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Published: August 28th 2007
Vegetable Patch come Home
We based ourselves in Alexandro and Lucias garden for a few days...Botiza is a little village in northern Maramures, off a road, off a road, off the main road. When we got to Botiza we took a side road and found a nice guesthouse where we asked about parking up our van. The said 5 euros to camp in their garden and to use thier bathroom and shower. We had just managed to park the van between the spud patch and the plum tree when our hosts, Alexanderso and Lucia had poured us a glass of thier home made plum brandy (palincă) and invited us to sit down with them and their guests for a drink. Conversation was a little slow as we have no Romanian and their only forign language was French, so had to rely on what Shilpa remebered from French in school. With pointing, nodding and the brandy we manged a good conversation.
We based ourselvers in Alexanderso and Lucias garden for a few days and explored the local area by foot and by bike. We hiked over the green hills through lush meddows full of flowers to the village of Lued in the next valley. Navagation was a bit difficult but we got some direction
and help from the locals who seemed a little baffled at the fact that we were walking the hills for recreation! Walking these hills was normally a chore for them to get to and from work.
On the walk we passed people working in their fields with hoes, scythes, rakes and forks. The women, young and old, were weeding their vegatable fields with hoes and the men cutting the meddows with scythes and piling the hay on horsecarts or haycocks.
It was amazing to walk along and in every field and see farming carried out by the whole family in, what to us, is such an old fashioned way.
Our greeting of "Buna Seia" (Good Day) was usually met by a big response and wave from the fields. Walking around here has felt like walking in a different time and in a way it has been. Allthough not having a lot of money the families here seem to have nice slow paced life and plenty of food from their land, and always seem to have a smile on thier faces. Quite a contrast to the rest of Romania we found.
On our return journey we stopped
Dara not quite fitting in with the locals
...I think it was because I didnt have a cool hat like theirs! in the local shop come pub with the old fellows for a beer, and enjoyed sitting back and watching the village life go on around us.
We are truely off the beaten track up here.....We saw a group of French people 2 days ago but other than that we've not seen any other tourists since leaving Camping Eldarado.
Thunder storms, Curry and Christy Moore We've had some crazy weather in Romania, Sunny days of over 30 degrees while on our 5 hour hike over the hills and then when we were ready to relax outside in the evenings we got massive thunder storms. That night it was so bad we were confined to our van, but we were very happy with a great curry, few local beers and Christy Moores box set. Not sure what Alexanderso and Lucia thought of Christy blasting out the windows of the van.
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