skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Having just spent the last two days here, I am now of the opinion that Istanbul rocks. Despite a rather shaky birthday involving hours on the truck, hours at the Turkish border, more hours on the truck and finally a cringingly embarrassing party at the tastefully named Meat House restaurant, Istanbul has more than made up for it. The town is a real melting pot, full of East and West, old and new, shops, restaurants, beggars, monks, cats and knock-offs. The Turks have a love of confrontation, using their car horns, voices, elbows and children to get their own way, but somehow also have a laid back attitude which seeps through the city.
There are so many great things to see and do here that it is hard to know where to start, and with only two days I just had a taster of this wonderful place. The Grand Bazaar is still the place for buying cool stuff, even if it has become geared up for the tourists. The shopkeepers have a mostly uncanny ability to guess your nationality and shout greetings in your language, but I got at least two "Konnichi wa"s on my travels. The Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace are the standard tourist stops, and both are worth seeing, but preferably without several busloads of primary school kids.
Apart from these obvious places, just walking around the city is fascinating, with shops selling nothing but buttons, others with nothing but ribbons. My personal favourites were those down a flight of steps, in an underground passage, selling ride on lawnmowers, in the centre of Istanbul. This is a city with a not inconsiderable lack of grass, particularly underground.
The food is absolutely excellent here, I haven't eaten anything less than great in two days. In fact, I have just eaten the best cake of my life at a shop near the Hagia Sophia, I could have happily died with that cake in my mouth. However, I am fortunately still alive, so I can continue with this blog entry.
The only downside that I can see to Istanbul is that it is a real money pit of a city, I have visited the ATM more times here than in the last two weeks. I do have some tat to show for it though, so it's all good.
The pictures show the view from the rooftop bar of the hostel where I am no longer staying, having paid for a room in a guesthouse. It really is a beautiful city.
Filthy Romania has been left behind, we are now in slightly less filthy Bulgaria, but only for one night. From what little I have seen, it is a beautiful but poor country, with snow on the tops of the mountains we just drove over. Thankfully our campsite is warmer than the mountains.
After the snow, we went past a beautiful church, which looked old but I think was finished in 2003. There were the inevitable tat sellers, but these ones were selling traditional Bulgarian rose scented items and decorations. And also furry dice, flick knives and throwing stars. Go figure.
Our new campsite is near a lake, with snow-capped mountains in the distance and a stream running by. If this sounds idyllic, that is because it is :) We even had a barbecue tonight, using wood which I helped to split. I can be useful sometimes!
Turkish border tomorrow, then Istanbul.
What a ridiculous city. The population all seem to have split personalities, one psychotic for driving, and one for everything else. This manifests itself as noise, and lots of it. Engines, horns and sirens are the soundtrack to Bucharest, with dirt and decrepitude as the backdrop. Apparently this is the Paris of the east, perhaps with a good scrub and some driving lessons it could be.
The bus into town was eventful, as we were fined for not having a ticket. This ticket is impossible to buy on the bus, and at bus stops. The nearest place where we could get a bus ticket was, of all places, the airport. So we had no tickets, and got fined by the jobsworth inspectors, who couldn't care less that we came from somewhere that had no tickets. Romanian authority sucks.
What made up for this in spades was the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. If you think that this name sounds eccentric, slightly random and of dubious quality, you would be right, but only on the first two counts. This is essential viewing in Bucharest, somehow encapsulating everything that is Romania in one slightly unhinged package. It contains a multitude of exhibits, arranged in a semblance of order, ranging from clothes to tools to a whole wooden church and windmill, all indoors. They charged 6 lei entry, and 50 lei to take photos, so we didn't pay for the photo privilege. This was a mistake, the museum is easily worth 56 lei, so much so I am considering returning tomorrow just to get some photos.
So in summary, Bucharest itself is a deranged beast of a city, with some refuges of sanity lurking within. Also some nice soup: Transilvanian sour soup.
