Brasov
June, 2004

All of the travel guides and clever resource sites, besides snarling at Romania's poor infrastructure, said Dracula's tomb was easy to get to.  Hire a car, go to Snagov, get a boat and go to the island where Dracula is buried.  Easy.

Of course, it's not at all that easy.  Like Bram Stoker, I think it's pretty clear that the authors of the travel books holed up in some luxury hotel and fervently typed everything out while living off of room service and laudanum.  Speaking for myself, you couldn't pay me to drive in Romania.  Then, in Snagov, there are no boats to rent.  The lake is all private or government property - the latter protected by trigger-happy citizen soldiers who race up to your car with machine guns ready, screaming maniacally.  That wasn't just my unique experience -- once on the island, the last remaining monk guarding the crumbling tomb of Dracula told us that he might see one or two people every six months.  Though, when I visited in June of 2004, he said it had been nearly a year since he'd seen anyone, with the exception of gypsies conducting midnight raids on his food supplies.

I went with my two English friends, Bob and Antony, and a Romanian-born Californian, Sherban, who I'd met in a bar in Brasov where I was having a good time buying Pilsner Urquell for 25 cents a bottle.  The four of us formed an impromptu Romanian Tour Group, which is the only way to get around the country.  Our guide, who had accosted us violently at the train station, was "hotel" owner Gabriel.  His hotel was actually a seemingly random series of flats scattered throughout the city, all of them in dodgy apartment buildings.  He stuffed travelers in wherever he had space, charging five Euros a head.

Gabriel was a great guy, if not a little bit insane.  We soon discovered that his eccentricities were far outweighed by his usefulness.  A former cab driver who had taught himself English, Gabriel was the rock upon which our Romanian trip rested.  He was translator, driver and negotiator.  He told us which bars and restaurants to go to, what kind of cabbies to trust, the safest routes back and forth through the city, and the places to avoid.  Even then, in the tourist hotspot at Brasov's city center, Antony nearly fell through a six foot hole in the sidewalk to the rushing, open sewer below. That sort of defines the Romanian experience.

The ridiculous exchange rate was impossible to get used to.  You could drink yourself to death for a Euro or two and grab a good meal at an out of the way pub for the change at the bottom of your backpack.  The penny, unlike in the US, had true power.  A bottle of local mystery beer for eight pennies? No problem.   Though I did have to explain American change to the family running the supermarket, all of whom clustered around me during the lesson.  One, five, ten, twenty-five...

Here we were in Europe, in a country that once held against the Ottoman hordes, and they had been stripped down to nothing by communism.  Their currency was shit, the rural areas were stone-age farmland which faded abruptly into crumbling cities, the cores of which were full of half-finished apartment blocs, the hideous communist style that, even when dressed up, destroyed every city's skyline.  They were ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe.  In places like Brasov, they were the epitome of social horror and decay.  Ceausescu's hands were all over Romania.  He'd been ousted and executed 15 years before I arrived, yet nothing had really changed.  From the unfinished apartment towers - complete with rusting construction equipment, all frozen in time - to the cruel urbanization of the rural population.  Masses of country folk had been forced into the cities and, now, were unemployed and reckless.  Packs of wild dogs, allowed to run free in the 80's, had now multiplied beyound control.  They ran the city streets, the countryside, even Dracula's island was overrun.

Yet, despite such ruin, Brasov - and Romania - is in the midst of a comeback.  A government, though twisted and corrupted, seemed to have some clear ideas on what to do in the new, capitalist world - tourism.  At all costs.  Though the urban decay remains, and the population lives in poverty, the tourist spots are being rebuilt from the bottom up.  Ancient castles and town walls, left to seed under Ceausescu's government, now rise from the ashes.  Though where the west has grown used to the Victorian-era rebuilding of monuments and medieval buildings, witnessing it now leaves a somewhat empty feeling.  Everything is built from scratch, based on historical descriptions, on top of the shattered ruins.  Visiting a castle in Romania's remote countryside is more like touring a construction site.  Our vacation soon became less focused on visiting the castle and more to see how it was being put it back together.  Warm days with penny beer, watching the crews rip down the original walls of ancient sites and put up new ones, bulldozers working side by side with horse-drawn carts.  There's nowhere you can go where construction isn't scarring the tourist sites yet, in the city, nothing is happening with the old unfinished towers or homes or storefronts.  Holes in the sidewalks, open sewers, and the roads are a nightmare of potholes that call to mind craters from a bombed out war zone.  The bullet holes in the Brasov's historic church are patched but, for the surrounding residences, they remain as dark reminders of what has been.

