Foreign Tourists Return to Romania

BalkanTravellers.com

1 July 2008 | Foreign tourists, mainly from the European Union, are showing a renewed interest in traveling to Romania, national media reported today.

The increased number of tourists who decide to head to Romania’s seaside and mountain resorts, according to the Evenimentul Zilei newspaper, comes after long years of avoiding the country.

According to data by the National Statistical Institute, an increase of 35 per cent in the number of foreign tourists can be observed. From the total number of tourists, 62.5 per cent come from the European Union, of which 35.9 are Hungarians, 22.1 are Bulgarians, 9.1 are Germans and 8.1 are Italians.

In the last month, according to the publication, 616,300 tourits have visited the country, which is a 5.7 per cent increased compared with May of 2007.

A mini guide to Romania

Tim Dowling
The Guardian

Romanians are descended from the ancient Dacians, and the Romans who conquered them in 106AD. Dacia remained a Roman province for 200 years.

Romania became a member of the EU on January 1 2007, along with Bulgaria.

The country of Romania was formed through the merger of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, which both sought independence from the Ottoman empire. Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia were added in 1918. Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviet Union after the second world war and now comprises the Republic of Moldova.

Wake Up, Romanian!, written in 1848, is the official national anthem of Romania, although from 1947, when the communists seized power, to the mid-1970s, it was forbidden even to hum it.

The Romanian language is so similar to Italian that Romanian speakers can more or less understand someone who is speaking Italian. For some reason it doesn't work quite so well the other way round.

The Danube runs for 40% of its length inside Romania, before emptying into the Black Sea.

Former president Nicolae Ceausescu rose to power in 1965 and ruled Romania until the revolution of 1989, when he was overthrown and executed along with his wife, Elena. To add insult to injury, on the day before his execution Ceausescu was stripped of his honorary knighthood by the Queen.

Under Ceausescu's brutally repressive dictatorship, Romania's secret police force, the Securitate, boasted 11,000 agents and more than 500,000 informers. At their instigation, some 80,000 political prisoners were detained in psychiatric hospitals.

The People's Palace in Bucharest, begun in 1984 and still incomplete at the time of Ceausescu's death, is officially the world's heaviest building, and the largest government building apart from the Pentagon. Its construction occasioned the demolition of 22 churches, six synagogues and 30,000 homes.

Mamaliga is a strong contender for the title of Romania's national dish: it's an ancient peasant staple made by boiling cornmeal with salt in a special cast iron pot called a ceaun. Actually, it's pretty much just polenta with a different name.

The oldest human fossils ever found in Europe were discovered in a Romanian cave in 2004.

Vladisav Dracula, the ruthless 15th-century Wallachian ruler who inspired Bram Stoker's vampire, was known as Vlad the Impaler for his preferred method of execution, although the nickname is somewhat unfair. He was equally fond of burning, drowning, skinning, boiling, cutting off limbs and nailing people's hats to their heads.

Romania now has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, with average growth around 5.8% annually.

60% of all European brown bears live in Romania.

According to legend, the children who disappeared with the Pied Piper of Hamelin re-emerged from a cave in Transylvania, after being led through a tunnel that ran all the way from Germany to Romania.

Famous Romanians include the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the playwright Eugene Ionescu, the tennis player Ilie Nastase and the gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The actor Edward G Robinson was born in Bucharest in 1893.

The perfect budget eco break? Romania

From The Sunday Times

May 18, 2008

Rod Liddle finds a corner of Europe yet to be invaded by Starbucks. And it cost only £1,500 for a holiday for five

Rod Liddle

In winter, the wolves migrate down from the frozen Carpathian mountains and prowl the snow-covered, wooded hills beyond our farmhouse – usually just out of sight, though you can hear them doing their famous howling thing.

In spring, the wolves head back to the peaks, but the brown bears have given birth to their young and are feeling decidedly querulous and antagonistic towards humans. Chippy, you’d probably call it. A year or so back, a local hunter was partially eaten by a brown she-bear, despite having apologised profusely for having disturbed her.

There are lynx and wildcats in the forests too; this is Europe’s last natural wilderness, a scenery of unremitting grandeur and minimal subsistence agriculture that the European Union has yet to streamline and thus destroy (though give it time).

I hadn’t thought it would be like this, Transylvania – quite so beautiful, quite so insulated from the exhausting, moronic clamour of western Europe – despite having read Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked through this landscape in the 1930s, astonishedly counting the gigantic white storks perched on every church roof.

That was then, I thought to myself before setting out: there’ll be a Starbucks on every corner now; there will be, God help us, malls.

