Our time in Transylvania has been amazing. Even though we’ve been here for two weeks it seems like we just scratched the surface. This area has made a very lasting impression on us and the combination of what we found in Transylvania doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the world. The beautiful scenery, outdoor activities, awesome people, good food, chill demeanor, historical sights, ease of access to the things we want to do, and great values make Transylvania the most under-rated place we’ve ever visited. There is a lot I want to share so I’m going to break this up into two posts. #1 The easy stuff: scenery, tourism industry, and driving in Transylvania. #2 The amazing experiences we’ve had with the people of Transylvania and the delicious food they make. I’m still working on #2 so that’ll come sometime later.
First things first: it wasn’t easy figuring out what to see in Transylvania. Normally, if someone wants to tour a European country the first thing they should do is find Rick Steve’s materials on the country. We were surprised to find Rick Steve’s doesn’t have a guide for Romania and even recommended people skip Romania. The next thing we turned to was TripAdvisor only to find there wasn’t a lot listed. The places that were listed didn’t have a whole lot of reviews and the descriptions of the places were pretty poor. Sites like the Lonely Planet and Wikitravel didn’t help much either. We’ve never encountered a dearth of information like this so we made our own itinerary and figured we’d see at least one cool thing during our two week drive through Transylvania. We ended up being completely surprised by how many things there were to do, how much fun the sites were and, best of all, we pretty much had the tourist places to ourselves because there isn’t a huge tourism scene. We knew Romania had mountains but we had no idea it had so many mountains and with the largest continuous forest in Central Europe. Transylvania has some very stunning scenery. It was really easy to find outdoor activities to do and it didn’t take a whole lot of work to see jaw-dropping beauty. I put some photos up and they really speak for themselves – Romania is very beautiful.
Romania has a rich history of being conquered, subjugated, and passed around by outside forces going back thousands of years. Romania, as we know it today, didn’t exist until after World War One. Because of this, there are a lot of fortifications all over the place dating back to Roman times and even some villages have churches with very large fortifications. A lot of the sites we visited were at some stage of refurbishment, it seemed like everything was under construction. We learned that a lot of EU money and tourist money is being used to make the tourist sites better, which is good, because a lot of historical sites are pretty dumpy and only some are in great condition. There was a huge positive benefit of the dumpiness: we could pretty much wander around anywhere, open doors, peek in everything, and thoroughly explore everywhere, and there were very few “fun police” running around ruining our time. This is pretty different than most tourist sites we’ve visited around the world. We also spent a lot of time trespassing because sites would be closed when they were supposed to be open or we were just interested in visiting. Unlike other places in the world, no one ran us off and no one seemed to get mad! People were generally happy to see us when we were trespassing. After setting off an alarm in one building, we were welcomed with open arms and later given dinner – but that’s a story for part two .
Since we didn’t find a lot of information about what to visit, we’d always ask people for recommendations on what to see during our visit. Almost always people would bring up a salt mine near Turda. We had read about it and planned on visiting it, but it was surprising so many people thought a salt mine was cool. It had its own aura with the locals, the salt mine would come up in conversation and people would pause and say something like, “Oh yes, it’s a very good place. You must go.” So the day arrives and we visit; I never thought a salt mine would be cool but it was awesome! The salt mine had been turned into a mini amusement park complete with a Ferris wheel, mini-golf, pool tables, bowling, row boats, and tons of areas to sit around and chill. Salt crystals were growing everywhere on everything, even the air was salty. Every so often I’d lick my lips and taste salt! It was a really cool visit!
The cost is right for tourism. Most tourist attractions were generally$2-$3 per person to visit, some were free, and the very few ‘expensive’ places, like Bran Castle, were only $7-$10. It was amazing we could go to so many places and see such cool stuff for so little money. In more expensive countries we generally have to choose what we want to do and make some type of judgement call on what we want to see. Not in Romania, we could visit everything! Food, lodging, rental cars, etc., were all pretty reasonable too. We could go out and have a very good three course meal with drinks and desert for $15-$20. That’s a very good deal!
The biggest downside for a tourist had to be getting around. Driving in Romania is insane. The bigger cities are filled with seemingly suicidal drivers and the countryside is filled with dirt roads in bad condition. In the first five minutes with our rental car, I discovered our horn was disconnected. After the first day of driving I told Jacquelyn that we should be prepared to pay for damages for our rental car because there’s no way the car was coming back unscathed. The crap mountain roads, extremely narrow streets, and everyone trying to drive over us was terrifying! That said, I’m thankful for two things which came in very helpful in Transylvania: 1) spending endless hours driving on the gravel back roads of the Black Hills during high school really taught me how to make decent time on crap roads, 2) driving in Albany, NY and Chicago for a year taught me how to deal with super bad and super crazy drivers. We ended up being completely fine and even returned the rental car in one rather muddy piece. These two experiences helped make sure we stayed on the road, didn’t hit anything, and nothing hit us!
So the scenery, the tourist sites, and the trip through Romania was awesome. Even if we hadn’t spoken to a single person in the country, Romania would still be near the top of our list of favorite countries we’ve visited. The unique and extremely awesome part of our trip occurred from all the interactions we’ve had with others and I’ll write about that later!
Enjoy the photos!
Chris W.
