Adventures in Oradea

I’m the most un-tan I’ve ever been in my life and I hate it. So I figured it was time to bust out of the suffocating office and shirts with buttons long enough for an outdoor adventure. And when you’re in these parts, why not Transylvania for the Fourth?

Elli and I go way back by now (even though by my calculations we’ve only ever met up a grand total of three times). Thanksgiving Elli. I taught her the joys of backpacking last year, on a short two-night trek through some Hungarian hills - her first unplanned adventure ever! Back in Hungary this summer, too, she was anxious to put her new backpack and boots to use, so we’ve be talking a Transylvanian trip for quite some time now.

It’s a fascinating land of twisted history and confused culture. That’s half the intrigue, I suppose. And having been there once before, bussed from village to village with a slew of Americans, I consider myself a bit of an expert. I thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifink that’s part of what led me, perhaps to underestimate the adventure. I was surprised, perhaps I shouldn’t have been, when we almost died. Repeatedly.

I left from Keleti Palyudvar a little after noon, Elli left Nyiregyhaza a little later. The theory was that our trains would met up at Puspodokladany and she would jump into mine. Late trains and frantic phone calls later, the train half of the adventure was a bit more complicated than that, as it generally is. Elli just managed to hop out of her train, follow my voice and hop into the train that was waiting for us. At the border, we had forgotten about the one hour time-zone difference, and weren’t ready to get out of the train when we pulled into less than 10 kilometers over the border. The city is called Nagyvarad in Hungarian. We managed to dive out, onto the unimpressive platform behind the city’s main train station, just before the train rumbled eastward, headed to Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvar).

We stumbled around for a while, trying to orientate ourselves and our map – a piece of paper printed off from the hostel website. Elli, it seemed, was still undecided on the merits of unplanned adventures. But as we wove our way through a long pedestrian street, things began to look up. Storefronts and words are intelligible in Romanian – it isn’t hard to guess many words. And people watching, of course, is good. We crossed the river, quite impressed by the grand facades of the churches and buildings fronting the main square.

We got lost, of course, on crumbling Romanian back alleys. Street names were different on our map, the scale was confusing. The usual. But after a half-hour search, we found our nearly unmarked hostel, right where the map said it would be. We knocked cautiously on the door. On the other side, six Hungarian painters, in town to paint a roof. Covered in green paint, but not shirts, they wound up being rather charming in an undereducated sort of way that reminded me of Heves. They did nothing but smoke, drink beer and slam palinka. They were kind enough to share the later, and became quite enamored with Elli’s Hungarian. Huddling in the other corner was the lone woman until Elli arrived. Helen was a Canadian wandering a giant swath of Eastern Europe alone. She had giant bags of medical supplies, including an electronic thermometer. She was worried she was sick, surprisingly enough.

The hostel’s run by David, a man sent down from Budapest to open the joint and get the subterranean wine cellar up and running. After he gets the hostel off the ground, he’ll head off to Targu Mures (Marosvasarhely) to do the same with a new hostel there. He’s such a committed host that he ran after Elli and I when he realized he’d given us incorrect directions to a restaurant down the road.

That’s when our misadventure with weather began, walking in between two possible restaurants. The day of clouds finally broke. We laughed as a gentle rain forced us under a narrow overhang, pressing our bodies against the closed store window in the hopes of staying dry. We made a break for it when we thought it lightened up after five minutes, but that was just before the dam burst. We found ourselves sprinting through the most ferocious downpour I’ve ever been apart of. Serious rain.

We gave up any hopes of dryness and sloshed our way back to the hostel. It was raining so hard I had to take my glasses off and peek through my fingers as I ran. My shoes were soaked within a minute. My shirt within two. My shorts within three. My passport was in a cargo pocket. Half of my face was washed off my old Hungarian visa, the Ukrainian passport is almost schmeared clean. Romanian money might be water-proof, but passports aren’t.

I’d taken a minimalistic approach on packing for this adventure, I think I’ve been lulled by a year of books and libraries into a complacency. I only had one pair of shoes. Just two shirts. Only three socks. Things were getting off to a sloppy start.

Come morning, it was still raining. I didn’t let Elli come with me to the bus station, despite her Hungarian skills, because I knew I would get lost, and am much more comfortable getting just myself lost, when no one else is following along, worrying. I sent her off to get groceries and supplies, instead. (Note to self. When giving a new backpacker a list of good food possibilities, always include a note about the increased amount of food required to sustain two backpackers for multiple days on the trial…)

The bus station, a city bus ride away on the east side of town, was a notch below Hungarian bus stations in terms of modern conveniences or information provided. The missing-toothed counterwoman spoke only Romanian, but a kindly man offered to translate into Hungarian. She was adamantly opposed to the idea of a 14:20 bus to Pietroasa, our proposed basecamp. But he assured me that it would be okay.

Two maps from a local bookstore completed my errands, and I rushed back so Elli and I had time to pack and hit the road. David called a taxi for us, despite the fact that he and the Hungarians thought we were crazy and should cancel our plans so we could spend a long weekend in Oradea instead.

Less than half of Oradea’s citizens are native Hungarian speakers, but our taxi driver was one. He was impressed, as they all are, with Elli’s linguistic prowess and offered to help us figure out which platform we needed to wait at when we got to the bus station, five minutes early. As we stood with our packs, outside of the car, though, he ran out of the station waving his hands. Vissza! Vissza! Vissza! He ordered, jumping back into the car and slamming the door. He explained as he sped off, that the old lady had reexplained that the bus wasn’t a state-owned one, operating out of the bus station, but a private micro bus running out of a small gas station on the south side of town. He sped off, unsure he’d be able to get us there in time.

Darting in and out of traffic, he finally screeched to a halt in front of three buses. After he deliberated with the drivers, he furiously drove off to the other end of the gas station, where a small van was already starting to move. He cut it off in the driveway and lunged out of the car. The driver shook his head during the first round of negotiations. He only had one seat left and was ready to leave. “But they’re two Americans,” the bus driver pled. It won us some sort of compromise, as the microbus driver got out and threw the back door open, tossing our packs in. One of us, he warned, would have to stand.

And that’s how I came to be sitting, sandwiched between the door and a seat on a crowded microbus as it darted through Romanian villages of no-note, weaving its way toward the mountains we had come to climb.

I was laughing. Elli was smiling. And the man on the seat between us, unable to do more than string a few English words together, was happy to inform us, using a copy of the day’s paper that while Hugh Grant had to pay a million dollars for oral sex in America, that in Hungary it was free.

Ahh, adventures... This was to be a good one, as we were left shaking our heads already...