20. Romania - bear hunting

Day 107, July 29th.  Dobra, Serbia – nr. Novaci, Romania 24 - 37C, sunny

We smile, nod, and mumble a little embarrassedly as we’re stamped into Romania. 

We’d begun to feel quite linguistically confident in the Balkans, with a mixture of English, ‘Balkan’ and – in extremis – Russian to get us by.  Now, as we pass through the most cursory of customs checks, under the shade of a tin-rooved gantry on the north side of the Danube, the near-total language barrier dawns on us. 

We can’t even manage “hello”, “please” or “thank you”.  Our pre-arrival research on the Romanian language had suggested it was very similar to Italian, but a quick glance at Google translate for “thank you” suggests otherwise.  We’ll just have to keep smiling and waving for the time being.

First stop is a fuel station, just inside the border.  We fill the car up and manage to buy two espressos from the garage attendant in the forecourt shop: he used to live in the UK and speaks good English.  He also offers to change some euros into lei for us: he’s friendly and seems trusting, so we exchange 50 euros and receive 180 lei. 

This seems like a good idea until, back in the car, we retrospectively check the exchange rate and realise we should have received closer to 250 lei…. He was so friendly about the manner in which he fleeced us, it’s hard to be cross with him.

For us, Romania starts by being flat, hot and littered with the rusting remains of communist-era industrial relics.  We decide to stop for lunch in the city of Drobeta-Turnu-Severin, which looks like the most appealing immediate option.  Its outskirts, however, are anything but appealing. 

We drive through an assortment of heavy industry, under human-sized metal pipes which snake up and over the road, connecting large toxic things to other large toxic things, and through grids of drab workers’ houses, situated immediately adjacent to the factories.

Things improve when we reach the centre, despite its one-way system doing its best to foil us.  We stop in a bookshop to buy a guidebook and decide to test the Romanian-Italian language theory.  “Just speak English” the old lady in the shop irritatedly barks at us.

We eat on the shaded terrace of a sophisticated restaurant – as suggested by the bookseller – adjacent to the town’s theatre.  Excellent pizzas and local Romanian dishes cost us over 70 euros though, our most expensive meal of any kind since we left Croatia three weeks ago, and a reminder that we’re heading back towards Western Europe, with prices to match.

In the afternoon we drive north towards Novaci, the jumping-off point for the TransAlpina Highway, one of Romania’s famous trans-Carpathian roads, our destination for tomorrow. 

It takes us an hour to cross this small section of the north Danube plain, scarred by the decaying remnants of heavy industry and derelict worker’s colonies.  It feels like every Romanian factory worker, following the Romanian Revolution and the execution of the Ceaușescu’s in December 1989, simply walked out of their Communist factories and never went back.  Of course, it’s not as simple as that: countless unfortunate souls still appear to be living in the tenement blocks we pass. 

We arrive at tonight’s camping ground late in the afternoon. It’s a field, surrounded by woodland, nestled in the Carpathian foothills and reached via a long, steep and very rocky track.  We’ve already decided that free camping is off the agenda in this part of Romania – too many bears around (8,000 of them, mostly in the Carpathian forests) and our roof tent is definitely not bear-proof.

There’s no-one else here apart from a middle-aged couple who appear to run the place, living in a little caravan in a corner of the field.  They greet us warmly, and proudly show us round their new kitchen and loo blocks, and their above-ground swimming pool.  They only opened this year; unfortunately, we suspect the off-roading required to reach the place might render them a little too remote to repay their investment.

We ask if there are any bears near here.  “No, we have dog” replies Christina, our host, in a friendly, nonchalant sort of way.  Her dog is a rather sweet, waggy mongrel – less than a year old and still puppy-like. 

We set up camp, as close to the trees at the edge of the wood as possible – given there’s no other shade – then cool ourselves off in their plunge pool. 

