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| After nearly 48 hours I'd finally come to terms with my speeding fine.... |
What should we do for tea? Bugger it - lets order some takeaway! I quickly looked through tripadvisor for restaurants which deliver... Dominos... I quickly downloaded the iPhone app. and within about 5 minutes we had ordered a couple of pizzas. Within 45minutes it was delivered to our apartment!!! Kudos Dominos!
With a couple of days up our sleeve before we needed to get to Bucharest, we decided to hire a car and venture around. It was only a few hours to Moldova, but I couldn't find a car company who would let us take their car out of Romania... Or if they did - you wouldn't be covered for insurance.
We found a blog post on a road trip through Romania - Drink tea and travel - which looked pretty good, so using this as a guide we decided to take advantage of what turned out to be a crappy situation and have a bit more of a look around Romania.
I decided to give a local private hire car company a burl instead of the big Eurocar, Avis or Sixt. This local company called Ecoline was significantly cheaper, and seemed less hassle with insurance, unlimited kms etc. When we picked the car up the next day, the whole transition was fantastic - no significant paperwork to record previous scratches, just a couple of photos of the vehicle. Return it with a clean interior and a full tank of fuel - easy! The deposit was 300 euro (as opposed to 1000+ when using larger car companies), and the cost was 22euros per day. The plan was to get a little Toyota because via their website, this was the cheapest option, but we were up graded to a slightly bigger Peugeot.
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| The rocket! |
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| Another castle eh - building this sucker took 10 years but wasn't "complete" until 40 years after it had began. The castle is still owned by the royal family (currently King Michael 1 of Romania), and sits on a 1000 hectare estate. |
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| The castle itself was pretty nice, and had a lot of detail in its construction. |
Three Day Road Trip
Day 1 - Singasora & Baia Mare
Easy, about an hour and a halve up the freeway from Brasov were were at Singasora in no time. It was a frosty foggy morning but when we finally reached Singasora we had sun! Amy directed me to the city centre where we found a park featuring its own parking intendent, we bought an hour ticket and went for a quick look around!
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| Singasora was super impressive! The town was mostly untouched from medieval times! |
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| The houses were all colourful and streets were quite! It really felt like it was untouched by an modern and western influence. |
It was also hard to get my head around the speed limits here. On the way into a town there would be a 70 sign, then a 50 sign - ok, I'll obey. Then I'd get past by about 5 cars and a couple of trucks through the town who seemed to be doing at least 70kph... I'd have trucks up my ass until they could pass no matter what speed I through these villages. . I even had people tooting me when I was doing the limit. At the end of the village there would be a
Eventually we came into a town and I was sitting about 100m behind the traffic doing about 70kph. All of a sudden a police car appears on the other side of the road with his lights on and he sort of signals to the car in front of us. It kinda looks like he flashes me too so I pull over behind another vehicle who was flagged down too. I was defiantly speeding but I thought the rest of the traffic was too...
The copper came to my window and said something in Romanian, I replied with a sorry do you speak English? He sort of shock his head and waved something which I though was get out of the car so I did, and walked up to the front car. When I got there he said something else to me and then waved up the road which I took as - nah your right to go. So we left.
I reckon everyone was speeding and the bloke parked in front of me was the first in the line to get caught so unfortunately he got the ticket.
We got about 10min up the road and the copper was BACK with lights and sirens behind me! Bugger, I couldn't pull over right away because we were on a pretty long bridge, but he was right up me hassling! I sort of half pulled over as soon as we got off the bridge hoping maybe he wanted to go around but unfortunately he was pulling me over...
He rolls up to my window and says Problem, problem - and waves me back to his car. I got our and head to his car where he shows me a video of me doing 69kph back in the village. I agree its me and he writes out some paper work. Turns out to be a 120lei (40AUD) on the spot fine - which I luckily have the exact amount of cash in my wallet, and then we are free to continue... I was fuming!!!
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| Baia Mare clocktower which used to be a church - the only real landmark we came across on a little wander around at night. We were staying right in the centre of the old town in a old style AirBnB. Other then Hotels there were only a few places on AirBnB and this one was the cheapest. |
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| Oh hey - another beer. Loved this pint glass/jar! |
Back in Albania a couple of Polish girls at a Hostel recommended we visit the Merry Cemetery, and I saw it on another couple of blogs that said it was worth a visit. Unfortunately nobody said it was practically out in the middle of nowhere! It was a good couple of hours of slow windy, village to village road from Baia Mare on the border of Ukraine and Romania in a small village called Sapanta.
The cemetery stands to show the lighter side of death with plenty of bright colours, sometimes funny stories and hand carved scenes on gravestones. Unfortunately its all in Romanian which I didn't know, so the experience was a little disappointing after it had taken us such a long time to get here.
One of the crosses read: This is where I rest, Holdis Ion is my name, For as long as I lived, I praised the political party (communist party), Aid I tried so hard for people here to have a good live, I had no children, But I helped, The town management.
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| Typical Romanian farmland in between villages. |
Day 3 - Sibiu, Brasov then Bucharest.
We only had a couple of hours to wander around Sibiu first thing in the morning before we needed to be back to Brasov to drop off the hire car, and catch a train down the Bucharest. It was a pretty nice place with plenty to offer!
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| Massive brick Holy Trinity Cathedral. |
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The medieval fortified walls are still in place around the city, just like Singasora the old town is in ripper condition. The main pedestrian street was pretty big and had plenty of coffee shops (best coffee we'd had for a long time). Sibiu actually had the Christmas markets up and running and what looked like an impressive light set up in the large town square - it would have been well worth a look at night.
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More great adventures. Have you been trying Google Translate? Keep the fine & frame it when you get home. Take care.
ReplyDeleteI was pretty dirty on the speeding fine so it was thrown in the bin... Google Translate gets used most days!
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