Sign of the signs

A very important addition to the Romanian road side. Particularly for people who are not familiar with the fact that driving through any village you are likely to find extremely pissed up people staggering in front of your car, just collapsing on the road in front of you, or if they're on a bike, slaloming slowly up and down the street.

Story here. Though I wouldn't trust the Telegraph's translation of the sign. As far as I know it says (quite poetically) "Tormented Citizens"

5 places tourists to Romania should visit

1. The monasteries of Bucovina. Absolutely stunning places. If you have to pick only two then I would recommend Voroneţ and Suceviţa. Really you cant fail to be blown away by them. They'd be stunning if they had been created last week, but to think these paintings were done 500 years ago and have been exposed to the elements ever since, then it's impossible to fail to be impressed.

2. The Saxon villages (and especially the fortified churches) located in the old German dominated area roughly demarcated by Sibiu to the west, Brasov to the east, Sighisoara to the north, and the Fagaras mountains to the south. Again these places are incredible. Biertan in particular is just out of this world, but many of the others too are simply spectacular, and unlike anything you will find anywhere else in Europe.

3. Maramures Beautiful traditional villages, great scenery, interesting wooden churches, people wearing folk costume just because they damn well want to and not because it attracts tourists, weird stuff like the "Happy Cemetery", and possibly the best museum in Romania (The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance).


4. Sighisoara Arguably you could include this as being part of no.2, but I think it's worth giving a section to all on its own. Stunning mediaeval city, that would only be improved if they stopped allowing traffic up there. Wander round the German cemetery, the church, the clock tower, sit on the walls, eat a delicious meal in one of the restuarants up there and then stay in one the expertly renovated old houses in the main square. Central Brasov and Sibiu are also very nice, but something about the quiet atmosphere of Sighisoara makes it, for me, the best city to be in in the country.

5. Driving around Now there are lots of downsides to driving around in this country, not least the fact that it's really hard work (bad drivers, bad roads, horse carts, cows, drunk people on bikes, villages with no pavements so children etc are all walking on the road etc etc), but there are also a lot of upsides. These include some spectacular views and scenery, gorgeous villages, and the fact that because there are no motorways to speak of you see it all without zipping by it in a blur (that's a bit of a double edged sword obviously). I recently drove up the Bistrita valley and over the Prislop pass, for example, and it it just amazing. Then there are all the other passes over mountains (Bicaz Gorge being possibly the most incredible). If the difficult bits scare you, then perhaps get someone else to drive you. Whatever, it's worth it.

Other places which might make the list but I haven't been to them - the Danube Delta, The Iron Gates, areas of the Apuseni mountains, and more.

Next up: "Places that tourists often do go to in Romania but shouldn't bother with" (liable to be significantly more controversial)

Greeced Lightning

Back from our too-short holiday in Skala Potamia, Thassos, Greece. Lots of sun, sea, sand and errrm, well that's it for obvious words beginning with "s", since we were in a small two room apartment with three kids. Salad, I suppose. There was a lot of salad.

You know those brochure style images of couples walking hand-in-hand down a moonlit beach? Sitting in candle-lit restaurants slowly sipping wine and eating delicious food? Frolicking playfully (yet with the obligatory hint of sex) in the foaming waves? None of that stuff happens when you're on holiday with children. Or at least not with our children. Perhaps others have some foolproof sleeping-pills-and-ouzo concoction by which they cleverly create space for themselves, but not us.

Anyway it was a good holiday and I wouldn't like my obvious need to spend a week on holiday just with Mrs Musings to overshadow that fact. The sea was perfect - warm clean clear water, gently sloping beach allowing kids to play without fear of going under, fine white sand. Food was Greek (which means fantastic). The Mythos was cold. We didn't do much besides hang around on the beach, but that was fine.

Driving to Thassos is also easier (and quicker) than driving to Croatia as we've done in the last couple of years. It's just a straight shot down to Giurgiu in Romania, across a ridiculously unkempt border post and run down bridge over the Danube (especially ridiculous given that this is a majorly important border crossing in EU terms, and beyond - the route from Turkey to the west pretty much has to go through here), across Bulgaria, and then into Greece at the the three way Bulgaria/Greece/Turkey border area. From there you hit "developed EU" and the roads are superb all the way to Keramoti, the port for Thassos.

