We left the magnificently chilled and civilised Hungary this morning, together with its wooden bell towers, brilliant cycleways, and sturdy and stoic people... and promptly passed through a wormhole into the befuddling world that is Romania. After we'd bought a suitable vignette online to legalise the dubious pleasure, that is.
Honestly, where to even start? We were last here in a far-more-conventional motorhome for a week in 2010 and it took twice as long to get over it. We spent the whole time then totally wired and feeling utterly besieged. It didn't help back then that some scumbag brazenly tried to swipe our mountain bikes off the back of our van as we slept.
Romania seemingly hasn't changed much. All norms are off. It's as if everything that we've ever learned and come to expect from European people and their behaviour needs to be unlearned and reset.
It's just plain weird here. There are people everywhere. Wherever you go, and however 'remote' it may seem, people just appear and do weird things. There are cars, vans and motorbikes scattered all over the countryside. There are random groups of people standing around smoking and talking in lay-bys, fields and woods. There are shepherds with packs of vicious dogs that habitually spring up as if by magic from the very undergrowth itself. It's all just incredibly oppressive and intense.
There are arcane buildings, lavish monasteries, wattle and daub shanties, hideously gaudy gypsy-king mansions, dead dogs in the road, designer-dressed 'beautiful people' and withered old ladies being bounced around in the back of tatty, open horse-drawn carts. Some people drive Porsches and Lamborghinis: some people wear mismatched shoes and are slumped in gutters.
We stopped for fuel at a busy station (£1.34/l) and, whilst filling up, saw a woman in her late 60s totally unashamedly rifling all of the forecourt's bins, apparently scavenging for anything made of metal. It didn't look like her motivation had its origin in Greta Thunberg.
There is fly tipping everywhere, stray dogs and chickens in the road, tethered cows grazing roadside verges in villages and towns, countless huddles of crones: and Lidls.
We've seen an unfathomable number of foreign-registered cars, particularly prevalent in the areas where ostentatious gaudy mansions sit alongside tumbledown shacks. We saw perhaps a couple of hundred such cars with zero indication of roof bars, towbars or any other obvious signs of facilitating holiday travel. Countries of origin included: the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Many of these cars were parked in the driveways of the aforementioned ostentatious gaudy mansions.
We've endured searing heat and a thunderstorm so violent - complete with hail - that many local motorists literally just pulled off the road and stopped dead in their tracks.
Tonight's intended overnighting spot is at the top of a mountain pass and, moreover, up a tiny, very steep and very heavily rutted track that simply serves as access to a network of fields. Given the location and difficulty of access, ordinarily we'd have been very confident of solitude. Here, though, within the course of a couple of hours, we'd been joined by a couple on a motorbike (who had a bit of a public romp), a bloke in a battered old Ford Focus (who just bounced aimlessly about for a bit then left), and four people in their thirties who spent about four hours stood at the back of their SUV smoking and talking, and who have literally only just left: a full hour after all light had faded. The mountain pass below is also, even now, just a constant stream of traffic.
I should also perhaps mention that for the first hour or so we were here there was also a very swarthy looking chap in a battered old Polish-registered Transit together with a young lad armed with a single melon and three huge (empty) metal vats (pic). The vats and kid were evidently no more than artifice, portraying a plausible image of an impoverished roadside-vendor. Meanwhile the bloke was hidden behind the Transit and pounding away at an adjoining wall: seemingly trying trying to nick God only knows what.
On the plus side, the 360 degree views from our besieged perch are truly amazing and - because we couldn't settle due to the unsolicited company - we've spent ages looking out with bins and the thermal imager. After dark, the area came alive with hares, deer and foxes: the most we've ever witnessed at one time with the imager. It was bonkers!
We've been in Romania for about 12 hours.
Post composed at 23:00 on Sunday 3rd August from our intended overnighting spot N 47.69446°, E 24.29723° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:47.69446%2C24.29723