Făgăraş Mountains and Sylvia the Love Machine

Before I get too carried away with our tramping adventure, I had better tell you something about Romania that Sylvia forgot to put into her last post. It would seem that Sylvia has been something of a sensation over here. The local men have been falling for her in droves!

The first was the train conductor between Cluj and Brasov. He spoke little (no) English but told Sylvia, first in Romanian then in English, "I love you" and pointedly examined her hand for a wedding ring. Sylvia's second admirer was a drunk guy at a bus stop who told her in three different languages (English, Italian and presumably Romanian) that she was a beautiful girl :-) Of course we all knew that already and it's probably all going to her head.

OK now the tramping. We had planned to do four days tramping in the Făgăraş Mountains near Brasov, but by the time we'd got organised on the first day it only ended up being about 3.2 days. We needed to obtain a stove (thanks Raluca :-), a billy, a decent map and some advice on transport. In the end we took a bus to a nearby town called Zarnesti and then a taxi from there. The taxi saved us 24 km of hitching or (more likely given the hitching conditions) walking, and considering the condition of the "road" I think the driver earned every cent of his ~20 Euro fare!

We only ended up walking a couple of hours that night to a pleasant campsite on a spur leading up to the main ridge.

Bears can be a problem - we took such precautions as putting all our food into my pack and stringing it up a tree!

On the second day we continued climbing and traversing along the main ridge. Unfortunately the weather wasn't that great so we were glad to find a pleasant refugio to stay in instead of camping again. We'd all been a bit cold the night before.

Mmm, cosy

Water is a bit of a problem along the Făgăraş Range. We ended up carrying a lot, and topping up where we could. Fortunately this spring was marked on the map otherwise we would never have found it.

Rubbish is another problem in the Romanian mountains. We encountered a similar scene several times a day, despite there seeming to be very few people up here (we only saw one other party along the ridge)

The next day dawned windier but warmer. Unfortunately the dark clouds came in again and it got pretty cold on the ridge. We made the decision to drop off the ridge a couple of valleys earlier than we'd originally intended to. This meant we didn't get to climb the highest mountain in Romania (Moldoveanu Peak, 2544 m) but as you can see, everyone was much smilier once they were off the ridge ;-)

Before:

After:


We camped down in the valley that night.

If only she'd brought us beer

The next day we walked out down the valley then plodded the 12 km or so to the town of Victoria, only managing to hitch the last 2 km or so! But a lot better than nothing.

Once we got to Victoria, all we had to do was wait for the train, and endure a very slow train ride back to Brasov. This is a Personal type train, the oldest, slowest and most frequently stopping of all Romanian trains.

Are we there yet?