Romania: Braşov to Sovata

Cast iron detail, Braşov

Back on the road again, we were about 9km out of Braşov when we came across a "no bikes or horses-and-carts" road sign with no alternative route in sight. We felt more comfortable when we saw another cyclist riding directly past a police car that was stopped to book speeding motorists. The horses and carts didn't seem to heed the sign either.

Horses and cart on "no horses and carts road"

We pushed on to the small town of Bran to see "Dracula's Castle", a homely looking whitewashed castle filled with a maze of wooden staircases and buzzing with tourists.

Bran Castle courtyard - home of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's book

Happily, we found a campground for the night in Bran. Roger made friends with a fellow camper who explained how he was more comfortable in nudist campgrounds and paraded around in stringy speedos until nightfall.

Camping European style

The next day we took the scenic forest road to Fagaraş, ignoring the "no bikes" sign again. It was on the 14 km stretch to Fagaraş that we experienced one of the only tailwinds so far, making the ride almost effortless, with a fierce storm building behind us over the Carparthian Mountains.

It was in the small Saxon town of Iacobeni, now inhabited by Gypsies, where we found accommodation near the Biserica (church). "Father Don" is a German priest who has spent the last 15 years in Romania running a home for street children. The grown children help run a small hotel, doing the cooking, cleaning and gardening. They showed us around the beautifully refurnished Biserica which is surrounded by a fortress, a common feature of Saxon villages. After dinner Father Don showed us some of the newspaper articles he has written about torture in Romanian prisons and the problems that communism has left here. It was a fascinating experience, one of our highlights of travel so far.

Iacobeni village from the church tower

We were fortunate to be travelling through Romania with two good maps. One was a German cycling map given to us by Darinka in Croatia (thanks!). This showed lots of good routes through the country and we learnt that deviating from them led to either really slow dirt roads covered in rocks or to busy highways with lots of trucks. The other map was a Romanian 1:600000 road map. Pink roads on this map were motorways; brown were busy highways; yellow were main routes that were usually some form of asphalt but sometimes dirt; and the majority of the map was covered in white roads which were suitable only for horses and carts, not for bikes. So we tried to stick to yellow where possible.

Luisa cycling through a Transylvanian village

On to the touristy town of Sighişoara where we stayed with a folk musician within the old town centre, close to this ornate citadel:

Sighişoara citadel

As we ventured through the Hungarian enclave in northern Transylvania the street signs were in both Romanian and Hungarian. The largest minority group in Europe, the Romanian Hungarians, number 1.8 million. The region was part of Hungary for 1000 years but was given to Romania as a gift for helping out the Allies in WWI. So even though it's been Romanian territory for 90 years there are villages where no Romanian is spoken, or even understood! Entering one of these small towns, Rugonfalva, we found we had no common language with most of the population - the most we could understand was a smattering of German! The locals at the pub found us a room with the chef, and we communicated in stilted Romanian.

Stork nest and church, Rugonfalva

A day or two and we were back to bilingual (Romanian and Hungarian) territory. Wandering off the known bike roads trying to find shortcuts left us on steep gravel roads, vowing never to shortcut again. Upon reaching Sovata we climbed to the top of a hill following "camping" signs to camping that never eventuated, the Romanian definition of camping being much broader than ours. We stayed in bungalows in Sovata, a town that appeared to have been built as a holiday resort around an disappointingly murky lake system where holiday makers sunbathed on concrete platforms. The "medicinal" spring waters that flowed from public taps tasted strange and metallic.

Triple bunger stork nest, Sovata