Later, as we’re drifting off to sleep, their little dog starts barking frantically, in response to what sounds like something large walking through the woods behind us, cracking fallen twigs and kicking up leaves. Nina, Laurie and Ralph are already asleep. 

It’s hard to describe the visceral, irrational fear of being in a canvas tent, in the dark, whilst listening to what you believe can only be a bear.  All our food is packed away, the dog is doing its job, our friendly hosts are snoring away in their caravan – yet all the same, it doesn’t make for a relaxing night’s sleep.

Day 108, July 30th.  nr. Novaci – nr. Dobra 16 - 32C, sunny

Rather sleepy this morning, but at least alive.  We make the most of the cool morning air and don’t leave until nearly midday: a side-effect of Romania being an hour ahead of Serbia means no-one wakes up until 8.30am.

En-route to the TransAlpina highway there is much excitement and anticipation at the possibility of seeing bears, from the safety of our own car now, and not in the tent.  We climb swiftly through a series of hairpin bends, from 500 metres at our camping spot to 1,500 metres, through the treeline and out onto wide open high pasture. 

The views of the Carpathian mountains all around us, and the vast southern plain beneath us, are staggering – but bear-less. 

We climb higher, through the ski resort town of Rânca and above 2,000 metres; still no bears. Just a succession of motorbike tourers and camper vans.  We stop for a picnic on the side of a mountain, relishing the bracingly cold mountain air for once, and are accosted by a series of friendly stray dogs.  At lunchtime at least, the dogs are preferable to bears.

Over the course of the afternoon, we complete the rest of the TransAlpina, weaving between a series of alternatingly grassy and rocky peaks in the southern Carpathians, before descending into a narrow, forested valley, following a beautifully clear mountain river.  Still no bears. 

We stop by some Roma children selling wild blueberries at the side of the road, Ralph jumps out with about five euros’ worth of lei to buy a small punnet.  The child trader he talks to is having none of it though: he wants the equivalent of ten euros, no bargaining.  Ralph’s not going to fall for this one and returns to the car empty-handed; we drive on, blueberry-less, for another 50 metres. 

Round the next corner, some Roma men are selling the same blueberries.  This time, Ralph procures an entire bagful for roughly four euros.  Fine work.  Interesting how the children here seem determined to drive a tougher bargain.

We reach tonight’s camping spot around four in the afternoon.  Nestled in the valley on the banks of the same river, this one is a little less random than last night’s affair: there are a few other campers here and the owners speak Italian, and some English.  Whilst the boys are busy paddling in the river and building dams, Nina and I have a beer with the campsite owner’s father. 

He speaks good Italian; we discuss how they lived in Rome for ten years during the fall of Communism, and how things are so much better in Romania now than they used to be.  Having a conversation like this in a mutual second language is so much easier: for one, we don’t need to feel guilty about our terrible Italian, and secondly, our interlocutor can’t get frustrated with us and just start speaking in English.  Perfect.

Day 109, July 31st.  nr. Dobra – nr. Porumbacu de Jos, 24 - 35C, sunny

A far better night’s sleep last night.   No bear scares, and very few dogs; just the occasional barking deer in the distance.

Today, we’re making our way slowly to the beginning of the Transfiguration Highway, another of Romania’s famous Carpathian passes. It’s too far to drive to, and over, in one day though.  None of us had quite realised that Romania is actually a very large country: roughly the same size as Yugoslavia, and we took five weeks to cover that distance…

We temporarily leave the Carpathians and drive across a great, flat plain to Sibiu, where we stop for lunch at the ASTRA National Museum Complex, a huge, open-air museum of Romanian civilisation and ‘folk technology’. 

After a lunch which is expensive and disappointing in equal measure, we spend a few hours walking round the complex, the boys exploring an assortment of ancient windmills, water mills, woodworking shops, olive presses, houses and churches, which have been carefully lifted from other parts of Romania and deposited here, to create a traditional folk village.

