Romanian Hospitality: On our way to Maramures

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We started our drive for a region called the Maramures. Reading about this area was really what enticed us to visit Romania. Due to its geography, the huge mountain range, it has been seperated from the rest of Romania. So it really did feel like going back 100 years in time and some of the villages felt untouched by modern times.

Our first stop was a Cluj Napoca, a large university town, with lots of cafe bars. We only stopped briefly as we were excited to head to the more medieval Romania.

Travel distance by this time we had realised took us twice the time we expected due to the state of the roads and on going road works on all the 'major' roads! As was it was dangerous to travel in the dark due to pot holes and horsecarts we had to stop at whatever village we were closest to at dark.

As their are very few campsites in Romania and none in Maramures, and we had been told that you can stay at monastries, we were led to the village of Rohia by following a monastry symbol on our map. In Rohia we found a small guesthouse but as we were trying to explain to the owner all we needed was a parking spot a Romanian student (studying tourism) who spoke a bit of english, got chatting to us and next thing we know we were invited to her cousins house down the road. They allowed us to use the shower in their house and afterwards had a big spread of coffee and cakes laid out for us. Having been in Romania only a few days, we were overwhelemed with the generosity and friendliness.

Its quite interesting, when we were in Austria people warned us about Czech Rep being unsafe and when in Hungary people gave us scare stories about Romania, "Never stop on the road, they will steel everything you have". It must be something about local rivalry!! But thankfully we have found in both cases that they are totally wrong! When I asked about if it was safe to wildcamp, the student replied "Yeah, Its safer here than in your own country".

So we ended up free camping in the village at the bottom of the road up to the monastry. Very peacefull sleep except for a few tractors and horsecarts early in the morning.

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Photos

There is no retirement age here!
The villagers at work in Rohia.

Holy Camping Spot!
We stayed the night in the van just behind this gate to the Monastry. Very peacefull and holy sleep.

Brief stop in Cluj Napoca
Shilpa still found some time for shopping!!