On July 3 I flew from Vermont to Cluj-Napoca, Romania where Bianca is currently living. After spending a few days there with her, I met my college friend Jon in Budapest, Hungary, where we started three weeks of travel and exploration around both Hungary and Romania. We spent the first week in Hungary exploring Budapest and the small city of Eger, and then spent the next two weeks in Romania. Our time in Romania was split between quite a few different cities each with different character: Cluj, Sighișoara, Brașov, Sibiu, and then finally Bucharest.
Hungary
The first day in Budapest we spent just walking around the city and taking in everything there was to see. We were staying in the old Jewish district of the city which is right in the center of where all the nightlife and activity happens as well as right in the old city portion with amazing architecture all around us. We got a tour of the parliament building which was quite impressive and one of the best tours of a government building I’ve ever been on – as impressive as the exterior of the building is, the interior is even more impressive with high vaulted ceilings and gold inlays / coverings & statues all over the place. After the tour of the parliament building we took a boat ride on the Danube that evening and caught a beautiful sunset.
The next day we met up with a couple other travelers and a local that we met through the Couchsurfing app and went for a nice hike through some forest & hills on the Buda side of the city and ended up at a small bar where we all relaxed for a while. That evening we got a nice meal at the restaurant that was below our AirBNB. The food in Bucharest was one of the best parts about being there – it was very inexpensive and all incredibly tasty. Both Jon and I got goulash soup at least three or four times, with the goulash from each restaurant being different enough that it was almost an entirely new dish. One of the best meals we got was a big bowl of traditional fish stew.
Another day was spent relaxing at the Széchenyi Thermal Bath, which is the largest thermal bath in Budapest. Throughout the city there are probably around 10 or more different thermal baths, with the water supplied by natural underground thermal springs. The Széchenyi Bath had two large outdoor pools with slightly different temperature, 10-15 different indoor pools ranging from cold to nearly too hot to get into, and two different saunas. We spent most of the day just ranging between different pools and then relaxing outside. That evening we also checked out the Szimpla ruin bar. The ruin bars are bars that are located in old run down & falling apart buildings and then filled up with all kinds of weird assorted stuff to create a very unusual atmosphere. Szimpla is the largest of these and was a bit halfway between bar & club but very cool to see.
After spending most of the week in Budapest we took a bus to the nearby small city of Eger, which is very much a wine city and surrounded by quite a bit of wine country. Eger was much smaller than Budapest but just as much fun, and a bit relaxing after the bigger city. Eger Castle was very cool to explore and actually had some really informative and fascinating exhibits describing the advancement in castle design & fortification throughout history. While in town we took a walk to the nearby (~20 min away) “Valley of Beautiful Women” which is a small valley with some ~40 different commercial wine cellars all arranged around a large central common. We walked through most of them and enjoyed spending an evening there, but any wine enthusiast probably would have enjoyed an entire weekend just in that one spot. I did buy a bottle of the local specialty wine, Egri Bikavér (Bulls Blood).
While in Eger we took two trips outside of town, one to go hiking and another to see a thermal bath set in a cave. For hiking we took a bus to the nearby town of Szilvásvárad just outside of Bukk national park, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful parks in Hungary. There aren’t really any tall mountains in Hungary (or any mountains at all) but there are plenty of nice rolling hills and that is mainly what this park had. We started out walking along a paved tourist path for a mile or so that follows a nice stream and eventually leads to a cave that lots of people like to go see. Beyond that we left the pavement and most of the other tourists behind and hiked through the hills for most of the afternoon. After half a mile or so of steep woods trails we reached a plateau level where most of the traits just jog up and down adjacent hill tops, almost all of them completely forested. Though, in a few spots we did find breaks in the foliage that gave some very nice views out on the surrounding countryside.
The thermal bath we visited from Eger was in the town of Miskolc and a ~2 hr bus ride away, but we really wanted to see these thermal baths set in a cave. As it turned out it was just a bit underwhelming, but still pretty cool to see. The main bath ran through a system of natural caves in the side of a large hill and had ceramic / human built flooring but all natural cave ceilings. There were quite a few different chambers to go through and it was impressive, though a bit distracting with lots of younger kids all jumping and splashing around. These baths definitely had a bit more of a “theme park” feel than the ones we went to in Budapest and were not quite as relaxing, so after checking out the caves we didn’t stay as long.
After a long weekend in Eger we took the bus back to Budapest for one night and explored a bit more of the city including a walk up to the old citadel that stands guard high up on a hillside at the edge of the city where we got an amazing view below. That night we also went to the Fisherman’s bastion, which is a massive ornate bastion with many towers & ramparts etc that used to be manned by the fisherman’s guild.
