We docked at Oltenita in Romania early in the morning. I woke up and read our briefing notes. It told me that the local Romanian delicacy was "crap kebab" from the Danube: I may give that one a miss...There was an early breakfast and we were all aboard our coaches by 08:30. On board bus 1 was our local guide, Kosmin (or Cosmic, as we quickly christened him). He bombarded us with facts and figures as we took the long, long drive to Sinaia, via Bucharest. We passed lots of fascinating sights, particularly, lots of horse drawn carts and horses ploughing fields. The latter was unusual though as most of the fields were being tilled by hand. I would have loved to have stopped to photograph those sights, but Cosmic would not let us: apparently the two-lane potholed road was a motorway…

The houses we saw in the Romanian countryside were very similar to those we saw in Russia - single storey with the long side facing due South to catch the Winter sun. The gardens were all heavily cultivated with vegetables, fruit or vines.

However, President Ceaucesceau did not approve of the peasants living in villages and had many of them destroyed, moving the people to blocks of flats. These were dreadful places.

Cosmic points out a gypsy house – curious with its little turrets and towers. But he has no time for gypsies and tells a number of offensively racist stories about them, such as each tower represents £10,000 stolen from people in the West. It clearly does not occur to him that with so much wealth, they would not be living in such conditions.

There was no ring road around Bucharest, so we drove through the centre at 09:30 and got caught in heavy traffic. It was not an attractive place to drive through slowly. Eventually, was got through and then drove very, very slowly down a perfectly good road. Cosmic told us that Elisabeth had arranged for a coffee stop, but the restaurant could not take three coach loads at once, so as we were the last, we needed to kill time and get there half and hour after the others! How very frustrating. We got to our restaurant and were offered warm Fanta or cold coffee of indescribable awfulness – for those of you who remember Camp coffee, that describes it quite well, just add grittiness. The two waiters could indeed not cope and it was an hour before we moved on. What a waste of time! It should have taken an hour to get to Sinaia, but again we had to drive slowly "so as not to swamp the hotel". We got to the hotel at 13:30 and were shown to the dining room. All the other passengers from the two other coaches were now eating their lunch, and we only had half an hour to get ours.

We decided instead to go off by ourselves and at least see something of the town before we were trapped yet again in a slowly moving coach. Accompanied by Sheri, we found a cash dispenser and got out 2,000,000 lei – we were millionaires! (2,000,000 lei = £40). We then went to the Post Office and were dead impressed with Sheri as she used her phrase book to ask for stamps. The post office lady was frosty at first, but when she heard us trying to speak Romanian, she became very helpful. We got back to the hotel at 14:00 to find that our coach was still on the soup course. Eventually we got away, some of our afternoon sightseeing now lost forever, because, well... this is Romania!

We got to Bran Castle at 16:00. In reality, it was the home of Vlad the Impaler, who, as his name implies, had a pretty ruthless way with his enemies. The Bulgarians, however, see him as something of a hero as it was mostly the Ottomans he was impaling. Bram Stoker took this story and others and merged them to produce the Dracula myth, as so now Bran Castle is Dracula’s castle. Elisabeth got on board our coach and warned the elderly and infirm that there are a lot of stairs in the castle and a dangerous back passage. She recommended that they should wander around the grounds. Our hardy lot ignored her advice and clambered up the stairs with the best of 'em!

And very attractive it was too: most unexpected. We were very happy to spend an hour and a half exploring. And were delighted to see that there were no tacky shops or souvenirs: just a few stalls at the bottom of the castle. I bet if we come back in ten years’ time, it will have all been exploited and spoiled.

The infamous back passage...

 

 

We got back to the hotel at 20:30 and were asked to go straight in to dinner with no chance to change or wash. We were treated to a very poor meal and then, the piėce du resistance, a local Romanian singer started up. I could describe him at length, but suffice it to say he was execrable. Luckily we were sitting with Bridget and Geoff – he was as angry as I was about the badly planned day, the lost sightseeing, the dreadful meal and the appalling music. Bridget was laughing at him, at me, and the singer and managed to get it all in proportion. "You’ll look back at this day and laugh," she said, and we started to do that then.