ROMANIA: A JOURNEY BY MOTORHOME

Barry and Margaret Williamson

The following article was first publishedas an article 'Romania Revisisted' in the April 2005 edition of the MMM (Motorhome Motorcaravan Monthly), the UK's premier motorhome magazine.

For a series of images of Romania, including many of the painted monasteries of Bucovina in the far north-east, click here:  Romanian Images

Our time in Romania was part of a 7,500-mile journey in our experienced 27 ft Four Winds motorhome, through 14 countries and 13 languages. From the UK, we travelled east across France and Italy to reach Greece by ferry before continuing to Turkey. Turning west, we began our return to the UK through Bulgaria, crossing into Romania over the iron-girded 'Friendship Bridge', which carries road and rail high above the Danube, from Ruse to Giurgiu.

Our unexpected welcome to Romania was a deep trough and a spray of disinfectant, which later dried into large white patches. One booth gave us a chit to confirm we had been treated; a second wanted to see the chit and take the fee - in Romanian lei; the third exchanged money but was closed; a fourth, the customs, authorised us to pay in euros - so back to the second clutching €8. A fifth booth stamped our passports; the sixth wanted €13 for road tax.

Losing count, the next booth (the Police!) told us that a Green Card for the motorbike wasn't necessary; the next that we should get one in Bucharest; the next 3 booths all sold Green Cards for €75 a month, argued down to €70.

After only 2 hours of this, we skirted gaggles of geese squabbling over the shrinking puddles, before passing under a well-remembered sign of welcome: Drum Bun (an odd mix of Greek and Latin meaning, literally, Road Good).

South-east Romania is as poor as Bulgaria and Turkey, the people thin and shabbily dressed, travelling on foot or by horse and cart. Old women sold tomatoes, eggs and watermelons at the roadsides, chickens and ducks pecked the verges. Bucharest lay at the end of 40 miles of rough road. The Romanians are inheritors of the Greek tradition of starting road works by digging deep roadside ditches, miles long, then moving on to the next job, leaving an unnervingly narrow passage.

Bucharest has wide tree-lined boulevards befitting a capital city and, with little Sunday traffic, we soon emerged unscathed, heading for its one campsite: the well-equipped Casa Alba (White House) about five miles north on the Brasov road, just past the Police Academy. It was strange to find ourselves among tourists again - several Italian motorhomes and a 25 ft Welsh Hobby from which Alan and Kaye emerged to greet us. They had been travelling for 2 years, recently coming east through Hungary and Romania, heading for Greece via Bulgaria and Turkey - their first visit to Eastern Europe. We had a lot to talk about!

Bucharest interested us for its modern history: on 21 December 1989, Ceausescu made his final, fatal speech to the booing crowd from the balcony of the HQ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, now the Senate building. By Christmas Day, he and his wife Elena had been summarily tried and executed, just two of over 1,000 people who died in those momentous events.

Still going north, we spent a night on a simple non-powered campsite on sloping terraces behind a motel in Sinaia, a little ski resort at about 2,700 ft in the Bucegi Mountains. Continuing to Brasov, we crossed the Carpathian Mountains on a good road, climbing gradually to the 3,310 ft Predeal Pass, which marks the border of Wallachia and Transylvania.

We zigzagged steeply down towards Brasov (alias Kronstadt), pulling into Camping Dirste just 5 miles before the old Saxon city. After setting up on a level pitch with its own power point, drain and tap, we met our 3 neighbours. John and Stephanie, on a one-year tour in their Hymer, were our first English people in 2 months; a French trio had just seen a family of bears hunting for food behind workers' flats in Brasov and an elderly Swiss motorhomer had once climbed the Eiger.

The Gothic Schwarze Kirche ('Black Church', built in 1477) lies inside Brasov's once massive walls. We joined German-speaking Saxons for a Sunday evening recital of Vivaldi and Bach on the 4,000 pipe organ. Priceless Anatolian rugs (spoils of war from the Ottomans) hung from every wall and gallery. While we were away, a convoy of 13 Italian motorhomes slipped into the campsite.

We went in search of Transylvanian castles on a short circular motorbike ride from Brasov. Rasnov lies 10 miles away with a splendid 13thC hilltop fortress, entry fee 90p, high above a grassy campsite. For another Ł1.50 each, we had chicken breast schnitzels, tomato salad, chips, bread and a bottle of water in the village far below.

Bran, 6 miles further on, has a less dramatic but better-known castle, originally built in 1378 by Saxon merchants as a toll station for trade between Transylvania and Wallachia. The many souvenir stalls reflect its current association with Dracula, even though it is unlikely that Prince Vlad 'The Impaler' Tepes (the inspiration for Bram Stoker's tale of Gothic horror) ever set foot there.

We returned to Brasov via a long climb to Romania's largest ski resort, Poiana Brasov at 3,370 ft, nestled in the southern Carpathians amongst hotels, cable cars, chair lifts and a gondola.
Seventy miles further west, heading towards Hungary, we had a wonderful surprise in the village of Carta, at the foot of the Fagaras Mountains, Romania's highest and steepest. De Oude Wilg (The Old Willow Tree) is a small campsite, run by a Dutch woman and her Romanian husband in the field behind their traditional village house. Corn grows on one side, a farm with horses, pigs, geese, chickens and peasant women in long red dresses lies on the other, and a river runs along the bottom of the meadow.

The price of €9 a night included a 'welcome drink' - a jug of sweet homemade cherry & blackcurrant liqueur. The by-now-very-welcome washing machine cost €1, washing powder and pegging out included.