Perhaps on other days they have more people working here, but today, it’s a little bit like a folk village after a plague.  Barring a few tourists and some locals playing pan pipes, the buildings are empty, the machinery is stationary, and the boys need to use their wholesome imaginations (and extraordinary ability to fiddle with things) to bring the place to life.

We’re done by mid-afternoon and jump back in the car, once again grateful for our air conditioning.  Our campsite tonight is back in the cooler comfort of the Carpathian foothills, again nestled in a forest next to a mountain stream, but this time, surrounded by some no-nonsense, bear-proof electric fencing.

Ralph’s been feeling a little under the weather for the last day or so, and this campsite has a single ‘glamping’ chalet.  In the interests of getting Ralph fully recovered for another day in the mountains tomorrow, we ditch the roof tent for a night and stay in an extraordinarily luxurious A-frame chalet, with a bathroom and bedroom downstairs for Nina and I, and the boys in their own beds in a mezzanine section above us. 

It's a great call – especially as we listen to the many campsite dogs, noisily doing their job as we go to sleep, and enjoy the satisfaction of being able to shut an air-tight, double-glazed window and close out the noise.

Day 110, August 1st.  nr. Porumbacu de Jos – nr. Podu Dâmboviței, 18 - 30C, sunny

Over the washing up in the morning, I chat to Florian, our host.  We find ourselves talking about the extraordinary cost-of-living crisis in Romania: he explains prices have risen 40% in the last two years, and wages haven’t moved.  He blames it squarely on corrupt politicians and Romanian oligarchs in Bucharest, and the power of ‘black money’ – which Bucharest-dwellers apparently spend with gay abandon in Romania’s holiday resorts, driving prices up for everyone else.

He's not a great believer in the EU or NATO either, and believes Romania needs a foot in both camps: “Russia is like, just there, and America, well – where the f*ck is that?!” It’s not the first time we’ve heard this view across Eastern Europe.

To the boy’s delight, Florian confirms we will see bears today.  “Once you’re through the tunnel at the top, you’ll see bears, for sure.  People feed them.  But don’t feed them!” We nod vigorously in agreement.

After that, we’re packed up and in the car with very little delay.  There’s another folk museum on the way, but there’s literally zero appetite to visit it.  Today is only about one thing: bears.

Leaving the plain, again we start to ascend, swiftly, through a dense pine forest, quickly climbing to 1,200 metres through numerous hairpins.  In the laybys along each straight, we see locals enjoying picnics, taking photos, occasionally having a pee over the edge – and then suddenly at one layby, we spot a huge mummy bear with three cubs.

She’s looking over the crash barrier at us, her cubs playing at her side.  She’s deep-brown and massive: between three and four feet tall to the shoulder when on all fours, but she’d be well over six feet tall standing up.  She watches us for a half a minute or so, then turns tail and ambles off with her cubs.

‘Amble’ is a massive understatement.  The speed at which this 200-plus kilogram animal can move, with such litheness, is terrifying.  If I’d seen this before hearing the night-time rustling at our first camping spot in Romania a few nights back, I literally don’t know what I’d have done.  Hauled the rest of the family into the truck and slept in the car, possibly.

Laurie, sat in the front with the big camera, is scared, elated and excited in equal measure.  He’s on my lap, taking photos like the paparazzi, asking me to put the window down, then “not that far down Daddy! Up! UP!!” as mummy bear makes eye contact.  Nina and Ralph in the back have their window open a little and get an equally good view, from a marginally safer distance.

We drive on, delighted to have a sighting ‘in the bag’ before the tunnel.  Shortly afterwards and rather unexpectedly, we meet a two-kilometre-long traffic jam, the result of part of the mountain road subsiding further up. 

Ahead of us are half a dozen ancient Czech Skodas, heavily decorated and obviously part of a rally.  At each stoppage, every single one of their many inhabitants take the opportunity to jump out of their cars, light up, crack jokes and compare their appalling tastes in heavy thrash-metal music (played at full volume out of elderly, tinny speakers).  It’s rather a come-down after our first bear spotting.