I was wrong. I had figured without Nicolae Ceausescu and nearly 50 years of incompetent, totalitarian state socialism. If anything, old Nick put the country back another 100 years or so – especially this, the Hungarian part of Romania, the bit the Romanians look at with grave suspicion and muttered oaths. Every cloud, then.

It is a region that has been preserved, if not in aspic, then in horse dung; there’s a horse and cart on every corner, and it’s no affectation for the tourists; there are few cars, and many of the roads are too rutted for them anyway, mere mud tracks even in the centre of town. Up above, there are stars, loads of them.

Do you remember stars? And there are more storks than you could shake a stick at, their vast nests teetering on telegraph poles. You want to get away for a while? Then get away here, before it’s too late, before they spoil it, before the entire province is painted in the virulent yellow of oilseed rape under some fatuous, planet-destroying CAP scheme.

Believe me, this was the best holiday I’ve had in 30 years of fairly serious holidaymaking. And the cheapest. And the most tree-huggingly ecofriendly.

I think the kids liked it, too. A year or so back, we took the family to one of those all-inclusive resorts in Turkey with 427 swimming pools and X-treme water chutes and kiddie discos and synchronised-swimming aerobics and DVDs and video games. I don’t know exactly why we did this – mental laziness, probably.

We knew we’d hate it, but we thought our three children might welcome being suffocated by prepaid corporate-entertainment bilge, which was gravely wrong of us on any number of counts. The kids remember little of the holiday except for occasionally vomiting, and me throwing a strop and telling the Turks that even Greece was better than this.

The holiday this time around – no television, no prepackaged, sanitised entertainment of any kind – cost us less than a third of the price of that hideous Turkish jaunt, and the children want to go back NOW. They want to live there, in perpetuity. That, it turns out, is all they wanted: space, the outdoors, the suggestion of exciting wildlife close to hand and room for imagination.

This holiday cost us about £1,500 for five people, including all flights, all accommodation, all food, all alcohol, all excursions (of which there were two per day). I’ve never seen the children happier, even the two-year-old, whose physical development came on by a factor of about 10 as a result of being exhorted to walk more and be carried less.

And, for the snobs among you, there’s the chance to be taken bird-watching by royalty. Come on, how many holidays can guarantee you that? The place at which we were staying – beautifully converted farm buildings in the placid hamlet of Miklosvar, about 30 miles north of Brasov – is owned by Count Tibor Kalnoky, one of Europe’s last blue-blooded links to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

He is also the diplomatic representative of the world’s smallest state – the Knights of Malta, a strange Roman Catholic enclave that clings to the side of a hill in Italy – and, of course, a naturalist.

Are you beginning to comprehend how magnificently arcane, how otherworldly, this holiday was? The count is perhaps part of that growing web of eco-toffs, of well-born environmentally friendly monkeys who count among their number Zac Goldsmith and the Prince of Wales. Charlie, incidentally, owns a similar establishment near Miklosvar, which the count has helped him to renovate. They all know one another, the well-born scions of this well-mannered and charming greenerati.

I do not mean any of this slightingly; Tibor was a funny and extremely knowledgeable guide. One morning, he put on his walking boots and took me and my two boys out to see the shrikes and the eagles and the giant bats, all flapping purposefully about down by the river. He does this every week, he says; he enjoys it. My girlfriend chose not to join us. “See one f***ing bird, you’ve seen them all,” she said, opening a novel on the garden terrace.

I liked the count a lot. So did my boys. And they’ve been brought up to believe that royalty are parasitical vermin who must be exterminated. In fact, they asked me about this parasitical-vermin business while the count was actually with us (“I don’t think we should shoot him, he seems really nice ...”), which led to a ticklish situation for a while.

I’ve revised my position, anyway – maybe they should be allowed to run guesthouses. Kalnoky runs his better than any I’ve been to. The count is fervently green. Pretty much all of the food comes from the local village or the village a few miles down the road; the kids can milk the cows and goats, then drink the stuff at breakfast.

The alcohol, of which there was a welcomingly copious amount, is all made on site – sweet, pale caraway brandy and another more fiery distillation made, I suspect, from spent uranium rods (excellent stuff, it was).

A few days after we left, the count had a “green day” planned, when he and the staff, and any guests who felt like it, were to go out and clear up the litter left by the local fishermen at the oxbow lakes. We missed that, sadly – never rains but it pours, huh? The point is, this place takes its eco-credentials very seriously indeed. I felt so virtuous on my return home that I almost went out and bought a 4WD to compensate.