The next day, after a bit more than a week in Hungary, we took a long bus from Budapest to Cluj-Napoca, where we spent the next five or so days.
Romania
The first full day we were in Romania both Jon and I needed to take some time off from the traveling & vacationing to do a little bit of work. I had some paperwork and administrative stuff related to my job in Belgium this fall to take care of and Jon had to update some of his job applications for teaching positions this fall. The next day we spent walking around Cluj and I showed Jon a few of the places that I had hung out with Bianca and her friends when I visited back in April. Cluj’s old town city center is a great spot to hang out, with tons of cafes and small restaurants on every corner and many small squares between streets filled with nice places to relax and get a fresh drink. We also took a walk through the city’s cemetery, where I hadn’t been before. It’s a very large cemetery and was impressive to see the hundreds of old tombs, many of which held people who had had some significance to the city over the last couple hundred years. The tombs were all much more ornate and decorated than the simple tombstones I think of in most American cemeteries.
It just so happened that our time in Cluj coincided with a large electronic music festival happening nearby called Electric Castle, which Jon and I got tickets to for one day. There were buses running all day and all night back and forth from the city to the festival to support any kind of party schedule that you wanted. The festival itself was held in a big open field surrounded by woods in front of an old (somewhat dilapidated) castle, hence the name of the festival. There were five or six different stages with different kinds of (mostly) electronic music and then a bunch of other stuff going on all around that. Some of the other stuff was fairly normal festival-fair, including bars & hangout spots tucked into small groves of trees with funky decorations hanging all around, group activities and stuff like face painting, and plenty of beer & food trucks. In addition to these things and the music stages there was also a volleyball court with a tournament going on, and a big circus tent where the Metropolitan Circus of Bucharest was performing two shows each evening. Jon and I watched one of the circus shows and it was actually my favorite part of the entire event – the performers were amazing to watch, very funny, and also extremely impressive with a wide array of acrobatic and strength/gymnastic feats performed.
We stayed pretty late into the night at the festival and then slept in the next morning before taking a bus with Bianca to go visit the Salina Turda (Turda Salt Mine) tourist attraction. Turda is the town nearby Cluj where Bianca grew up and she came with us on the bus to visit a friend there while Jon and I went to the salt mine. Huge amounts of salt were actively mined at that location starting a couple hundred years ago, with operations halting sometime in the last century. Now the massive underground caverns have been turned into a tourist attraction with a mini-amusement park located at the bottom with row boat rides in a flooded cavern, pool tables, and other games type stuff. The caverns themselves were amazing to see, just from their massive scale. Jon and I also got in a few rounds of pool while we where there.
The next day we left Cluj and took a train to the town of Sighișoara. Sighișoara is only a ~2hr car ride away from Cluj, but the train took nearly 4 hours due to low speed and circuitous route. It was also hot and I couldn’t find out where any bathrooms were. That was the last time we took the train. Sighișoara is a very small old medieval town with the main attraction being the citadel, which is one of only two citadels still actively inhabited by people in all of Europe. We spent the afternoon walking around the hilly streets inside the citadel checking out several old churches and the impressive architecture all around us. There were also quite a few shops selling various traditional art in the forms of paintings, sculptures, and pottery that were fun to look through. That evening we took a walk out of town to the Breite Oak Tree Preserve, home to over 500 oak trees up to 800 years old.
Having had our fill of the train with just our one experience, we opted to go by BlaBla Car (ridesharing) from Sighișoara to Brașov the next morning. This worked out very well and we ended up using this for all our remaining travel during the trip. We spent two nights in Brașov and on the first day visited Râșnov Citadel and Castle Bran, both nearby. Castle Bran is usually associated with the legend of Dracula even though Vlad the Impaler never actually lived here (that sure doesn’t stop people from playing up that association to take tourist’s money). From the outside the castle is quite impressive, sitting high on a hill overlooking the town of Bran. Inside the castle is a museum that may have been interesting except for the way that so many visitors were packed into the narrow rooms and walls that it was single file march forward nearly the entire time touching the people in front and back of you. When we finally got outside again fresh air was a relief, and if I ever go back I only intend to appreciate this castle from the outside. I found Râșnov Citadel to be actually much more interesting, and also a better price for admission since it isn’t so famous! It is another old citadel with most of the structures in varying states of crumbling down, but it’s located on the top of a large hill and offers amazing 360 degree views of all the surrounding countryside.