Happily, once we’re through the traffic lights and the road works, the traffic dissipates as we climb through another series of tight hairpins, above the treeline now, towards 2,000 metres.  The climb takes its toll: on the way up, we pass numerous camper vans and a few of our Czech friends, parked up at the side of the road, bonnets up, waiting for their engines to cool down.  At least out in the open, we reflect, there’s no large, wandering fauna to turn a breakdown into a crisis.

We reach the tunnel.  On this side it’s surrounded by an array of cheap souvenir stalls and restaurants.  The magnetic appeal of rubbish food and cheap tat has pulled virtually every other car on the road into the adjoining car parks; we continue, without stopping, into the largely deserted tunnel. 

Emerging the other side, we’re debouched into a wide, green and rocky glacial valley.  Far below us, we can see glimpses of the heavily forested Argeș valley, plunging out of sight.   Our eyes follow the series of hairpins which will eventually lead us back into the trees: somewhere down in there, we’ll be in bear country proper.

The first part of the descent is uneventful, the amazing view notwithstanding.  Indeed, the first 20 minutes’ driving through the forests in the gorge below is disappointingly quiet as well.  But not for long.  Rounding a bend, we come across three cars parked up: rather like being on safari, these tend to be the precursors for seeing a bear. 

Sure enough, on the other side of the road, is an adolescent brown bear: smaller than the mummy bear we saw earlier, but still not to be trifled with.  The closest car – on the other side of the road – throws an apple out of the window.  The bear picks it up and eats it, we tut disapprovingly, but then find ourselves in a ‘Catch-22’ situation: we don’t want people to feed the bears, but then if no-one fed them, they wouldn’t hang around by the side of the road and we wouldn’t see them… 

Grudgingly we accept the hypocrisy of the situation and get on with enjoying watching the bear.  After a minute or two, this one climbs up the bank – again with fearsome speed and agility – and disappears out of sight into the woods.

As we continue our descent, we see another eleven bears. Some are harmless-looking adolescents, some are super-cute cubs – but with the cubs, there’s always a fearsome mummy lurking nearby.  We make reasonably close eye-contact with a particularly large female at one point – which, if it wasn’t for the safety of a car door and a largely-closed window – would be a truly bowel-loosening, likely near-death (or worse) experience.

Our final sighting is a solo sighting.  No other vehicles around, just us and a very large, single bear, stood on a wall on the other side of the road, looking at us.  By now, everyone’s worked out the optimum window aperture to ensure we can take some great photos, without inviting any closer, unwelcome contact.  Ralph overcomes his initial fears to enjoy looking out of a semi-open window; Laurie is still clicking away furiously.

Then, before we know it, we’re back in civilisation.  We stop at a fuel station in a town at the bottom of the pass, fill up and have a coffee and ice cream in the forecourt café.  It’s been an exhilarating drive – undoubtedly one of the highlights of the trip.

It’s another hour and a half on to tonight’s campsite, a friendly, Dutch-run affair, in suitably bear-free countryside, on top of a hill overlooking what would be a very pretty valley, if it wasn’t for the motorway to Brazov running through it. 

Secretly enjoying the fact that all our neighbours are in ground tents and thus would almost certainly get eaten first in the event of rogue wildlife making an appearance, we sleep soundly.

Day 110, August 2nd.  nr. Podu Dâmboviței - Brazov, 16 - 34C, sunny

It’s actually chilly during the night.  Nina wakes up at 2am, freezing; we swap bedding, she gets in my sleeping bag and I take her duvet, which means I also get to cuddle the hot water bottle – AKA Laurie.

At 6am, we’re woken up by a cacophony of noise: the local cow-herders, taking their herd up to the high pasture, beyond the camping ground.  It sounds like they’re driving their cows through the campsite and underneath our tent: the chorus of unintelligible shouts from the herders, coupled with the clinking of cowbells, means we’re all up and eating breakfast by seven.

