After a long silence due to lots of soul-eating work on the computer, here some fresh text to my dear readers: Last Tuesday I went to the Maramures region in the very north of Romania [map]. It’s the region of wooden churches, calm valleys, rivers and forests. Every Romanian person get sparkling eyes when the name is mentioned. I hitchhiked the whole trip, and most lifts were paid, something like 3 Euro per 100 km. I hardly waited more than 20 minutes, often the first or second car stopped. Almost everybody gave hand signs indicating that they were either from this town (point the index finger downwards) or would leave this road soon (point left or right). Just rasing the index finger from the steering wheel means “sorry dude, can’t take you”. Making a movement similar to screwing a very big light bulb in and out means “where do you want to go?”. In other countries and places in Romania it’s common to treat the hitchhiker as an invisible lowlife. Many fellow hitchhikers say the name of the place they are going to out loud as the car is approaching, so the drivers can lip-read, which works well. If there is an important turn near, people point up right or left to indicate their destination. When a car stops the crowd quickly rushes towards it, people get in or turn and tell the others what the driver said. Everybody was on the road again, the student, the granny, the old couple with a bunch of flowers, the fancy city chick with a wheely suitcase on the way to the family (they don’t stick up their thumb, they just stand away a bit and wait until a fancy car stops 😉 ).
I started in Sighisoara early in the afternoon, walked through Targu Mures for a while, then went 150km on to Cluj-Napoca where I met my host Anca from Hospitality Club in the centre. We joined her boyfriend and friends at a bar and stayed there until late. I had heard about many Hungarians living in the area, but that night I got the full experience. 🙂 They make 20% of the population of Cluj and so Anca and me were the only non-Hungarians in the big crowd. Hungarians here tend to stay in their own circles (the bar place was Hungarian managed), some of them don’t really speak Romanian and I heard a “this area was ours for 600 years and only belongs to Romania since 80 years” by a student on the table.
The next day I had a look around town, met Liviu from D Media (website hosted on our server) and Anca invited me for a nice lunch at a restaurant. She and her family were great hosts. We exchanged some web design and programming ideas, as she works in a similar field than I do. Actually this was my first classical Hospitality Club relationship of contacting someone for accommodation in a town I was visiting – so far I only met HC people at gatherings etc. Thanks for this nice start, Anca! 🙂
The next morning I left for Baia Mare (this is the first place on the map linked above), about 150 km away. The driver left the main road, showed me his hometown Targu Lapus, stopped at some rural police station, had a chat with the officers and dropped me at a crossing to Baia Mare. I walked a bit and two men in a Dacia picked me up. They went into a forest to visit a meadow in the middle of nowhere with about 30 huge marmor statues lined up. Quite bizarre. Baia Mare was not too thrilling to me, so I walked a few kilometers out of town, put up my tent near a river and enjoyed the cold(!) night in nature.
The sun heating up the tent woke me up, I washed my face in the river and went on. I heard about the “funny graveyard” in Sapinta near Sighetu Marmatie up close to the Ukraine border, so I went there. The border guards got a little nervous when I walked around the border area with a curious face. They checked my ID and let me go, looking puzzled about what I’m doing there walking around on my own. I got a lift to Sapinta and I wandered over the graveyard with colorful paintings and humourous poems about the lives and deaths of the people on the blue wooden gravestones for a while [picture]. One guy was obviously decapitated by a soldier during the war. Another got ran over by a tractor. Afterwards I went on to the “largest wooden structure in Europe”. The great wooden church of Sapinta [picture]. I spent two hours around there and then went back to Baia Mare via Sighetu with a young person that was about to sell the car that he recently brought from Germany in Cluj the next day. In Baia Mare I walked through the Chesnut festival, but escaped the loud crowd soon towards the outskirts of town. I found a spot behind a hedge near a road.
Some road workers on their way to work woke me up by walking around my tent, musing who or what would be in it. They used some bad language in the process as far as I understood, but then left without knocking on my tent. In the darkness of the night before I didn’t realise that the road was that busy and that my tent was that exposed. As it got warmer I also got some sleep. I was about to take a route through small villages and towns back to Sighisoara, when a driver pointed me to the wonderful Rohia monastery near Targu Lapus. I spend a few hours in the calm atmosphere of the place curing my inner unrest. From Rohia I walked into the unknown down a dirt road. There was a sign for Dej (a town on the way back) 25km, so the worst that could happen would be a two day walk. I had food with me and there were clear rivers, so I walked and walked in beautiful sunshine along fields, hills, meadows. See these pictures of a someone that obviously did a very similar trip. I arrived at a village on the other side of a mountain chain around dusk. I pitched my tent up meadow on a hill and listened to the dogs down in the village and the farmers on the other side of the valley talking to their cows and sheep while bringing them in for the night. I put on all clothes I had, two pairs of trousers, many socks, my big winter jacket, a hat and I was actually sweating during the cold (5 degrees?) night.
The farmer of the land that I was on woke me up by howling and whistling near my tent. Only as he addressed me in a proper manner with “domn” (mister) I reacted. I’m no dog, you know.. I unpealed and opened my tent and saw a small man standing in safe distance of about 5 metres. We had a little chat and when he was convinced that I would not steal his horses he left at an instant. Salut, and he was gone as he appeared. On my way out of the village I was greated friendly as the lonely person with the tent. A few hours down the road without cars and I was back on tarmac and then things went quickly. One lift was a bit weird. The car was decorated for a wedding and the driver turned out to be either very drunk or generally very rough in his movements. I’m not sure which I would have preferred. The criticism of his driving style by his wife with a wedding cake on her lap was really not appreciated by him at all. The poor girl.. I was back home in Sighisoara before dusk where Anisoara, Tino, and another “crazy” trucker (the one that brought my new external hard drive to Romania, another story) waited for me with some food. Those were some fine 5 days – Maramures: Check! 😉
