I felt a bit of a cheat leaving Romania immediately but the truth is I could never stay there long.
Travelling alone is always a series of gambles with calm periods amongst the storms. Go with the wrong guy to change money, find a cheap hotel or an internet cafe and you could lose more than your shirt. The result of knowing this is that you are always on your guard – for the guy slipping up to the next ticket window, for the piece of luggage left momentarily unattended, for the directions that seem wrong, the advice that seems suspect, the eyes, the hands, the body language..
After a while it overwhelms your ‘holiday’, taints your views, prejudices your notions.
It had been a long time since my nine month trek across the world but the nerve-tightening awareness was all too familiar. Thus when I found myself alone for a 17 hour journey in a compartment I could lock, I did so and enjoyed an oasis of pure bliss.
I love trains more than any other form of transport. They offer the scenery denied by planes and ships and a relentless rhythm that cars can never achieve. True they are inflexible in direction and destination, but within them they offer an unequalled freedom of movement.
I watched as Bucharest went by. It’s hardly fair to judge a city by an airport, an arterial route and a railway station, but I did so. The houses near the airport were alike in that their roofs wouldn’t stop a light shower, such was the state of the tiles. The Gara de Nord was stationed in downtown Beirut and the houses I was now looking at had little or no glass in many windows, judging by the broken reflection of the moon.
The conductor came and went and I relocked the door, made a bed of the bench and turned the light off. Brasov and other stops came and went in the small hours. No-one disturbed me.
At 4am I got up and looked out of the window. In the moonlight we sneaked through the low hills and woods of Transylvania.
At 6am I woke to a dry mouth and sore throat. My underwear had about 25,000kms on the clock and I ponged. I was happy.
For the next few hours I watched the rural Romanian countryside wake up. The sun rose about a dozen times as it ducked and dived amongst the hill tops. Fields of sunflowers raised their heads, mist cleared, school-kids wandered down dusty roads, men and women went about their chores.
Insanely long, thin strips of crops flicked by. From the air they had looked like the teeth of thousands of combs hachuring the landscape. On the ground they might measure five metres by several hundred.
Maize, fallow, sunflowers, grass or freshly turned earth, each showed signs of the oppressive heat. In neighbouring Moldova they were waiting for the worst drought in 60 years to break.
Romania had scores of heat-related deaths, Hungary hundreds. Even at 7am and 100km/h the air was warm and sweet.
I gave up bear-in-the-woods spotting – Romania has half of Europe’s bear population – as we came down onto the plain again. All too soon we left behind the bucolic charm of a lost century, the haystacks built around a central stick and capped with a little waterproof hat, like great thimbles, the cattle byres, horses and carts, dusty roads and the vegetable gardens. This was a place even Caucescu had limited success in penetrating. As a goodbye, a gaggle of twenty or more geese walked unhurriedly along the hard earth of a village road and the train said goodbye.
Now we approached the border at Arad and Romania tried harder to be modern. I didn’t like it. We passed two cooling towers waiting for a power station to be built. They had been waiting a while, judging by the state of them. I slept again.
Somewhere along the way I gained a room-mate. As the train was being reshuffled a guitar-toting, hair-over-his-eyes youth got in: he’d been in the wrong carriage and narrowly avoided an unwanted tour of Romanian parts unknown. Alex, from Guernsey, told me he had come directly from 6 weeks in Moldova as a volunteer.
“Was it nice?”
“Beautiful!”
Impeccably polite, he told me to let him know if he disturbed me, as he put some earphones in to listen to music while I got out. On the platform an anxious German lady, whose idea of a holiday clearly included not shaving her armpits, fretted that the train wasn’t going to end up in Budapest.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” she asked a guard. He shrugged and indicated that he didn’t. She ignored this and jabbered away in German until he shrugged again and walked off.
“A lot of Hungarians speak German,” she said. We were still in Romania.
As the train neared the border crossing we were shooed into first class by a very uptight guard who didn’t appreciate one little bit my pretending first not to understand and then to prefer second class. To be fair, she was a little less uptight before my antics. Later it became clear why we had been moved, as school-kids and Hungarians started to occupy our old quarters. I felt a little bad - she should have left me there to suffer the fate of a thousand children!
For now, passports were checked at a station with ‘Romania’ in huge letters and a bigger flag complete with eagle rampant.
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