We leave the campsite by nine.  Our first stop today is the famous Bran Castle, the adopted home of the Dracula stories and an extraordinary beneficiary of the marketing, branding and PR that has accompanied it for the past century.

The castle itself, perched prettily on a cliffy hillock amongst the forests of the Turcul valley, is surprisingly homely.  After years of neglect during the Communist era, it’s been painstakingly restored; its pointy turrets, towers and galleries all immaculately manicured, ready for the daily influx of tourists who come here for the Dracula experience.

Luckily, on a sunny summer’s morning, it’s easy enough to avoid the worst vestiges of the vampire-induced marketing, but as we shuffle round its attractive white-painted and heavy beamed rooms, we can’t help feeling that the whole thing is a little overblown. 

Laurie – becoming increasingly ruthless with his determinations of cultural relics, sums it up at the end: “That castle was a complete waste of time.”  Harsh, but we can see where he’s coming from.

We spend an hour navigating our way through the least-plasticky of the souvenir stalls, having a quick coffee and a snack, before getting back in the car.  It’s 11am and the crowds, large when we entered, are now snaking their way down the hill to the many car parks, all of which are now full.

We’ve decided to spend two nights in Brazov, our next stop, in an apartment.  Everyone’s more long-term tired from the travelling now, and we’ve agreed to break up our final few weeks with more ‘two-nighters’ and to keep cultural diversions as minimal and interesting as possible, as everyone starts to suffer from the combined effects of a peripatetic lifestyle, the enduring, ruthless heat, and the well-known symptoms of “OCF” (simultaneously, “old-church-fatigue” and “old-castle-fatigue”).

Brazov is a great place to start this discipline.  We check in to a large, airy apartment, with a separate room for each of the boys, about a ten-minute walk from the ancient city centre.  We have lunch in a superb Romanian restaurant five minutes’ away, and collapse in a heap in our apartment for the rest of the afternoon, while the summer sun blazes away.

In the late afternoon, we venture into town.  Brazov is a delight by any standards: a small, chilled out, colourful hotch-potch of Baroque and Gothic architecture, largely pedestrianised, and adorned with so many Italian restaurants that we sometimes think we’re back in Rome.

We stroll round the Piața Sfatului, watching locals and tourists alike playing in the fountains, then find a suitably nice-looking pizza restaurant and enjoy – despite some archaically slow service – excellent pizzas and antipasti, washed down with cold beer and flavoured lemonades – an Eastern European speciality.

Day 111, August 3rd.  Brazov, 24 - 33C, sunny, showers

None of us have yet adjusted to the Romanian time zone: it’s 9am before we’re all up.  But there’s no hurry: we’re not planning on covering much ground today. 

Nina puts together one of her now celebrated walking tours through the city, starting with the White Tower – a medieval tower perched on a hillside, overlooking the town’s red tiled rooves, pastel church towers and the monstrous Gothic Biserica Neagra (the “Black Church”) – Brazov’s Lutheran cathedral.

We wander down to the down, walk through the pastel yellow Schei Gate, like a doll’s house version of the Arc de Triomphe, and amble through the city’s streets, admiring the colourful, shabby rows of Baroque houses.

We pay a short, sobering visit to Brasov’s synagogue.  Outside, there’s a memorial to the 150,000 Transylvanian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz by Hungarian authorities, then murdered. It’s another grim episode of WWII which doesn’t feature much in the UK mindset – it’s just too far from home.

After a coffee and some fancy ginger and pomegranate lemonades to refresh everyone and cheer us all up, Ralph and I pay a visit to the Black Church, while Nina and Laurie go looking for an art shop. 

Orthodox Lutherans are a pretty austere bunch; the Black Church seems to reflect their deeply conservative, biblical fanaticism rather well.  Ralph thinks that its dark, foreboding exterior, coupled with its lofty, yet claustrophobic and subdued interior – accompanied by some downright Satanical organ music being played during our visit – makes the place feel far more like Dracula’s palace than Bran Castle.   

