Like Charlie said, we definitely underestimated the size of Romania and the quality of the roads. Wanting to travel from Southern Romania to Northern Romania within 3 days, we later learned that it is impossible unless all you do is just driving. Since we had heard that the places we wanted to visit in the Northern part of Romania is not easily accessible by public transportation. Without the luxury of time, we decided to rent a car to drive around ourselves. What we did not expect is how rush and tiring it would be.
Scenery that we had seen were just spectacular. Transylvania lives up to its reputation of beauty. Driving through the winy roads up and down mountains with crisply green trees and misty air is something different. May be it is the foggy and chill air making this place more mysterious and attractive (after all, from legends, it is where vampire lives). I will definitely come back to spend some time to explore this place more.
Travelling north of Transylvania was painstaking. The beautiful highways in Southern Romania up to Transylvania deceived us. There’s only country roads that passes through a town every a few kilometer. We dare not driving pass the speed limit as we got caught speeding at a “school zone’ (yes…dead in the center of summer holiday, the school zone is in effect) and on the way, we saw a lot of police catching people speeding.
(P.S. We had a close call when we drove through Transylvania where an old pick-up truck lost control at a turn and drifted/slid side-way toward us. I felt my stomach was coming out of my mouth.)
It seems like that the whole Romania is revamping their roads and building highways. We drove through 30+ kilometer of construction. Though the drive was long and painful, it was all worth it after we saw the villages in the country Maramures. It was a whole different world.
We saw people especially older ladies dressing in traditional costumes – for the ladies, they dressed in black puffy dress, long sleeves pull over shirt or sweater, and a bandanna; for the men, they dressed in a light color long sleeve shirt with a darker color vest and a dress pants, and a cowboy like hat but with a round top.
There are cars but wagon seems to be a preferred way for the locals to transport goods and travel. There are also wooden churches in each town we passed. A lot of homes have this wooden gate with fine crafting on it. There are also a few homes with their exterior wall decorated with colorful tiles. There was just so much for the eyes to see in this area. I’m glad that we decided to drive, there doesn’t seems to have frequent bus, if there is, passing by these towns. Local usually hitchhike. Then, we later found that it is a common practice for the hitchhiker to pay the driver, which is very different from everywhere else we’ve been to where hitchhiking is free.
To return the favors we enjoyed hitching rides from other kind drivers, we picked up a Polish couple to give them a lift to town on our way.
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