We were housed in large peasant buildings equipped with bourgeois furnishings – nice, heavy furniture, comfortable beds, warm showers. The handful of guests ate together each night in the lovely candle-lit cellar, sharing fine meals (and free wine) drawn from that Mitteleuropa tradition of pork goulash, caraway soup with dumplings, pikeperch, or zander, grilled and served with the freshest available vegetables, huge Hungarian cakes flavoured with cinnamon and sugar.

The scale of the operation is small enough for you to tailor the excursions as you might wish – what I wanted to do was walk, down the spectacular ravines and up in the high forests, and there was a willing and knowledgeable guide on hand for all that stuff. You can also do the usual Transylvania thing and see “Dracula’s castle”, or visit Saxon villages and sulphurous caves that are supposed to endow you with good health and sexual vitality, neither of which I possessed before I went there and neither of which I possess now.

Incidentally, the Hungarians are a bit sniffy about Dracula, his being a fictional character and all. But we went to his spectacular castle and walked around, noting Dracula’s disabled-access ramp and Dracula’s CCTV security system and Dracula’s TV lounge.

Elsewhere, there are pretty mountain lakes where, in late April, the snow still lay on the ground and fresh bear prints could be made out at the water’s edge, and fossil-collecting expeditions deep in the Carpathian forests, where the black woodpeckers scurry from branch to branch and there is not a sound to be heard but for the birdsong and the gentle susurration of my haggard lungs, finally giving up the ghost.

By the way, I spiced up this trip, just for the benefit of the kids. (Well, that’s my argument.) Instead of doing the simple thing and flying to Bucharest, then taking a two-hour train ride to Brasov (from which city the guests are collected), we flew instead to Budapest and took the sleeper train south and east, across borders that have shifted more frequently than Conservative policy on the EU.

There is something inexpressibly romantic and exciting about boarding a big Soviet-era train in Europe’s loveliest city, Budapest, armed with only a few bottles of grain alcohol and some chocolate, then heading slowly off into the mysterious eastern European night.

And being woken at 0500 by cheerful Romanian soldiers demanding to see your passports, the mountains of Transylvania closing in on either side of the track. A decent sleeper berth for five of us, plus the cost of the 12-hour journey, was no more than £150 in total – and, of course, the kids were entranced by it all. To think that we put ourselves through all that Turkish corporate misery, all that prepackaged bilge, a year ago, when we could have had this all the time.

Travel brief

Getting there: EasyJet flies to Budapest and Bucharest. Or try Wizz Air (www.wizzair.com), Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com).

Getting around: there are four direct trains per day from Budapest to Bucharest. Book through Deutsche Bahn (0871 880 8066, www.bahn.co.uk); a two-berth couchette costs £195, one-way. Trains from Bucharest to Brasov cost £8, one-way; tickets can be bought locally. For timetables, visit www.cfr.ro. Where to stay: Kalnoky Guesthouses (www.transylvaniancastle.com) has doubles from £77.

Canines and capitalists

The Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/

Bucharest is becoming a dynamic part of the new European landscape, writes Sam Vincent.

At sundown in Bucharest, the stray dogs that prowl the city's streets by day return to their lairs, some slinking into abandoned buildings, with others retiring to nests of grass and twigs. It is a scene from the Third World, which is why it is unlikely to endure. Last year, Romania joined the European Union, a move that is transforming the country's capital with giddying speed.

It is about time Bucharest had something to celebrate. Following centuries of Ottoman, Russian and Austrian rule, the city only emerged as the capital of an independent Romania in 1862, prompting a golden era of peace and stability. But the 20th century would see locals suffer greatly through World War II, natural disasters and the crazed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

This troubled history of domination and subjugation is best seen in Bucharest's peculiar mix of architecture. I start my exploration of the city beside remnants of the inter-war period on Boulevard Regina Elisabeta, where beautiful locals wrap themselves in fur to combat the cold. Crumbling neoclassical mansions stand testament to a time when Bucharest was known as "little Paris", a pretension supported by the grand boulevards that cross the city centre.

I follow one of them, Nicolae Balcescu, where small Orthodox churches occasionally emerge from behind naked birches.

As I move further from the centre, it is the communist era's turn to flaunt its achievements. Giant, Weet-Bix-like apartments and other gaunt celebrations of the proletariat devour the streetscape. They are the colour of dirty dishwater and are caked in a layer of slime, as if having spent the past 50 years underwater - a kind of post-communist Atlantis.