We head back to our apartment for lunch and a quiet afternoon, reading and snoozing.  We don’t venture out again until gone 6pm and after a pleasant early evening stroll through Brazov – watching locals and tourists enjoying themselves – we settle down at a table on the street, outside another of Brazov’s civilised eateries. 

It feels like a mini-holiday: Nina goes so far as to order a glass of prosecco before supper.  More pizzas and excellent Italian food are topped off with a complementary shot of meloncello – by far the nicest free dram of anything we’ve been given on this trip, and light years better than the routinely foul rakia that’s dispensed like water in the Balkans.

Sitting in the evening sunshine, watching the crowds and listening to some lively street music from round the corner, it's hard to believe that we’re further east than Lviv, Ukraine’s westerly city, and less than 200 miles from Odesa.

Day 112, August 4th.  Brazov – Petrestrii de Jos, 22 - 32C, cloudy

It feels like we’re simultaneously regressing and advancing, to teenagers.  No-one’s up before 9am this morning, and Ralph – usually a committed dawn riser – doesn’t wake up until 9.45.

Despite the late start we’re somehow on the road by 11, helped by some excellent teamwork to re-load our car. It’s become apparent that whenever we stay in an apartment, we don’t travel light: all our clothes and dirty washing, cooking equipment, fridge food (our auxiliary battery has never been the same since we left the fridge running for five days in Tunis without driving anywhere, meaning the fridge won’t keep cool for more than 24 hours without the car being started), non-fridge food, camera, computer, teddy bears, books…  

Every time we de-camp, it feels like we’re moving in permanently.  Luckily, we’ve become quite practised at it.  Such are the rigours of a peripatetic lifestyle.

We leave the Carpathian foothills this morning and drive across a large plain to Sighasoara.  En-route, the road is lined with more – as yet undemolished – industrial relics and numerous long, straight Romanian villages; each with a mixture of crumbling, rather forlorn looking houses, and some with beautiful mosaic facades. 

Sighasoara is a colourful, chocolate-box sort of town – quaint, pastel-coloured houses leading off a bustling market square, with a local brass band playing oompah-loompah songs.  

At this stage in the trip, we’re desperately searching for ‘points of differentiation’; Sighasoara is just about interesting enough for lunch (in a restaurant where they’re showing the Olympics in Romanian – the first TV we’ve watched in months) and an hour-long wander afterwards.  On a shorter trip, it would be positively noteworthy.  Culturally, everyone’s a little ‘over it’ by now. 

In the afternoon we drive on to a campsite near Petrestrii de Jos – a rocky gorge carved out by a small, muddy-brown river – it’s pretty much the only topographical feature of interest anywhere nearby.  

Having barely seen a car for miles, arriving at the campsite we find the entire area over-run by Romanians, enjoying their Sunday afternoon picnics and hiking around the gorge.  But by nightfall, they’ve all left, and we can enjoy our carbonara (now a long-established camping favourite) in peace.

Day 113, August 5th.  Petrestrii de Jos – Valea Lunga Romana, 26 - 34C, sunny, humid, rain showers

An undisturbed night’s sleep, and as ever (when undisturbed) it’s nice to be back in the roof tent again.  Our morning at the campsite is drama-free, save for one of our flip-flops mysteriously going missing from the bottom of the roof tent ladder overnight. 

I pick up its lonely other half and wander round the campsite, catching the eye of other campers in a (hopefully) inquisitive yet not accusatory manner, but no-one proffers any ideas.  We suspect the campsite dog has snaffled it.  The owners are apologetic, and scour their dog’s favourite hangouts, but to no avail.  It’ll probably appear, in many pieces, in a few days’ time.

Our first stop today are the unfortunately named Salina Turda salt mines, a quarter of an hour’s drive way.  In the spirit of ‘points of differentiation’, these fit the bill very well.  The mines – two of which are still being actively mined – are vast.  Despite being mined since the Middle Ages, they still contain enough salt to cover the entire earth with a thin layer.