Jon and I decided to split up for a little while the following day and he spent some time exploring the city of Brașov while I went hiking in the nearby hills. Brașov is right at the foot of both the Piatra Craiului and Bucegi mountain ranges and I had originally wanted to go hiking in one or both of these while in town. Unfortunately the weather was storming and since I had no familiarity with these mountains I didn’t quite feel like taking the chance of getting caught there in a thunder and lightning storm. So instead I hiked through the hills directly abutting Brașov where there is a large system of hiking and mountain biking trails. I got about 5 or so hours of hiking in with about half of those dry and the other half in the rain. But the forest was beautiful and opened up in a few spots to give nice views. At one point I heard some crackling in the brush ahead of me, which I assumed to be a deer or bird of some kind. But when I came around a corner I saw the back end of a brown fuzzy ball of fur about the size of a a beach ball bouncing away from me into the trees. There are bears all over the mountains in Romania and the first thought that jumped into my head was that a momma bear was about to come crashing down on me with swift Romanian fury so I immediately threw up my arms and startled back peddling while loudly proclaiming how much I love bears. If mom was around she stayed out of sight, or maybe it was a wild dog in bad need of a haircut that I saw instead. After a couple minutes a swarm of seven or eight mountain bikers came ripping down the path from the other direction and I figured that if there had been any bears near the path they were long gone now, so I continued on my hike with no further sign of bears for the rest of the day.
After our two nights in Brașov we took another BlaBla car east to Sibiu where we spent the next three nights. Sibiu is a decently sized city, about half the size of Cluj, and it has a very historical old town area which we were lucky to get an AirBNB right in the center of. This is where all the old architecture is and there are nice cafes and restaurants on every corner, so while we weren’t exploring outside of the city we spent most of our time just walking around the city center area. We took one trip just outside the city to the nearby Ethnographic museum, which is a huge collection of old traditional Romanian buildings from many different points in history that have all been restored and relocated to a large tract of land where people can walk through to learn about what life used to be like 50-500 years ago. There is a small Ethnographic museum near Cluj that I had been to before, but this one outside Sibiu really blew that out of the water. We spent an entire afternoon walking through the grounds here and saw lots of amazing exhibits. They had some really impressive collections of old water driven sawmills and gristmills from different points in history and it was quite impressive to see all the different styles of construction.
The other full day we had in Sibiu we rented a car in town and then drove up the nearby Transfăgărășan highway, which is a long winding mountain road that climbs to the top of a pass in the Făgărăș mountains, which run east-west in the middle of Romania. On the north side of the pass is Balea lake, which is a popular tourist attraction complete with restaurant and small lodge. Past the lake one goes down a long tunnel and comes out on the southern side of the pass. We stopped on both sides for a bit and walked around, and then drove further down the road on the southern side into the valley where we wanted to see Poenari Castle, which is actually one of the main castles used by Vlad the Impaler. Unfortunately when we arrived there the path of 1,480 steps up to the castle was closed for some reason and so all we got was an (admittedly very nice) view from the road and late lunch at the nearby restaurant before heading back to Sibiu.
Our last stop on the trip was Bucharest, where we would spend one full day and then Jon would fly back to the states and I’d head back up to Cluj. Since we’d (of course) never been to Bucharest before it was definitely worth seeing, but both Jon and I agreed that it was our least favorite stop of the entire trip. When you think of most of the things you don’t like about cities – Bucharest has all those things. In general most of it was just a dirty and not very impressive city. The old town area was nice, but it was just renovated in the past 10-20 years and so is all very new looking and doesn’t feel like it has as much character. Plus, there are people outside all the restaurants trying to heckle you into eating at their place and then insult / make you feel bad if you don’t. But apart from all of that, we did have a fun time while in the city. We saw some of the famous locations, like the large Palace of the Parliament. This parliament building is the second largest administrative building in the world and was ordered built by the communist dictator Ceaușescu, though it’s now seen as a massive waste of resources and looked upon with contempt by much of the younger generation. We also went through one museum where we learned about many of the different eras of Romanian history culminating with the communism that lasted until 1989. But the most fun we had in Bucharest was just sitting outside a cafe drinking local beers and playing cards for an entire afternoon. We also went to the famous Caru’ cu Bere restaurant where I got a very nice sausage dish and Jon got the largest piece of meat I have ever seen before.
The next morning Jon had to get up at 3am for an early flight and I slept in a bit more before catching another BlaBla car from Bucharest up to Cluj and back to Bianca’s place, where I was planning to spend the next month or so before starting work in Belgium.
Those salt mines are amazing!
The other pics make me homesick for Europe 🙂
Incredible adventure Matt. Good for you to be able to have this experience. I envy you!! be safe…