There are no real long distance buses you can trust, a rental car is a joke, and the trains are outdated and slow, clacking along the tracks hypnotically.  You get to your stop and that's where you stay, unless you have a guide. Gabriel was our savior, his lunatic driving ferrying us around the countryside to visit more castles and sites than our tourist minds could absorb.

Romania drifted into a sick dreamland.  With the nightmare decay all around, unexpectedly counterbalanced by the eager kindness of strangers, it's a country in flux.  Grimy inner city buses, powered by overhead wires, race along unmarked roads where, as far as I could tell, no rules existed except "Don't hit the other guy."  To cross the road, it's a matter of waiting for a gap in the traffic and then running across in a panic.  A bit of a tall order when drunk.  Though, in some parts of Brasov, the roads are painted and top of the line crossing lights have been installed.  The modern day catching up, as the infrastructure throughout Eastern Europe is slowly rebuilt a strange mix of new and old.  Starting with today's modern technology, crossings, roads and intersections can be more organized and flashy than the streets of DC. 

There's no doubt that Romania will have a different face in five years.  When the roads are painted, the ancient trams are gone, the crumbling construction sites from the 80's are demolished and the tourist sites are glittering castles once again, Romania will begin to breathe.  Perhaps for the first time in its long, troubled history.  Now, tourists arrive because it's the fringe of comfortable European travel.  Like the Canadians who took rooms next to ours, they cluster together on the balcony and mutter about the buses and the traffic.  They move in English-speaking clumps to the tiny cathedral, the city wall, and then hurry back to their rooms before dark.

Brasov, using the Lonely Planet method, can entertain you for an afternoon.  Gabriel stretched that out for two days and, leaving on the third day, I felt nothing but remorse that I didn't take Gabriel up on his laundry list of extended adventures in the city and surrounding areas.  His itinerary could keep the traveler moving for a week. 

On our first night, he drove us to the worst part of town.  There, the packs of dogs gave way to an infestation of black bears, running through the garbage heaps outside the apartment towers and the playgrounds.  For five Euros each, we followed Gabriel through what was, by day, equivalent to gangland LA and, by night, ruled by bears that lurked in the shadows and charged unsuspecting pedestrians.  Gabriel moved like a hunter, which was amusing until the first charge came:  A beer snuffling and snorting, loping across the street, at which point Gabriel grabbed us all and hurried back to the car.  After that, we were serious and obedient when we embarked on the next foray into the trash heaps. 

The bears were becoming a problem in Brasov, but it was against the law to hunt them. In order to stop illegal culling, the government put in a warden to patrol the woods and trash heaps at night.  The warden's position had a high turnover rate - citizen vigilantes shot and killed one every four or five months.  In 2003, the death rates for wardens exceeded that of the bears.

On our last day, we paid Gabriel to run us to Snagov, outside Bucharest where we had an evening train to catch.  Snagov is a sprawling sub-suburban town surrounding a fetid lake.  The water-snakes and mosquitoes, stinking mud and dirt roads, toothless gypsies and open sewage dumps of Snagov was Romania's version of a holiday resort.  In the center of the lake was an island, guarded by an ancient monastery.  Built by Vlad Tepes, the church, monastery and "blessed" well marked his last resting place, maintained by his family up until the early 1900's. After the revolution, the government cut all funding to the site.  Since 1991, the monks have been dying out, leaving, today, only one guardian.  When he dies, the island, monastery and tomb will be left to rot.  Already, the island is frequently raided by gypsies, who steal supplies and deface the tiny chapel.  In response, the government gave the monk a serious arsenal and a license to kill.

Though, when we arrived, we had the Lonely Planet image of a happy, go-lucky monastery full of welcoming monks running a daily ferry back and forth.  Even Gabriel, who read the Lonely Planet entry, shrugged and said it sounded like a good detour on the way to Bucharest. He'd never even heard of the spot. A machine gun toting holy man who existed above the law and was authorized by the Romanian government to kill us, on a whim, was a surprise for all of us.