Twists and Turns in Mountain Country

We awoke in our barrel early, but unsure of what we would find outside. Fearing the worst, another day of the same drizzle, we braved a peek outside. The morning air still sucked previous warmth out of self-heated barrel, but the skies were blue. We smiled.

I don’t usually wake early, but we started packing before the rest of the sprawling camp. We took still-damp clothing down from our make-shift mid-barrel clothesline and jammed them all into our packs. Carefully dividing our dwindling food, we gobbled breakfast before filling our canteens in a sketchy second-world bathroom sink and setting out.

An hour into our hike, having chosen to go the scenic route, the sun started beating down on our little trail, skirting a little creek cutting down an alpine valley. It was as good as it gets, the sun so easily erased the memories of rain and make the whole hike worthwhile. Elli and I were all smiles as we started to hang wet clothes from the backs and bottoms of our packs, letting the sun and gentle summer breeze air them. Even river crossings became joyous and pain-free in the sunshine, although Elli learned that she preferred to ford streams with her spare pair of shoes. (This silly man had neither a spare pair of shoes nor sandals.)

Three hours into our round-about descent from Padis, we came to the Castles of Ponor (Cetatile Ponorlului). Our blue dot trail suddenly gave out as five-hundred foot sheer cliffs of white limestone dropped straight to the bottom of a tight valley. The whole region is a karst-craver’s dream, speckled with caves and odd geologic formations. The view was marvelous, but the 1960s-era viewing platforms failed to meet several key safety guidelines and were in poor repair. We trekked on after snapping pictures. We’re not sure if any of them will turn out. Our little German disposable camera took some falls and water exposure over the course of our travels. But it did survive, it will have captured some pretty places.

After lunch on top of a ridgeline pass, we caught up with a slow-moving group struggling down the far side of the ridge. Two city slickers tip-toed down the muddy trail while their better-equipped guide led the way in obvious boredom. As we passed, he was so desperate he asked us where we were headed, then invited us along when he found out we were headed in the same direction. It could have been that he was impressed with Elli’s new Arctryx backpack, but I think Alex would have taken any company at that point. His friends didn’t enjoy their first – and presumably last – night in the outdoors. He was practically licking his chops at the prospect of adventurous friends to tackle the next challenge, the greatest challenge, ahead.

Alex guided us, in chiseled English, down a hill and around a river that emerged from an underground karst tunnel like a giant spring. The backside of the spring was so tight against the cliff that a cable was bolted against the rockface, four feet above a small ledge. Elli couldn’t believe the mission-impossible at first, then changed her mind in excitement and demanded I take a picture as she billy-goated her way across the traverse. Just as she crossed, our three friends from our warm-soup-dinner the night before came from the opposite direction. Even with smiles on their face, the demanded in impassioned Romanian that Alex not take us on the trail ahead, especially with backpacks. It was too dangerous they pled, that’s why they had turned around. Elli and I looked at each other nervously, but Alex was confident.

By the time we got to the third cable, we began to wonder what we were getting into. The rock-climbing-esque uphills and downhills weren’t designed for large backpacks. Or for tired hikers ready for the end. But as we traversed the edge of a tight valley, limestone cut by the river that stitched the terrain, above and under ground at different points, we crept lower and closer to the river, with beautiful cliffs rising above us. But then, the path gave out for good. Our two choices? Go back, uphill, or start really dangling from cables.

Ropes courses are generally pretend, safe for me. But this was real. I think that’s what made it so fun. Elli decided to kick off her shoes and ford her way, thigh deep, downstream. I had only one pair of shoes and a bit of an adventurous streak. I took the cables.

The river, emerging from another karst tunnel, cascaded back to the surface in the form of a waterfall, dropping out of the middle of a cliff. After a frothing into a river, the water turned right, completely occupying a thin crack of a canyon. On the left side, an old cable, 30 meters long, bolted six feet above the water level. A series of primitive footholds were chiseled into the rock, four feet below the cable, two feet above the water. Compounded by slippery rocks, my pack pulled me backwards, away from the cable toward the foaming river with each carefully placed step, but I slid along the cable until I was able to leap to a shoreline as the river slowed as the ravine spread out just a little.

Feeling like champions of the world, Elli and I patted ourselves on the back with giant grins, amazed by our accomplishment. Little did we know we hadn’t even finished half of our cables to traverse the rest of the ravine to the road. We still had to pull ourselves up cables through caves. Up ahead were cables with chain-link footholds straight across the river. One by one we battled them, I was way impressed at how Elli tackled each one. Lesser folks would have given up. We battled through. In essence, we survived.

At the end of the ravine, smiles and pictures. We waved goodbye to Alex, who raced uphill to rejoin his city-folk friends, who hadn’t braved the two hour voyage through the heart of the ravine. More friendly Romanians offered us (bad) advice on short-cuts to Pietroasa, and we set out with smiles down the long forest road (20 km) that twisted down to the little village. Our plan was to find our long lost old-lady friend Flori and sleep in her yard before catching a bus to Oradea on Sunday. Anything would be fine, just as long as we could get to the border city by 5 pm.

On the way down I drank the riverwater. Maybe I shouldn’t have, and I don’t think I ever have before, but it was hot. And I was thirsty. And my schnazzy Euro canteen looks so invincible I was lulled into the risk. Plus, I figured I wouldn’t have to pay the price for the luxury of cold water on a hot day until I was long out of the woods and back home in Budapest. It tasted good. I wouldn’t let Elli drink any, she still had plenty of tap water left, even if it was luke warm. Results? No problems.

We debated hitching a ride down on a logging truck, but none lumbered past, at least none with room in the cab, and we weren’t quite willing to ride, rodeo-style, atop the logs. All the cars were headed up-mountain, the opposite direction we were hoping. Some of the cars motoring up the incline, though, stopped for advice as they saw us rambling down the road, all spoke rather good English.

Things weren’t looking good after a grueling “short-cut.” To save 1 or 2 kilometers of trail, we had to bushwhack a non-existant trail, then march up the steepest incline of the whole trip, with no trail cutting up the tall-grass slope. But a funny thing happened just afterwards. Elli shouted up to me, she had been walking 10 meters behind me, asking if we wanted a ride. One of the cars we had given advice to on the way up and stopped on its way down, and offered. We weren’t that far from Pietroasa, so I thought about recommending we decline the offer, but it seemed too good to be true. We through our packs in the back, apologized for our muddy shoes, and climbed in.

That’s how I came to be riding in the trunk of a Romanian station wagon, drinking non-alcoholic beer, gripping anything within reach as a crazy Romanian man with an Australian accent zipped down the Transylvanian Alps…

They asked where we were going, we said Pietroasa, then Oradea. They laughed, they were headed to that very city at that very moment. The man had to drop his sister off back at home – they’d simply come into the mountains for a Saturday afternoon drive. Tickled pink by our good luck, we couldn’t do anything other than shake our heads and laugh. We were almost back home, misadventures far behind us.

Ahh, Romania…

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...

4th of July = Romania

It's Independence Day and Thanksgiving Elli and I are off to one of the world's great bastions of Freedom - Romania. Err, something like that...

A couple days wandering through the Transylvanian Alps sounds good. Real good.