The latest architectural style is that of New Europe. The European Union is pumping millions of euros into beautification and infrastructure projects throughout Bucharest, aimed not only at restoring the city's faded grandeur but also dragging it into the modern (capitalist) world. Brightly painted stores now sell brands once only dreamed of by the locals. Vodafone, The Body Shop, Max Mara and McDonald's - they are all here, much to the delight of the trendy teens, weighed down by shopping bags despite the fact their parents' average wage is still just $200 a month.

Feeling overawed by the pace of "progress", I visit the fantastic Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Its three floors celebrate the life of rural Romanians, with a vast collection of quotidian titbits collected from barns and farmhouses throughout the country. Particularly impressive is the collection of wooden crucifixes, which could come in handy if you are planning a trip to Transylvania.

Having worked up a peasant's appetite, I walk to the city's daily Amzei Market, where the entrepreneurial guile of the resident babushkas sees me leaving with arms full of lunchtime goodies I don't remember asking for. Among my bounty is zacusca - a puree of grilled zucchini, tomato, eggplant and paprika. Not for the faint-hearted but just as tasty is my grapefruit-sized lump of branza de burduf - shepherd's cheese left to mature in the stomach of a slaughtered sheep.

My picnic attracts the attention of two stray but surprisingly handsome mutts, casually planting themselves at my feet. I give one a crust of bread but am told off by a security guard for doing so before I have a chance to feed the second. The strays date from the 1980s, when thousands of homes were destroyed by communist hard-man Nicolae Ceausescu to make way for socialist housing projects. The replacement apartments proved unsuitable for pets, leaving dog owners few options but to free their pooches. By the mid-'90s it was estimated that Bucharest, a city of two million people, was home to 250,000 feral dogs. Most have since been culled or removed (and continue to be) but the city still wakes to the yelps of overworked bitches and snappy pups.

Walking around Bucharest is easy and pleasant but, for a look at how the locals travel, I hop on the city's immense metro. It dates from 1979 and looks it, with bright-red seats and retro orange walls. In a graffiti-clad carriage I take a noisy ride from Piata Victoriei station to the city's most infamous building.

The Palace of Parliament resembles a space station that never quite got off the ground. The world's second-biggest building after the Pentagon, this monstrosity is perhaps history's most absurd folly. Ceausescu had one-sixth of Bucharest bulldozed to make room for his "House of the People", while the real people suffered chronic food shortages and frequent blackouts.

Today it houses the Romanian Parliament, which struggles to fill 30 per cent of the beast's capacity. As the bitter cold turns my hands the colour of lavender, I circumnavigate the palace's perimeter, a task that takes a full 50 minutes to complete.

Ceausescu's regime was toppled in December 1989 in a bloody revolution that left at least 1000 people dead, marking the end of a year of political upheaval throughout Eastern Europe. I ask a local man skateboarding in dim light what he makes of it all. "I was on school holidays at my grandmother's house watching it on TV. Very scary times,"says Valentine, a law graduate originally from the city of Sibiu in Transylvania.

As a starless night envelopes Bucharest, skateboarding is out of the question, so Valentine invites me for a beer at his favourite watering hole, La Ruine, at 88 Str Lipscani.

We sip pints of Romanian lager among a young crowd and discuss his adopted city.

"Bucharest isn't a beautiful city," he admits, as the rush-hour fleet of locally made Dacia cars hoons past outside. "But the thing I love is that its people have hope.

"We want to put our past behind us and have Europe accept us. This town is moving forward fast and it's great to watch."

Anything he doesn't like about Bucharest?

Valentine thinks a moment, then looks me in the eye. "Sure. All the f---ing stray dogs."

TRIP NOTES

Getting there Swissair flies from Sydney to Bucharest via Zurich. See www.swiss.com.

Staying there Hotel Duke says guests will "feel like a duke, sleep like a duke". This might not be equal to Ceausescu's decadence, but the Duke's cosy rooms are still pretty plush. Singles cost from 370 Romanian lei ($168); doubles from 480 Romanian lei. Phone +40213174186; see www.hotelduke.ro.

More information Museum of the Romanian Peasant, open Tuesday to Sunday, $3.50 adults, $2 children. See www.romaniatourism.com.

Officials in Romania are expecting to see an increase in visitor numbers this year, it has been reported.

Officials in Romania are expecting to see an increase in visitor numbers this year, it has been reported.

According to BalkanInsight.com, the government believes the number of people who visit the country's beaches will be 15 per cent up on 2007.

Romanian beaches attracted a record 60,000 foreign nationals last year, which tourism minister Ovidiu Silaghi attributed to recent improvements in the quality of their services and facilities.

Speaking to the news provider, Mr Silaghi said he believes visitor numbers will go up again this summer because Romania has stepped its promotional activities overseas.

