought he was an asshole, which made me laugh! I felt relieved too – it wasn’t just me being obstinate! Tent wars – who knew?!
No sleep in Bran
We went to Bran – the home of Count Dracula – awesome! Wow they’re mad about Dracula over there. Just so happened that the town’s festival was on the day we arrived. Great traditional music – at festival level until 2 am! Strange how this is happening to us so often. Do Romanians party all the time? Or do we just happen upon it every night?! There is no sleep to be had in Romania!
Overhyping tourism
Bitten in the home of Dracula!
Talking of Bran, if it’s not Dracula/vampire related it must be banned from Bran! Everything is Dracula/vampire related in Bran, vampire burgers, vampire campsite, vampire drinks – hilarious! We loved it. To be fair Bran is a tiny place and probably needs all the hype it can muster. But it hasn’t gone down the lets sell lots of plastic tat route – so no fake plastic Dracula teeth to be found. Perhaps this is because real vampires actually live there! In the spooky castle!
We were thinking this when the mist descended on us and the moon rose in a way that only it could in 1960s B-movies! We slept and awoke with bite marks on our necks – agggh! That’s mosquitos for you – or is it! 😉
Transfagarasan
Talking of overhyping tourism … so Transfagarasan is a well known and very beautiful mountain pass! Travelling up through the forests gives you a sense that you can’t wait for a break in the trees so that you can see the vistas. And what sights there are – absolutely stunning, and well worth the effort!
But it’s not the only great place in Romania, far from it. So despite it being worth the effort, we were staggered to find that literally everyone in Romania had decided to visit it n the same day as us 😉 Near the top the queue didn’t move for over an hour! We waited and waited, then turned the car around and went back down lol! Plenty of other mountain passes to see in Romania!
Right … the down side of Romania!
The DN2! Seriously, something really needs to be done!
Unbelievably there are worse drivers in Europe than those we’ve encountered before – think Latvia and Serbia! And if you’ve seen the TV programme ‘World’s most dangerous roads‘ – the roads that the two ‘Derry Girls’ stars Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell went on in Romania are definitely not the most dangerous in the country – there are FAR more dangerous roads, although they’re motorways – so possibly not such great TV!!
Really though, Romania is MAD when it comes to driving! Just now, when writing this I found out that Romania has the highest road deaths per capita in the European Union! Once you’ve been there, you can easily see why! We saw right in front of us, (not, ‘it happened a while back and we’re passing the carnage now’) on average THREE car crashes a DAY, some definitely deadly and all totally unnecessary! Utter madness.
The outrageously dangerous road I mentioned earlier – the DN2 road from Bucharest to Moldova is plain and outright deadly. There are two lanes and two hard shoulders. The hard shoulders take up half width lanes. The lorries drive in these half width hard shoulders at maximum speed. This leaves half a lane for cars in both directions, most of which travel in excess of 100 miles per hour in both directions! Sometimes, if you’re lucky a car will flash lights to say I’m about to overtake now so don’t you overtake too. But mostly, it’s entirely luck and skill that gets you along the road.
So this isn’t the number 2 road that I was writing about, it’s nowhere near as busy. But the road structure is the same. You can see how slower vehicles move to the right leaving half lanes for overtaking traffic. This is mostly fine on quieter roads, not not on major motorways!!
Interesting the DN2 road has a wiki page in which it notes that it is Romania’s most dangerous trunk road!
We have no photos of the DN2 unfortunately due to having to concentrate on staying alive!
If you’re not very experienced as a driver, I can only imagine how scary it is. Many slower cars hide behind lorries – sensible! Many lorries overtake lorries!!!! in both directions – at the same time! In such instances, it’s best to hang well back in case of major collision – which we saw – twice!
Luckily we have a pretty fast car, we’re not entirely mad, we don’t have a death wish, and we appear to have sounder judgement than most. We also have excellent safety on our car, including top notch air bags – many of the crashes we saw had none of these safety features unfortunately!
Interestingly when there is a crash, they’re so frequent that everyone tries to drive by – at speed. The police usually arrive pretty quickly and drag everything to the side of the road to enable the traffic to move on asap!
Also, they don’t slow down when driving through villages – so 70 miles an hour appears to be wholly acceptable!!!
Plus when we visited Reșița where they’re installing a new tram system, we ended up going the wrong way down one-way streets as there were no signs indicating otherwise. In fact the signs were still indicating that we should go the wrong way!!!
For a nation which counts 85% of its citizens as religious – perhaps they feel that they’re leaving it in the hands of God? I say this, because in Delhi, India – which really is mad when it comes to driving – although not as speedy – we were told that life and death are in the hands of … whichever god they happened to believe in! Perhaps Romania and India have a similar belief system!
Whatever, it’s sheer madness, and despite the fact that we absolutely love Romania, something needs to be done about the driving over there! Sort it out Romania!!!
And anyway, despite this madness, in our view, Romania is still fantastic and definitely worth a visit! 🙂