shilpa_dara

We had heard acount couchsurfing from a few people but it was the German hicthhiker that really convinced us to give it a go. Basically its a website with people who have a couch or have some space to accomadate fellow travellers. A great resource for travellers as it gives the opporunity to meet local people and also have a free nights accomadation. Our couch surfing host in Timisoara was Rasvan, a Romanian who studied in Timis and is now working for an IT company there. Rasvan is true gent, he had some friends up from his home town that night and Shilpa made us all a curry which went down well with everybody. Rasvan took us into town with his mates for a few beers and we had a fantastic sleep on his very comfy ... read more

The myths and legends about Transylvania enticed us to go a bit further into Romania than we initially planned. For those who know me(Shilpa) well, Im not the biggest fan of dark, scary, or vampire stuff so Dara loaded the van up with those extra few cloves of garlic and started sharpening the wooden stakes. This sealed the deal for me, and we headed into dracula land...!! Left my Appendix in Romania.....(Dara) As Dara cannot recall much of his first day in Transylvania I'll attempt to explain the longest 2 days of our trip. Well, we thankfully in hindsight decided not to wild/free camp and stayed in a lovely dutch owned campsite in the small villave of Sovota. In the morning we did a hike up some hills and to cool down had a long swim ... read more

From the Maramures we went over the mountains to Southern Bucovina, where there are a number of painted monastries. Weve read the monastries are a few hundred years old, all on the UNESCO world heritage list and have gorey paintings of stories from the old testament on the inside and outside walls. We´ve been enjoying our time in Romania so much that this was certainly good enough an excuse for us to go to explore another region of the country... Due to the lack of tourists up here, there are again no campsites in this region. Since weve been told you can stay at the monastires and there are plenty of them, we drove up to one and tried to find a monk. Its seems we hit evening mass time as they were no monks to ... read more

Wooden Churches, Folk Festival and Mass! The drive from Rohia to the Maramures was to take us by a number of traditional wooden chruches that are on the UNESCO world heritage list. Our timing at the first church coincided with Sunday morning mass. As we walked up to the wooden church two old ladies, dressed in full traditional costume ushered us in, next thing we knew we were sitting in Greco-Catholic mass, which turned out to be quite a fascinating experience. In contrast to the system Im used to in Ireland, it was men at the front and women at the back. I got a seat in the front section and Shilpa got a kneeling space at the back. The interior of the church was stunning, very small inside with wooden walls colourfully decorated with paintings ... read more

We spent the last couple of days trvelling from Bukk national park to the Romanian border. Once out of the hills in the north, Hungary is as flat as a pancake. The bridge over the motorway is the biggest hill we have gone over in 6 hours driving. We have come from one of the best campsites in Hungary in Bukk to the worst campsite in Hungary in Miskolc. The guy running it had the cheak to try and charge us 20 euro (twice the price of the best campsite). After investigating the rusty, filthy cold showers we haggled him down to have the price. Tonights campsite is a 'christian' campsite according to our guilde book, Not looking forward to asking them if there is a local pub to watch the camapions league final. Eldarado When ... read more