Having bought our tickets and walked down a long and increasingly cool passageway underground, we descend 13 flights of wooden stairs, into an enormous, conical chamber – possibly the biggest enclosed space we’ve ever set foot in.  The mine is a busy tourist attraction and indeed there’s a whole leisure park down here, complete with a Ferris wheel.  But there’s plenty of space for everything and everyone: the cavern is 112 metres high and nearly 70 metres wide at its base.

Having walked through this first cavern, admiring its striated walls and the layers of salt deposits on literally anything that’s stayed still for longer than about five minutes, we descend another 13 flights of stairs to a second, inter-connected cavern, with a lake at the bottom. 

There are boats for hire here: we dutifully hire a particularly difficult to manoeuvre rowing boat and whilst Nina sensibly stays on the island to admire the view, Ralph, Laurie and I bump our way clumsily round the lake, trying not to capsize or broadside other less-than-impressed tourists.

Two hours underground is sufficient: avoiding the massive queue for the single (very small) lift, we climb the cumulative 26 floors back to ground level and emerge, squinting but proudly not panting, into the heat and the sunlight.

Our final cultural stop in Romania is Corvins’ Castle, en-route to the Hungarian border.  Laurie in particular is less than keen to visit; but Ralph and the rest of us over-rule him.  As it turns out, Corvins’ Castle – a spectacular, multi-turreted Gothic-Renaissance monster – is worth the visit. 

But it’s not, as the marketing photos would have you believe, set in the resplendent, mountainous Romanian countryside.  It’s situated at the arse-end of a particularly grim industrial town called Hunedoara; indeed the first view we get of its magnificent turrets is perfectly framed by a decaying concrete silo and another derelict factory. 

Laurie, holding his position, decides it’s not worth the entry fee; so Ralph and I wander it’s grand halls and climb its many towers alone, leaving Nina and Laurie to paint the edifice from the moat walls, outside.

Late in the afternoon we arrive at our final night’s accommodation in Romania: ostensibly a campsite but really just a homely, plum tree-filled garden, owned by Ada, a middle-aged Romanian lady who lives here alone, with her cats, playful kittens, and obligatory guard dogs.  Her house is on a side street off one of the quintessentially long, straight Romanian villages we’ve driven through, it’s refreshing to be back in an authentic, rural setting.

Ada invites us to pick as many plums as we can: the branches of her trees are breaking with them.  We’re happy to oblige – although the consequent detrimental impact on the air quality in the roof tent later in the evening is significant. 

The boys play with Ada’s kittens for hours; we listen to the sound of next door’s tractor threshing hay, whilst playing screechy Romanian folk-songs on a Communist-era radio. As we drift off to sleep in the roof tent, a particularly adventurous kitten climbs on to the roof and crawls between in the inner and outer lining of the tent, trying to get in.  At one point, it crawls across the mosquito net nearest Ralph, silhouetted by the moon. Luckily, we’d just told a sleepy Ralph that a kitten had climbed up: from close range, the silhouette briefly resembled a baby bear.

We drift off to sleep, listening to the rain, the terrible folk music and the determined scratchings of a small kitten.  Luckily, our canvas is strong.

Day 113, August 6th.  Valea Lunga Romana, Romania – Lakitelek, Hungary, 21 - 34C, sunny

After a relaxed, kitten-filled morning, we leave Ada, amidst goodbyes and thankyous for the bags of plums, plus a watermelon she’s given us.  She’s another shining example of simple, rural generosity.

We make our way to the Hungarian border, via a detour over a particularly rickety wooden bridge to fill up with fuel.  The boys take great delight in getting out and testing the bridge – over a reasonably large river – before we cross.  Quite why we think they’re qualified to give us the all-clear, we’re not sure.

We reach the border by 11am and join an-hour long queue of cars, buses and lorries: thankfully, this is our last proper border crossing before we’re back in the welcoming world of Schengen.