This comes after Ziarul Financiar revealed that tourist numbers in Romania increased by more than a quarter to 7.7 million last year.

Speaking after the release of the figures, the government said it was optimistic that this trend would continue during the next 12 months at least.

More Tourists Lured to Romania’s Beaches

BalkanInsight.com

01 May 2008 Romania’s Tourism Minister says the country’s beaches will see the biggest influx of holidaymakers in nearly two decades.

Ovidiu Silaghi said he expected the number of tourists along Romania’s beaches to be 15% higher than last year.

Summer 2007 was already a record-breaking bumper season for Romanian seasides with about one million visitors, 60,000 of who were foreigners.

The rising number of visitors was due to the increasing quality of services and facilities, Silaghi said during the official opening of the new season.

He added that this year, Romania will actively promote its resorts in Eastern European countries such as Serbia and Moldova.

The number of tourists from these countries has significantly declined as visas were required for entry after Romania joined the European Union.

The Minister also argued that Bulgarian and Romanian coasts should not be compared as the two countries offer different kinds of services.

A 60 kilometre coastline in Romania cannot compete with Bulgaria’s 450 kilometres of beaches, Silaghi pointed out.

Meanwhile Zanfir Iorgus, the mayor of the seaside town of Mangalia, said Romania and Bulgaria will cooperate in some recreational projects for entertaining tourists along the Black Sea, such as a cruise route between Romanian town of Eforie and Bulgaria’s Balcic, or a light railway to link these resorts.

Romania to Brand its Eco Products Internationally

Balkan Travellers

17 April 2008 | The creation of a national agency for traditional and ecological Romanian products was recently approved by the Romanian government.

The agency, which is supposed to begin work within the next two months, will assist Romanian manufacturers with the registration and advertisement of ecological Romanian products, so that their names are protected on the European market, the newspaper Gandul reported.

The new agency will be entirely financed by state funds, Gandul added, and it will be based in the Braşov County, in the central Romanian Transylvania region.

As the Radio Romania International reported several months ago, ecological products are gaining popularity in Romania and they are readily available in supermarkets and clearly marked as such. More and more people are now willing to pay higher prices for organic and ecological foodstuffs.

Despite the rising interest, however, most ecological products produced in Romania are sold outside the country. The same media quoted Traian Dobre, an ecological-honey producer from Ploiesti, in southern Romania, who sells only one ton of his product on the Romanian market and exports some 150 tons of it to West European countries every year.

Bicycle Path to Link Black Sea Coastal Cities in Bulgaria and Romania

Balkan Travellers

10 April 2008 | A bicycle path consistent with European standards will be built between the town of Shabla, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, and the resort village of 2 Mai on Romania’s coast, Romanian media reported.

The 500,000-euro project, financed by Brussels, will begin in May. According to the Romanian daily newspaper Adevarul, its expected completion date is in November.

Both the Bulgarian and Romanian municipalities have received approval for the project and will organise a tender for the construction of the path shortly.

The town of Shabla is located on Bulgaria’s northernmost Black Sea coast, about 80 kilometres north of the major port city of Varna. The waters around the town boast many sunken ships that make it a popular destination for diving. In addition, the nearby Shabla Lake is a natural reserve, housing a diverse population of animal and plant species, while the area round Shabla’s lighthouse boast numerous warm, sulphur-rich mineral water springs.

The village of 2 Mai, though much smaller than Shabla, has become popular in recent years among Romanian tourists as a quiet and peaceful sea-side resort. Located between the port city of Mangalia and the village of Mama Veche, many of its inhabitants are the Lippovans, a minority that lives in the Dobrogea region of Romania.

The bicycle path project is the latest in a series of initiatives to build closer and stronger ties between the two states. Despite the fact that Bulgaria and Romania are neighbouring countries, the traffic levels over the Danube – which forms much of the nearly 500-kilometre border between them, were surprisingly low until a few years ago.

This is changing rapidly, as the scores of Romanians who head south for the holidays testifies.

In addition, local and national authorities are taking measures to increase cooperation and strengthen ties between the two states. As BalkanTravellers.com reported in January, the districts of Pleven in Bulgaria and Olt in Romania – along the border’s central portion, initiated a new project for cross-border cooperation for the development of alternative tourism.

Another much-anticipated development is the construction of a second bridge over the Danube between Vidin and Calafat in the western part of the border, which – as BalkanTravellers.com reported in March, has been in the works for the past two decades, but is scheduled to be completed by 2010.