There is a bit more too it than that obviously. For example when I say "just a straight shot down to Giurgiu" I have conveniently left out the need to get past Bucharest. This is no easy task. I asked on a Romanian forum before going for advice, and got lots of helpful answers (which of course all contradicted each other as is the way of these things). Based on that, on the way down we decided to try the "centura" (belt) which is the sort of ring-road thing round Bucharest. My god, what a road. It's more pot hole than road, has incredible traffic and baffling road rules (all the "spokes" going in and out of the city have priority over the centura, so you have to crawl across these mad, churned up junctions every couple of kilometres, dodging cars, being squeezed by trucks, just generally living on a knife edge). On the way back, as it was a Saturday, I decided to instead try out the "driving through the middle of the city" option. Arguably this was better - the roads were in better condition, the traffic was still heavy, and complex, but at least there was slightly more logic to the road junctions. On the other hand, they have obviously banned signs in Bucharest - the only directions point you to the various barrios. This is all very well if you actually want to go to cartier tineretului or wherever, but not much use for the outsider. It wasn't until I had somehow negotiated myself to the road leading out of town from the Arcul de Triumf that I first saw a sign pointing to the airport. I mean surely this is information that might be useful to people? Madness. I think it's some massive scam to try and sell more GPS systems (it's certainly the first place I've ever driven in which I've felt I could have used one. Though such is the disregard shown for out-of-towners that it wouldn't surprise me if the City Hall jammed the signal of Satnavs within the city limits).

Bulgaria, like Romania, is a bit of motorway free zone. But unlike Romania, the other roads are actually pretty good. Even roads marked as minor white ones on the map are in good shape (you'd never venture onto one you weren't familiar with here for fear of spending three hours negotiating a 10 km section of untarmacked hell). It's helped by the fact that almost nobody seems to live in Bulgaria, meaning that you only pass through a village every 20 kms as opposed to every 3 kms here. And when you do it's empty of the horsecarts, dogs, cows, drunk blokes, cyclists, children, and wandering people of all varieties that you get here. (This allows for fast driving but it is slightly disconcerting. It was almost a relief to get back to Romania and it's colourful vibrant chaotic villages on the drive home). The other border, at Svilengrad is the starkest contrast you're ever likely to see within the EU. You cross from organised, fast, clean, well-kept Greece, into shabby poverty-stricken mayhem of what appears to be a major Rroma shanty town in Bulgaria.

Finally, a recommendation. If you're ever driving thorugh Bulgaria (either from N-S or E-W or any combination thereof, and you want a place to stay somewhere in the middle, try the Shipka IT Hotel. Fantastcially helpful and friendly owners, great hotel, good value, in a really nice village at the bottom of the mountains in the Valley of the Roses. Even if you've no plans to drive through Bulgaria, then make some, just so you can stay there. We stayed there both coming and going and felt like we were saying goodbye to friends at the end.

On the Liban(on)

Slowly but surely the roads in Harghita County are being resurfaced and therefore made driveable. When I arrived here (4 years ago TODAY! bloody hell), the roads here were appalling. Potholed and virtually impassable even for gas-guzzling SUVs (not that I ever actually experimented with one, but I reckon)

As time has gone on though the county council has made a concerted effort to make destinations accessible for people, which is a nice touch. Cities and towns are a bit slower to catch up, so you can still find yourself leaving a pristine new road surface for the old style potholed track whenever you get to a town or village, but you can't have everything.

Anyway, the latest road to get the treatment was the one that runs over the mountain between Udvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc) and Gyergyo (Gheorgheni), and this weekend we drove along it to see places we'd never seen before, for fear of destroying the car. It was spectacular. The road crosses the mountain at a place called Liban, which affords great views over thickly forested mountains and hills.

Here is a map of Harghita County to give you a sense of where the road is:

Since the county has three sizeable towns of note and this road connects two of them, it seems like an important one to have had done, so presumably it will make life easier for people having to travel between the two. The bus which goes between them, for example, has always used that road and it must have been one of the most miserable "short" journeys in the country. Now however it will be almost pleasurable.

Another road which was made useable two or three years ago was the one over the Bucsin pass between Gyergyo and Parajd (Gheorgheni and Praid). I only know of a couple of important roads now that could really use some work - the one between Csikszereda and Gyergyo, and the one between Udvarhely and Keresztur (Cristuru Secuiesc)

By the way, I would have tried to show this map on Google Maps, but for some reason Google Maps hates Romania, and just has vast empty spaces where anything should be. There is nothing there north of Brasov. Absolutely nothing. It's weird. The satellite images work, though they're not especially close in, and the ones round here are all taken in the winter so you can't actually see half of the roads as they're covered in snow.

I would quite like to know what Google has against Romania and why they can't be arsed to stick a map up, though.