Romania
THE FIRST THING you notice is the trash. Strewn along the train tracks is an endless stream of garbage that's been picked through and left to sour an otherwise pristine landscape. A light drizzle and dense fog confound my view and slowly but surely beat my spirits into submission. Yet I'm glad, for this is Romania: the cloudier and less cheery, the better.
The fog begins to lift, revealing the bottoms of mountains with no peaks and churches with no steeples. The train descends farther into Transylvania, barreling past beat-up towns and industrial mills the size of malls in Minnesota. Much of the country's landscape is dotted with ugly factories left to rot and colorless apartment blocks that resemble a giant Tetris board built to the Soviet gods. But past the gangly suburbia is a gorgeous countryside of endless rolling hills as green and luscious as the 18th fairway at Augusta National. Romania might look like Austria, were it not for its lack of highway infrastructure and the abundance of communist-era architecture.
Transylvania, like Pennsylvania, is a large gob of land that seems to go on forever. Also like the Quaker State, there's no shortage of tiny towns, each a clone of the previous one. The houses have orange-gabled rooftops and the churches are wooden and nondescript. The streets are lakes of mud with Mercedes-Benzes sharing the road with carts pulled by buffalo. Roosters jaywalk, shepherds tend their sheep and kids play with sticks and stones, pausing to wave at the train roaring past. One throws a rock at my outstretched head; it grazes my nose and strikes the side of the train with a loud thud, sending a shudder down my spine. I retreat to my seat.
This is a land made for tourism. Train tickets, rounds of beer and taxi rides rarely exceed a few bucks. People are chatty, almost winking at Westerners as if to say, "See? We belong in Europe." Those under 30 speak near-fluent English. And Romanians are not put off by the American passport like, well, the rest of the world. I was bombarded with questions about 9/11, about New York, about American tv (Six Feet Under is big here, perhaps owing to Romanians' alleged fascination with all things morbid).
Older Romanians are also approachable. Though the women have long, unsmiling faces, they always look on the verge of smiling, whereas in most of Eastern Europe you couldn't pry a smirk out of them with a check signed by Ed McMahon. The older men carry the same stern and focused look, one befitting an unhappy gymnastics coach. Younger guys resemble Gary Oldman, only with high and tight haircuts and much better posture. No one ever slouches in this country.
Romanian is pleasant to the ears. It's a Romance language that sounds similar to Italian or Spanish, only with an intonation redolent of Slavic tongues and a garble betraying the country's Saxon roots. The "skis" at the end of traditionally Slavic words become "scus." Current president: Iliescu. Former president: Constantinescu. I was paranoid because I kept thinking everyone was talking about me; turns out the word for "okay" sounds like my surname.
Our destination was Sighisoara in central Transylvania, a city that a few years ago came close to becoming Romania's Disneyland. As the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, known popularly as Count Dracula, Sighisoara drew a consortium of developers who wished to open a theme park based on Bram Stoker's famous novel. It's unclear what the park would have entailed-presumably rides, haunted houses and historical tours-but the effort was thwarted thanks in part to the protests of environmentalists, community activists and, of all people, Prince Charles, who has a nearby villa.
Local reaction to the proposed park was mixed. Shopkeepers welcomed the potential boost in business, while naturists scorned the commercialism such a park would bring. A few opportunists bought up dozens of acres of land near the proposed site, only to see their newfound property go unused. The theme park has not been shelved but instead will get built outside of Transylvania just north of Bucharest.
Sighisoara's pointy skyline emerges from around the bend of the brownish Tarnave Mare River, which hugs the Carpathian hills along the winding train route. The spires above the citadel ramparts hover over a medieval center that looks untouched in half a millennium-with the exception of a spate of pizza joints in town. Sighisoara is what I imagined Romania to look like: quaint, quiet, spooky at night. The streets are narrow and mostly empty, save for a few gypsy kids roaming about in tatterdemalion clothes. Every July the town hosts an arts festival whereby the townsfolk don traditional garb and sing folk songs, dance and drink. But today, with the inclement weather, the town feels like an abandoned movie set.
We stop at a trendy restaurant off the city center and, like everywhere in Romania, there's techno music throbbing. Strangely, half of the room's customers are dancing awkwardly in broad daylight. Then a pair of guys in Navy Seals-wannabe uniforms struts through the doors, their backs bearing the inscription "Dragon Force." They are large and intimidating and patrol the streets unpestered, no doubt protecting the townsfolk from vermin. Yet when our waitress, an attractive blonde, drops a bin full of toothpicks near their feet and must stoop down to pick them up, the nice guys of Dragon Force don't help her out. Instead, they point and laugh.
We climb up the path that leads to the citadel and a tall clock tower that greets tourists with tiny wooden figurines that poke their heads out of the belfry at the stroke of midnight. We ascend a flight of wobbly stairs covered by a wooden canopy that leads into a courtyard and another church bearing the uncreative name Church on a Hill. Sighisoara has been spared the blight of industry and communal flats that afflict other Transylvanian cities like Cluj or Brasov, so the views are incredible.
Back at the base of the citadel we visit Dracula's birthplace: an unimpressive three-story building that houses a restaurant and museum. Born in 1431, Vlad Tepes became known as Vlad the Impaler, the Christian prince of Wallachia who, though no vampire, had an aquiline nose and vicious mean streak. His enemies were drained of their blood, but not from a bite-a stake was driven up through their rectums. In 1462, Vlad fought a fierce battle against the Turks and famously captured 20,000 troops; each one was impaled and left to rot. The tactic worked and weakened the knees of the advancing armies, who retreated shortly thereafter. Vlad was later beheaded-it is said by his own servant-and today his headless body rests in Bucharest's Snagov Monastery.
The castle that bills itself as Dracula's former home is found 100 miles to the southeast. Each year, thousands of tourists flock to Brasov to see Bran Castle, which sits above a high rock, flanked by imposing trees with the Carpathian Mountains as a backdrop. The long staircase that leads to the castle's entrance is impressive, though the foray itself is not. The walls are white; the furniture, wooden and sturdy. The stairwells are narrow and winding, and there's a courtyard with a wishing well in its center. The tour lasts all of 20 minutes, and there's nothing creepy about it. At worst, there's a bearskin rug making a mean face in one of the bedrooms.
Beneath the castle is Bran, a small town where the smell of burning wood mixes pleasantly with the ballpark scent of a nearby hotdog stand. The market is filled with vendors hawking every touristy trinket under the sun with Dracula's face on it-chess sets, urns, t-shirts, tablecloths, playing cards, bottles of red wine called Dracula's Blood. Indeed, there's no bigger scam in Europe than the industry surrounding Dracula's Castle. Vlad the Impaler never lived here, and Bram Stoker never stepped foot on Transylvanian soil. Still, it remains the most visited spot on Romania's map.
The tourist trap of Dracula's Castle and abysmal weather notwithstanding, Romania feels like one of Europe's last vestiges of untrammeled paradise. There are ample attractions and outings minus the hassle and poor service of most Eastern European countries. With Prague and Budapest overrun by tourists, students and poets, Romania seems poised to become the next European destination for adventurous, budget-minded backpackers.