Drum bun, şi la revedere (and have some zombie train fail as a farewell present)

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So we're just killing time in Sighişoara now, waiting for the time to come to saunter to the train station to catch our zombie train to the Hungarian border (we got couchettes booked for this one, one 8 hour seat experience was enough!) It's too hot to do otherwise, and it's been a very heavy and tiring but memorable 6 days crossing this huge country. The last 2 days we've spent in the middle part of Transylvania in the old city Sighişoara (best known as the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler) and the nearby village Biertan. We were recommended Biertan down to one particular place to sleep by Anne-Sophie's friends in Bucharest, but warned that there was no way to get there on public transport (they had done it by hired bike).

After eating and drinking on monday night we arrived in Sighişoara, we asked the people at our hostel there and they told us flatly that there was no way of getting there except by taxi, which would cost somewhere between 75 and 100 lei (around £20). However, further research showed that there is infact a train station 10km from the village, and we really didn't have any qualms about walking 10km - we had probably done that in Braşov the previous day anyway.

The next morning after checking out of the hostel, we took the train and asked a couple of guys for the way to Biertan. They were going the same way as us, and told us there was a bus that went "some time soon" from the next village along, Şaroş. The bus hadn't come from Sighişoara, but it existed, so we felt we had found an alternative to taking a taxi - the walk from the train station to this village took no more than 15 minutes. On this walk the one of the pair who could speak English, who was very talkative, told us about his break dancing and his and his brother's work in Spain, then managed to communicate with Jitka in Spanish pretty successfully. He told us that, although he liked Biertan (his home), he would prefer to live in Spain as there is "thing", while in Romania, there is not "thing".

We waved goodbye to our new friends as we arrived, hoping to catch them in one of the village pubs later on. We found our guesthouse which we had been recommended, it was run by an old lady who only spoke Romanian and basic Russian, but we managed to communicate with her in a more kinaesthetic way. I felt dirty not having learned this language - I would advise visitors to Romania to learn some Romanian phrases. People here generally don't speak English, even young people, and French and Italian haven't got us very far either. It's one of those countries where if you want to do anything besides drink in the hostel bar, you're going to struggle without a basic knowledge.. and we have struggled a fair bit.

We took a quick siesta before heading out to explore the village, which was well known for its church. The whole area seemed to be (perhaps historically) German-speaking, down to bilingual signposts, and the interior of the church was full of German inscriptions. The rest of the village was all very nice, but very tourist-centered for a reason I couldn't quite put my finger on - plenty of villages and towns have nice churches.

Even if there had been anything left to see in Biertan, it was far too hot for us to attempt it, so we spent the rest of the evening drinking in a restaurant. We were joined by a Polish/Dutch couple who kept us entertained through three beers until about 10pm, by which time we were struggling to keep our heads up, so I insisted dropping by the local gipsy pub for a shot of Tuica (Romanian slivovice-lite) before going home. Sadly we never met our friends from earlier anywhere.

The next morning, the old lady who ran our guesthouse cooked us an epic breakfast which we only managed about half of, before giving us a warm farewell as we set off back towards Sighişoara. We had left the guesthouse about 2 hours before the next bus, so we decided to try and hitch a ride back to Şaroş. We were picked up by a young guy busting out the ubiquitous cheesy summery electro house from his car stereo, who seemed pretty happy for an opportunity to practice his English over the 10 minutes we spent driving back to the next village. We walked along the road in the blaring heat back to Dumbrăveni station.

Now a side rant of sort. I have yet to actually say this about a country in these parts since I'm usually very patient with the former communist pieces of scrap metal which wail down the iron road with all doors flying open and similar, ahem, differences to how it is in England, but the Romanian train system is the most annoying and direst infrastructure I've ever come across. When we arrived from Sighişoara to Dumbrăveni we paid 3 lei each and took a train which stopped everywhere (everywhere being something like 4 intermediate stops). On the way back our train happened to be a fast train, and because of this we paid over triple the price. Not only is this ridiculous, the train was, as ever in this country, over half an hour late, so cue us starting an epic game of scrabble while annoyed and bored in the station to kill time.

We didn't have the energy to do anything back in Sighişoara - the fifteen minute walk in the blaring heat was enough to suck most of it out of us. We walked through the city centre and lay down in a park for a long while before we noticed a looming grey cloud, which would be our cue to flee to a cheap Italian restaurant for the rest of the evening. We just drank, ate and recharged, watching a looping cloud of Jackdaws circle the church spire, then headed to the hostel to pick up our bags and went off to the station to GTFO Romania.

The trouble is that as I've already said, Romanian trains just do what they want to. The train before ours going north was 95 minutes late on arrival. The departure board said there was no problem with our train until 5 minutes after it was supposed to arrive, when the delay suddenly jumped from 0 to 150 minutes. Knowing that if we arrived 150 minutes late into the border station we would not make a connection across to Debrecen, we told the woman in the ticket office this and asked if, because of the delay, we could change our couchettes to the next train, bound for Budapest but roughly in the same direction, so that we could find another connection (or hitchhike across the border).

While she was phoning the head office in Bucharest, the Budapest train, 10 minutes short of its arrival time, suddenly jumped to a 100 minute delay, making this also pretty worthless. However she didn't register this, and when we spoke to her to tell her not to do anything and that we would just take our planned train and hope for the best, she told us she had already cancelled our couchette reservations (something I did NOT ask her to do), and that it was not possible to re-book them now as it was too late. So, we could get either train (reservation apparently not necessary), but would have to do it zombie train style. We got our 50 lei back from the couchettes, but I was fuming.

When this train finally arrived, we found an empty compartment and collapsed. We were woken up by a ticket officer who shouted at us that this part of the train was terminating at Cluj-Napoca, and that we needed to move into another carriage, and also that despite what this stupid woman at Sighişoara may have thought, we did need a reservation. We moved carriage but there was no indication of when we had passed the dividing threshold. We were stopped by another extremely irritable conductor who, after shouting at us for not having reservations again, told us the carriage we were in now was continuing its trek to the Hungarian border. We collapsed and I managed about 3 hours total of cut-and-cover shut-eye before being woken up as we approached the border.

Just another unforgettable zombie train night. Second to How many pissed off, confused backpackers can you pile in to bratislava hlavná stanica?, this is the most severe train fail I have ever experienced.

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Photos

Oldschool style!
A fair number of people in these parts prefer travelling by horse to by car.

There are some despair inducing zombie train experiences money can't buy
For everything else, there's...