Railway through the Vampire Mountains Part 2

you + me + a wild romanian brown bear

Deep into night we stopped a while in a station where upon boarding, the Hungarian authorities proceeded unimpressed with our passports as we rattled across the border, followed pretty soon by an identical process by their Romanian doppelgangers once we’d crossed over into Transylvania. My dumb nature is curious so I asked a lot of questions that were of course unwelcome and anyway nobody understood me.

At about 4am the train stopped somewhere not visible from my horrible foldout train bed, my head pressed almost against the open window and rolling in and out of sleep. The train is taken off the tracks to have its wheels changed in whichever direction the Romanian railway requires. It’s like 6 in the morning when we give up sleep and in our parallel bunk beds sit up as much as clearance and gravity allow and eat assorted stale snacks that have seen their own complicated night on the inside of our bags.

Our sleeping rail employee bunkmate gets up and smokes out the window between the train cars and then walks over to the far end of the train up to an invisible door that appears in the fake wooden paneling to reveal two train employees reconciling their bodies to waking life. The taller one holds up a finger as if to tell me to wait and in about a minute hands me the kind of tiny plastic cup they hand you at the dentist’s office to rinse, but full of coffee. It’s not clear if I’m supposed to pay so I raise it up and smile and drink my brain slightly into sentience. We roll into Brasov early in the morning and find a boisterous landlady renting out pieces of her family home with a depth of interaction I am too tired for but Maz embraces until I want to murder them both.

We climb seemingly endless stairs through a space that seems to expand into its own wooden pocket abyss papered with photos and paintings of her children playing piano and huddled in unsettling familial warmth, the upstairs adorned with enough furniture to start a warehouse for dated ski-lodge family seating. We have like 3 wooden decks to choose from and it’s cold but we sit out there and take in the Transylvanian rooftops layered backwards towards the hilltop through the fog of our breathing.

The lady recommends a trip up the mountain, labeled in white block letters like Transylvanian Hollywood. She cautions against climbing the steps and disturbing the bear that congregates there. So we ride the cable car up and eat a great meal of salmon and duck overlooking Romania. It is a sleepy day wandering around mostly into random spaces, gasping and pointing at some of the most beautiful architecture either of us has ever seen.

Romania is genuinely overwhelming to look at. Every structure straight out of some ornate gothic fairytale. It’s hard to imagine people built these places to live and not just to congregate in front of. Every place feels at least partially related to a church or castle. The town’s center at paces cosplaying a red light district, a bar for vampires, endless businesses themed as American, giant food, strip clubs. I don’t know how many bottles of wine we drink across the timeline of the journey but it seems appropriate to the gothic vibes of Transylvania to keep supplies on hand. The next day I drive us to Bran castle, an 11th century fortress famous for being associated for almost no logical reason with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The entrance is chaos, as if they’d started to hand out snacks somewhere at the front of the crowd and a hundred people had run up to see what the hell the other hundred people were shoving each other to get to. It is touch and go and I don’t fall to my death on the harsh incline of stairs like jagged teeth up the rock face.. Several frustrated Italians push past to heighten my accomplishment. The inside is basically a collection of furniture and art collected by a dowager Romanian queen from Kent. It’s a slow walk through the building not because of any depth to the display but because it isn’t built for this many people. The staircases are narrow and precarious, the slow walking equivalent of a rickety wooden roller coaster.

On the 3rd day we make it to Bucharest and are surprised to find this storybook country’s capital is a gruff unfinished metropolis of thick buildings that seem to compress perspective along massive roadways through this fixer upper eternally in progress. The city is a beautiful amalgam of ornament and decay. It feels like a modern vista on a post war 1940s film lit like a soviet era documentary. I am of course immediately smitten by this beautiful princess missing a great many of her teeth.

NEXT: Two weeks in Africa

there are no bears in these pictures