Read more about Bulgaria and Romania on BalkanTravellers.com
Use BalkanTravellers.com's tips to organise your trip to Bulgaria and Romania

Romania: Room to Grow

Oxford Business Group Latest Briefing

During the upcoming spring holiday, thousands of Romanians will head south for the beaches of Bulgaria, eschewing their own Black Sea resorts and seeking superior services. The exodus reveals the ongoing weaknesses of Romania's own tourism industry, which has tremendous potential for growth but remains hobbled by bottlenecks, particularly labour issues and poor infrastructure.

A recent report by the World Tourism and Travel Council (WTTC) said Romania's tourism sector was the sixth fastest-growing in the world, with tourism-derived revenues increasing by 8.1% in 2007 and expected to expand by 9.3% this year.

However, despite the positive headline, the WTTC report made it clear the Romanian tourist industry has some distance to go simply to reach regional standards, let alone compete on a global scale.

Tourism will generate approximately $9.4bn in Romania overall this year, or 5.8% of the gross domestic product (GDP), according to the WTTC. By contrast, it is forecast to contribute 12% to GDP in neighbouring Bulgaria and 25.5% in Croatia, a leader in tourism in the Balkans.

These figures are "cascaded", taking into account indirect income from tourism, such as expenditures by tourism-related companies on other goods and services, including fuel, accountancy and utilities. Direct revenues from tourism in Romania are in fact considerably lower - around $3.6bn, or 2.2% of GDP.

Despite its current slump, Romania has a long history as a popular destination. During the Communist era, the honeypot resorts of the Black Sea coast were favourite holiday spots for fellow Warsaw Pact citizens and budget-seeking West Germans, Britons and Scandinavians on package tours. However, as the economies of Central and Eastern Europe contracted as the Soviet Union crumbled, the tourist flood turned into a trickle. When the inhabitants of these countries began to become more affluent in the late 1990s, they had the freedom to travel to a new range of other destinations, many of which appeared more attractive than Romania, itself in the midst of economic crisis and political turmoil. The country's tourism infrastructure had not developed to meet the new era of the more discerning traveller.

The progress made by Bulgaria, which neared economic collapse in 1996-1997, and Croatia, which was embroiled in a civil war for several years in the 1990s, suggest that Romania's tourism deadlock has much to do with poor marketing and strategy, in addition to underinvestment and poor infrastructure.

Hotel capacity is limited, with high prices and low standards, and a culture of service tourism has yet to be universalised. Other problems facing the sector include long journeys on poor roads and the unsatisfactory levels of cleanliness on many beaches.

Another challenge facing the sector in Romania is the low pay and social stigma attached to jobs in the industry. While the number of people employed in tourism is forecast to reach 304,000 this year, up 10,000 on 2007, such positions are still considered a last resort for many people. The average monthly salary in the hotel and restaurant segment is just over $305, compared to a national average of around $495, according to local press.

However, the good news is that sector's fast growth is propelling wages forward quickly; local press reported that hotel and restaurant workers' wages increased by 27% in 2007, while salaries for those employed by travel agencies rose 31%.

Romania is, it appears, beginning to make up for considerable lost time. Authorities are keen to promote the country's natural beauty, and have identified the potential for adventure, cultural, eco- and agro-tourism ventures. This will help to diversify business away from the often crowded and concrete coastal resorts, which, for the time being at least, have limited appeal. Additionally, these forms of tourism are less damaging to the environment and local culture than the mass variety, and the potential is there to develop Romania's relatively unspoiled interior carefully and strategically. Nonetheless, tourism projects remain largely on a cottage-industry level, and promotion remains sketchy, with a clear "brand" for the country yet to be envisioned.

In the short term, the increasing number of budget flights into the country will improve its accessibility to foreign vacationers. Infrastructure developments for internal transport routes will lend a boost to such cities as Brasov, Cluj and Sibiu (which was designated the European Capital of Culture 2007), in time potentially stemming the yearly holiday migration to Bulgaria
while inviting a new generation of travellers.

Beauty and the beasts of Romania

birminghampost.net
Apr 6 2008 By John Revill

John Revill travels to the home of Dracula, Vlad the Impaler and the Cheeky Girls to see some seriously strange – and large – buildings.

For Western men, a midlife crisis purchase is sometimes a sports car. Not Nicolae Ceaucescu. The Romanian dictator probably had a garage full anyway, so when he began to fear his own mortality (and maybe his appeal to the opposite sex) he set about building the Palace of the People.

Inspired by a visit to another small dictator – Kim Il Sung of North Korea – he set about building the vast edifice in 1986.

The building, which is now called the Palace of the Parliaments, is in fact the second biggest building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington.

