After the longest and most painfully boring train ride I have ever taken, with the electricity broken the entire 30+ hour journey and trapped in a small sauna-like bed cabin grasping for air through the small window that wouldn’t open up properly, we finally arrive at the train station in Bucharest.
We are the only ones left to get off at the final station in Bucharest – hungry and exhausted we pass out at the closest hostel.
We thought we had made the biggest mistake ever to have planned another train journey already the next morning – but we stuck to our plan, and soon later we were so grateful that we did.
The train ride from Bucharest to Sighisoara, which was our final destination in Romania, turned out to be one of the most beautiful routes I have ever traveled.
The landscape was breathtaking with alpine mountains, unexplored
valleys, lonesome forts and castles and animals grazing on the green
fields.
Many of the villages we passed looked like they had not changed for
hundreds of years, with a charming medieval architecture and rural
locations.
Sighisoara has made a name for itself for being one of the best preserved mideval villages in Europe.
It was truly a quaint place and it made us really want to go back to Romania to explore more of the country side and villages.
The first interaction we had was with a woman handing out flyers at the station – she was advertising ”Gypsy tours”, which included a tour to a ”real Gypsy village”.
I think it’s strange and wrong to make a tourist attraction out of what in this case was poor people living in misery, many of them spending their days begging in Sighisoara’s streets and at the train station, but apparently this tour was very popular.
However, the reason most people go to Sighisoara wis not ”Gypsy tours”, but to visit the old part of town.
This is the town where Dracula was supposedly born.
Dracula was named and inspired by the notorious blood thirsty prince Vlad III Dracula, who was born in Sighisoara and lived in Transylvania during the 15th century.
Known as Vlad the impaler, he killed up to 100,000 people – mainly by using his favorite method of impaling them on a sharp pole.
It really was like stepping back into the past, and walking around the little town you could imagine exactly what life must have been like in the mideval century.
The scenery in Transylvania is very special, and waking up to look outside the window and seeing the thick misty clouds slowly move over the hills and thick forests, mountains and small villages – you realize that if vampires really did exist, this would be the perfect place for them to reside…
Romania is high on top of my list, very interesting, I would also like to visit Dracula’s hometown, but in general I’m attracted by the country as a whole, maybe for its beautiful landscapes and culture.
This was the most amazing town I”ve ever been to. The architecture was like out of an old horror movie. I loved this place even though the vibe was weird. I went alone and didn’t see any other tourists. Creepy.
Nice read about Bucharest and the medieval villages in the area. I’d like to take that Gypsy Village tour.
I recommend a Dracula tour http://noveladventurers.blogspot.com/2011/06/off-beaten-track-searching-for-dracula.html
Very cool. Is his castle somewhere else?
very nice post indeed, great