We soon learned that there are 5 Dutch-owned-and-run campsites in Transylvania and we stayed on 3 of them: De Oude Wilg, Benelux in the village of Blajel near Sighisoara and Aurel Vlaicu named after its own village (visit www.axyzgroup.com). The Dutch first came to Romania in the early 1990's with aid schemes, met a Romanian partner and settled down.

The Fagaras Mountains are accessed by the Trans-Fagaras Highway, another expression of Ceausescu's insanity but now a spectacular tourist road, switch-backing up past waterfalls to a tunnel at over 6,600 ft. It led us to great cycling, motorbiking and walking.

Sighisoara, the finest unspoilt Saxon town in Transylvania, has its own campsite at the top of an impossibly long and steep hill, high above the town. On our Sunday morning visit, folk dancing and traditional music filled the cobbled medieval town square.

Timisoara is a pleasant and prosperous city in the west of the country, with Hungary to the north and Serbia to the south. The excellent Camping International lies to the east, on the Lugoj road. Timisoara is where the revolution of December 1989 started, as a protest against the dismissal of Father Lászlo Tökés from his Reformed Church. Cycling through in the summer of 1989, we had seen a bookshop in which all the books were written by either Nicolae or Elena Ceausescu, while the locked food shops had only empty shelves. Now McDonald's occupies a key position in the central Victory Square.

In Arad, the last town before the Hungarian border, we were reunited with the Fizedean family - Dan and Cristina and Dan's parents, Teodor and Lucretia. We last met in 1990 when we took aid by the truckload to Romanian orphanages in Moldavia, in the remote northeast of the country. The Fizedeans had given us a welcoming break in Arad during each of the 3 long drives from the UK, and a great insight into life in Romania, before and after Ceausescu.

Arad's only campsite, down by the Mures River, had been turned into a tennis club but we found a safe place on the TIR truck park behind a small motel on the Timisoara road. Some things had changed in the last 13 years: cars other than the Dacia (Romania bought the Renault 12 factory many years ago) were on the streets, petrol stations did not have mile-long queues, buses no longer ran on methane, shops had opened and private enterprise was obvious in many small businesses and market stalls.

We crossed the border at Nagylac/Nadlak, our 14th entry into Hungary, now the crossroads of central Europe. Smooth roads, clear signposts, campsites and supermarkets in every town - all the signs of a developed country - did little to ease the regret we felt at leaving the Romanians to their much simpler life behind well-guarded frontiers.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Camping: Romania has good sites on the coast and in major cities, while petrol stations, restaurants and motels are increasingly providing camping places - and then there are the Dutch!

Currency: The Romanian leu, still inflating, stood at 50,000 lei to the pound during our visit. The currency should not be brought out of the country. Credit cards are of little use except to get cash from ATM's, which are easy to find in towns. The euro is the (strongly) preferred second currency.

Food: Romania has large Cash and Carry stores - Metro and Selgros - in the major cities. They literally sell everything and we were happy to become members for the day by showing our passports.

Fuel: LPG is freely available and diesel cost 43p per litre. Since Hungary was 55p, we knew where to fill up!

Internet: Even quite small towns had good facilities for emailing for as little as 60p an hour.

Languages: A welcome relief after Bulgarian (or Hungarian!), Romanian is accessible with its roots in Latin; Italians feel at home there! German is spoken in tourist areas but young people prefer English, now the first foreign language in schools.

Maps and Guides: For overall planning, we used a 1:800,000 map of Romania and Bulgaria in the excellent Kummerley and Frey series, bought in advance. The Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe gives good value with its coverage of 19 countries!

Roads: The German ADAC Guide writes: 'The road network is largely in a pitiful condition. Side roads are frequently a row of potholes. Only the long-distance roads can be driven at all quickly, except where they go through towns. Driving after dark is to be avoided at all costs.' We agree – for example, the signposted truck route (over 3.5 tons), north from Bucharest to Ploiesti, was the worst road we had driven since Morocco!

However, the roads were quiet and drivers took their time. Amblers we may be, with an eye on the fuel gauge, but even we sometimes needed to pass a Trabant, a bullock cart piled high with hay or an ancient 'Roman' truck, belching black smoke.

Safety: Our experience was that Romania is safe for motorhomers. We had been warned of police, and even people dressed as police, stopping foreign vehicles and hassling for an 'on-the-spot' fine. The Lonely Planet also warns of 'Street Scams', but we missed out on all these excitements.

Only two other British motorhomes came our way in Romania, although German, Italian and French camping caristes were an occasional sight, sometimes in convoys and usually driving to or from the Black Sea coast.

Telephones: Public telephones work on cards and can be used for national and international calls. UK mobile phone companies have good but expensive roaming agreements with the extensive local networks. The code for Romania is +40.

TV: The standard is PAL B/G, common throughout Europe but not the UK. American and British films and documentaries are shown with subtitles.

Visas & Insurance: Romania gives a free 90-day tourist visa to EU citizens at the border and 'Green Card' minimum insurance cover can be bought for any vehicle at €75 for 4 weeks. For a more acceptable Ł12.50 per occasion, Comfort Insurance extended the motorhome's usual 12-month full insurance cover for 26 countries (including RAC Continental Breakdown Cover), to a further 11 countries, including Romania, for up to 120 days in any given insurance year.

Weather: The country has a continental climate - hot, dry summers and cold, damp, winters. Spring and autumn tend to be brief but provide the best time to visit.

Where Else? We plan to return to Romania to spend time in the mountains of the Maramures, below the Ukrainian border, and among the painted monasteries around Suceava in the northeast province of Moldavia. Bird watchers should make for the Danube Delta with plenty of insect repellent!

For more information, contact Romanian Embassy, Arundel House, 4 Palace Green, London W8 4QD, telephone 020 7937 96666. Visit www.romania.embassyhomepage.com or www.romaniatourism.com.