So while many of his countrymen starved and the rest of Romania went to wrack and ruin, he set about building huge monument to his own vanity.

Sadly for him, he didn’t get to see it completed (or rather the teams of workers who were drafted in to work there 24 hours a day, every day) as he was overthrown and executed in 1989 before it was finished.

In fact, according to my tour guide, there are some rooms which aren’t quite finished yet.

Still, the building is certainly impressive: 1,000 odd rooms, and one ballroom which apparently has a sliding roof to enable a helicopter to land there.

Gigantic chandeliers and an indoor theatre and balcony – all constructed from Romanian marble and replete with gold and leather, add to the opulent but strange emptiness.

Large alcoves where huge pictures of Nicolae and his delightful wife were supposed to hang are now empty.

There are also innumerable boardrooms with gigantic tables, leather chairs and intercom so the members can hear themselves speak.

These in particular seemed like something from James Bond or Austin Powers; you could imagine members of Smersh or Dr Evil meeting up here to plot the takeover of the world or extort $1 million.

Nowadays, the Palace, is home to the Romanian parliament as well as much of the state’s bureaucracy. It also hosts the odd reception and even weddings, which is nice.

Also in Bucharest is Snagov Monastry, which is supposed to be the last resting place of Vlad the Impaler, a prince of Wallachia (a part of medieval Romania) in the 15th Century.

Vlad earned his nickname from his delightful manner with Turkish prisoners, who he had impaled on large stakes.

Such behaviour would probably brand him a war criminal nowadays, but he went on to become the inspiration for another famous Romanian – Dracula.

During a rapid weekend, I also managed to take in two other monuments from Rumania’s past.

Bran Castle is supposedly the inspiration for Castle Dracula – well, the author Bram Stoker passed by when travelling through Transylvania and was told this was where Vlad lived.

It wasn’t, it was more of an outpost on the trading route between Vienna and Constantinople and intended to hold out against bandits and Turks.

But this hasn’t stopped the locals from cashing in, with Dracula mugs, T-shirts and snowstorms.

Still, the castle, which looms over the town was never captured, and was certainly more of a working base than Peles Castle.

This was the more sedate affair, constructed over many years to act as the summer residence for King Carol, the first king of the united and independent Romania in the late 19th Century.

Carol, who came from Germany, knew a bit about castles – being born in one, so this one had to be a bit special, and it is.

The palace was established to benefit from the cooler air of the Carpathian mountains, which hang in the background and give a spectacular backdrop to it.

Driving by a cross, erected on one peak as a monument to the Romanian dead from the First World War, emerged from the clouds.

And then it is back to Bucharest and the Marriott hotel where I stayed.

On the rickety road back I was thinking about the various Romanians I had popped in on and how strange it must be for a country whose top five most famous people – Ceaucescu, Vlad, Dracula and both of the Cheeky Girls, are all a bit evil.

Alright, the Cheeky Girls may not be exactly evil, but you know what I mean.

As well as the weird and wonderful buildings, I also paid a visit to a crafts market set up in a replica medieval village.

Imagining an onslaught of tat, instead I was presented with local gingerbreads, wines, clothes, and wooden-wares.

Bucharest itself little further afield than other eastern European capitals, but this may prove a defence against stag and hen parties which have over-run Budapest and Prague of late.

I think Prince Vlad, and his love of foreigners, would have approved.

FACTBOX
• Lufthansa operates 73 weekly flights connections from Birmingham via Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf to Romania (Bucharest, Timisoara and Sibiu).
• 2007 marked the 40th anniversary of Lufthansa services to Romania.
• Fares from Birmingham to Bucharest start at £189 (economy class) and £800 (Business class.)
• Further info is available on-line at www.lufthansa.com
John Revill stayed at the Marriott hotel in Buchraest, where a deluxe room is 370 euros excluding breakfast and taxes.
• Special rates and offers apply during low season periods, like summer time (July 15 to August 30).

The Second Danube Bridge Between Bulgaria and Romania Will Be Completed by 2010

Balkan Travellers

26 March 2008 | The long-awaited bridge connecting the cities of Vidin in Bulgaria and Calafat in Romania will be completed by 2010, according to Bulgaria’s transport minister Petar Mutafchiev, quoted by national media.

During a recent meeting with Vidin’s mayor, Mutafchiev also stated that the Spanish company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas, which won the bid for the bridge’s construction in January, will begin work in April.

Currently, Bulgaria and Romania are connected by one bridge only: the Danube Bridge, also known as the Bridge of Friendship. Linking the cities of Ruse and Giurgiu respectively, the bridge was constructed in the 1950s.