We had a full day in Sighisoara today, which is enough to do justice to this pretty, small town. Famed as the birthplace of Vlad Dracul, there are surprisingly few fangs and capes to be seen here. It is a real town, with businesses other than tourism, and a population with things to do other than fleece visitors. They try to make an effort to keep the old buildings in good condition, but only in the now typical Romanian manner. It is common to see satellite dishes on the sides of the buildings, "Do not walk on the grass" signs next to parched patches of weeds and boxes of junk left in the corner of the churches. This does add a certain charm to the place when you leave your Western expectaions behind, especially with the streets being a mix of tar, cobble and dirt. These streets have a significant population of dogs, whose sole purpose seems to be to look cute and receive cuddles from passers-by.
We climbed the clock tower, which is a construct only possible in this part of the world, with eerie model people who appear on the hour, wooden stairs crowded with Romanian tourists who will not give way and holes in the wall which appear to be designed for the use of boiling oil. There was a lovely view from the top.
I tell you this because the picture here is of the view from our current toilet, a toilet which one must dig with a trowel. I think this view is better.
We've arrived in Bucharest a day early, due to not being able to find a suitable campsite. We travelled through the Transilvanian Alps to get here, which are as stunning as the name suggests, and would be absolutely heaving with sports nuts in the winter were it slightly further west.
Prior to this we visited Bran Castle, home of Mr. Dracula. I said before that Sighisoara had a pleasant lack of tourist tat. This, I now realise, is due to them all being in Bran. The whole town seems set up to sell crap to tourists, from Dracula masks to the ever popular genuine Romanian samurai sword. The Lonely Planet guide book says that you can run round Bran Castle in half an hour. This is absolutely correct, since the castle has nothing at all inside. Everything moveable has been removed and the end effect is like an open viewing of a grand old house. With really low ceilings. And people who charge you to take photos. It was a significant letdown for someone used to Crathes Castle.
There was a further exhibit after the castle: a recreation of a small traditional Romanian village. This exhibit had signs proffering information. One sign said, and I kid you not: "This is the house with the yard, known locally as "the house with the yard". It features a house, and a yard." All the signs continued in a similar vein, providing much needed hilarity to our group. Despite the amusing signs, I find difficulty in recommending Bran and its castle to others.
Romania doesn't have all that many roads. We travelled for some hours, and took literally the only turning off the road, which led up a dirt track into the hills. The lack of roads means that you pass through every settlement, and sometimes it seems that there is only one continuous village. The road into the hills led up to a section which appeared to be the entrance to a secret military installation, complete with multiple verbose signs in Romanian. Of course we just ignored the signs and carried on. Unfortunately, it was not a secret army base, but a campsite so remote and hidden that we couldn't see how it got any custom. It didn't get any more custom from us either, as we just used it as a truck park whilst we all trooped off into the surrounding hills.
The main feature of the hills was a stunning gorge with forest at the bottom, and a path which we took. This helped to illustrate something slightly unusual about Romania's inhabitants: they throw their litter everywhere and anywhere. Even this magnificent place with rubbish bins at strategic intervals had trash spread around all over the place. I am beginning to think that disdain is a national personality trait here, which extends to many aspects of life: the environment; other road users; the unfinished houses that line the roads. Perhaps it is a hangover from the communist era when it was always someone else's responsibility.
Our first bushcamp went well, and ended even better since I am writing this sitting in a hotel room in Sighisoara, having spent about £4 on a huge pizza and having had a great shower. I think that all tents should have ensuites.
One long drive later, the intrepid band arrived in the fair land of Romania: land of slightly suspect building practices, chickens and inquisitive villagers. And accommodating farmers, since we are now camping in a field, thanks to the donation of an Odyssey t-shirt and a beer.
The country is obviously poorer than those we have already passed through, but it seems to me that there is no real misery or discontent here. Those we have seen appear to be content, with a genuine family life. I don't think that this is an over generalization, as we have driven past so many houses with all the inhabitants outside having dinner as a group. Something increasingly rare in the UK.
Our family is getting used to the reality of no shower tonight, and generally coping using a process of denial. This will change to grudging acceptance by tomorrow morning, and open truck windows by tomorrow afternoon. We are such soft westerners!
Posts
