I wasn't exactly looking forward to the 16 hour journey across Hungary into Romania, but it turned out to be fantastic! For the first leg of the journey I shared a cabin with three other characters. At one point in the night I woke up with a thump to find one of them sitting in my lap. I think he was more surprised than I was. He clearly wasn't used to the perils of reaching up to the luggage rack whilst the train is still pulling into the station..
Anybody taking this journey will notice the stark changes in landscape when entering Hungary. The country is one vast flat plain stretching from its Western border with Austria, right across to its Eastern frontiers with Romania and Ukraine. Just as striking are the changes in the way people dress, the cars they drive, their farming methods and the absence of anything distinctly Hungarian. Whilst the British drive on the left hand side, the Czechs are all pushing around in Skodas, the Arabs decorate towns and villages with mosques and portraits of their political leadership and the Spanish are all fast asleep by mid afternoon, it takes a more accustomed eye to notice either that Hungarian is a language designed specifically to drive even the most dedicated linguist to distraction, or that if a Hungarian doesn't live in an appartment block, or farmhouse, his most usual abode will be a tiny house of almost perfecly square planform with two identically shuttered windows facing the nearest road. Yes, somehow Hungary is so distinctly Hungarian simply because there is nothing distinctly Hungarian about it!
With the Magyar plains drifing away, the Romanian border crossing was upon us. My entire compartment was searched, to the extent of pulling out the seats and checking a hole in the ceiling, then I enjoyed a fat ten minutes of questions... the usual stuff, which I almost enjoyed, knowing that all my reservations were in order and that I don't need a visa this year.. (I hear a sigh of relief from all you traveller from UK!)
The train moved on and for the first half hour, the embankments were speckled with thousands of poppies. There were birds flying around, which I had never seen, (don't know much about birds), and storks were nesting in huge beak-woven twiggy baskets perched on top of telegraph poles, looking down upon acres of hand-farmed fields in which old men steered rusty horse-drawn ploughs and old ladies hacked away at weeds, stopping only to place a withered hand on one hip, raising the other to wave at the passing train...
It has been nearly a week now, and Romaina is great. The people are warm and approachable, with a touching sense of 'family' which we Westerners should try practising from time to time! I'm in Cluj-Napoca right now, an old Roman city in Transyvania, with a distinctly Eastern feel - Also a city where you are likely to be fined for crossing the road before the little green man shows (can't quite fathom that one!).. There are thousands of Dacia cars driving around and gypsies going about their daily business of counjouring up money apparently from nowhere! Yesterday whilst hitching back from a small town in the country, Laura and I managed to get a lift with two little gypsy boys in their horse-drawn cart. That was cool!! Cluj has been enjoying a beer festival this weekend and the city centre has been packed with food stalls, beer tents and seemingly endless crowd of youngsters all keen to enjoy the atmosphere. I am sure I will be criticised for saying this, but Romania still has an excited post-revolutionary feel to it, (although not quite as noticable as in the Balkans) - youngsters going bezurk at the first hint of a party, or some fluctuation of the norm.. This festival was a fine example, and at one point it threatened, at the switch of a drum machine button, to turn into a hysterical Transylvanian attempt at an open-air rave! Yeah, this has been more a display of Romanian temperament, than of Romanian music and beer!
So I will be off again in the next couple of days, I have to catch up with Tony somewhere in Czech or Poland, so I will take a train to Bratislava and hitch the rest.. The Russian Ministary of Foreign affairs are processing our visa applications and we should have a reply by the 8th of June :)