Cluj-Napoca

The blazing tangelo sun burns across the airport tarmac and through the windows, taunting your tired eyes. RISE AND SHINE EVEN THOUGH YOU'VE BARELY SLEPT! IT'S CLUJ TIME!

The flight from Bucharest to Cluj-Napoca is, thankfully, under an hour long, an easy hop over the Carpathians; it would be an arduously long drive through them. You're surrounded by businesspeople on the plane, commuting for meetings, on this 8AM itinerary. It's oddly comforting to be around people going to work, acting out normal routines, and you get a weird pang for working life. You close your eyes to get some rest, but all you get is a headache.

The accents of people around you, as the businesspeople whisk away to their meetings and you shuffle towards the city shuttle bus, are Dracula-reminiscent, there's no way around it, they just are. You went there, a couple of days ago - to Dracula's alleged castle, here in Transylvania. Deep in bear country, it's not alone - there are plenty of castles and palaces with ornate spires and haunted rooms nestling in the thick woods. Legends and terrors, stoked and incubated in the dark forest, stalk the mountains and valleys. The trees themselves are medieval, arcane, and they watch centuries drift by and myths transform like fossils, into tourist totems on shelves. Everything becomes a product, eventually. Even the trees, probably.

~

In Cluj, you have a taxi death ride to visit the famous salt mines. Travelsick and pissed off, you lurch into the tunnels and find a monochrome wonder underground, You row boats around a lake in the moody gloom and ride a ferris wheel. Underground.

Back in the city, rain begins to crash down on the cobbles. Belatedly, with Dracula-land already behind you, you find safety from the vampires (which is really just safety from the rain) in a garlic-centred restaurant.

When the deluge is over, you head back out into the streets, past yellow, orange and blue walls, and find a red bar. Red, as in Soviet, as in Soviet-parody. You drink cocktails called 'Chernobyl' and 'Free Europe'. The wall behind your seat is wallpapered in a repeating pattern of matroyshka dolls, kitsch as hell, but you also want it for your own house.

~

On to Timisoara, by yourself again, friends jetting off in the sky above back to Scotland. To get there, your bus skirts along the Hungarian border for miles and miles. Hungary is tangible here, their language covering signage, and often totally displacing Romanian. It's a land of wide, flat plains, monotony and madness. There are no features, no contours, just quiet town after town, in suspended animation like models on a hobbyist's tabletop.

In Timisoara, you walk through the Austro-Hun streets, every shop a gelato shop, under a thousand suspended umbrellas in every colour, like the displays of sweet flavours, into a plaza, the Piata Unirii. On the scrubby grass in the centre sits an old piano with pink and purple flowers spilling out of its soundboard, hanging over its line of crooked teeth. The instrument of art becomes installation of art.

By the canalized river, a hundred different types of rose waft their heavenly scents through the garden. Piles of crimson cherries shine in the market, bursting with vitality. You sit and eat some, watching a shaggy dog splashing in the river, and lithe rowers and boat-taxis gliding past in smooth straight lines.Read more