The remaining nine border crossing points between the two countries consist of seven ferries, including the Vidin-Calafat one, and two inland crossing points near the Black Sea. Despite the introduction of joint border control between Romania and Bulgaria since they joined the EU in January 2007, going across the river by ferry is usually time-consuming and costly.

The project, worth 236 million euro, envisions the construction of a 1,971-metre bridge, featuring two road lanes in each direction, an electric railway and a bicycle path. It would be part of the Pan-European corridor IV.

The idea to construct a second bridge seized the imagination of people on both sides of the border as early as the 1980s. In the 1990s, Bulgarians felt an even greater need for such a bridge, as the wars in former Yugoslavia cut off their way to Central and Western Europe.

The bridge’s construction has been a Bulgarian transport priority for over ten years, with symbolic first digs taking place every few years but numerous delays preventing the production of any concrete results.

It looks like the 2010 deadline may actually be realistic, as many of the important issues surrounding the bridge’s construction – such as the construction firm bid and the land disputes, have already been solved.

Read more about Bulgaria and Romania on BalkanTravellers.com
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Dracula takes a back seat in Transylvania

From Times Online

February 2, 2008

Count who? It's the Prince that matters - the medieval villages of Transylvania in Romania are held in high regard by royalty

Andrew Eames

The quiet village of Copsa Mare lies cupped in orchards in central Transylvania. Its clay-tiled houses branch out from a central stream that is busy with geese. Above it rise terraced slopes that once bore vineyards but which are now meadows.

A horsecart laden with newly scythed grass stands outside the Magazin Mixt, the village shop. The farmer emerges as the noon bell tolls from the 14th-century fortified church, slaps his mare on the rump, and they clop home, the mare's foal skittering alongside. Nothing in this picture would be out of place 500 years ago.

The church-keeper who tolled the noonday bell hails me as I step through the gate. He lets me into a building sufficiently robust to shelter the villagers from Tartar raids.

Together we climb a rickety staircase into a tower that smells of owls' nests, and I tell him where I'm aiming for that day, Nou Sasesc and Malancrav. “Ah, Neudorf und Malmkrog,” he says, correcting my Romanian with the original German names. Although this is part of Romania, it was settled, in the 12th century, by Saxons, from Germany.

“Your Prince Charles was here,” he adds as we peer down the valley from the top. “Last year maybe, in Malmkrog. He has a house there.”

I knew this. I had heard that he walked the way I was going: Biertan to Malmkrog. The keeper pointed out my route through the maize fields.

There are about 230 villages in Transylvania's Saxon land. They comprise some of the last medieval landscapes in Europe, so walking between them is a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming experience. But in the last days of the Ceausescu regime, when many villages were threatened with annihilation to make way for giant agro-economic projects, the villagers began to leave. Germany announced that it would accept them as citizens, so today, in a village such as Copsa Mare, there are only 18 people left.

The place hasn't changed a bit. Every household has a couple of cows, a horse or two, a pig, chickens, vegetable gardens and fruit trees - particularly plums - to supply the raw material for throat-numbing palinka, distilled in the back yard.

It makes ideal walking country - Kent with bigger bumps - being rich in wildlife, totally unfenced, and well provided with trails. It does mean an almost complete absence of signposts because anyone on foot or on horseback already knows where they are going. So you need a map, compass, and friendly church-keepers to point the way.

I had chosen to connect the string of villages that lie in parallel valleys between Medias and Sighisoara, both once Saxon towns. It took me four days, but it wasn't hard, and I could always flag down a horse and cart when my rucksack felt too heavy.

My first night was in the village of Atell, and from there via Richis to Biertan, whose Unesco-listed fortified church has a “divorce room” where couples intending to separate were locked up to make them see sense.

And then it was over the hill via Copsa Mare to Malancrav. Here I stayed in a simple guesthouse run by the Mihai Eminescu Trust, which is based in Britain. My dinner was brought across the street by two teenage girls who giggled at this strange man with his stupid, beatific grin.

I searched for, and failed to identify, Prince Charles's house, and then in the evening I watched the cow parade as the cattle brought themselves back from the grasslands. Each beast knew where it was headed, peeling off from the herd at the appropriate doorway or gate. If it wasn't open, then the cow would stand and bellow, demanding to be let in.

This is a land where all the old lore still applies: you really do make hay while the sun shines, you certainly don't count your chickens before they hatch and you must wait until the cows come home.

It is land that deserves to be covered on foot, not in a car. And if you don't believe me, ask Charles.

Andrew Eames's latest book, Something Different for the Weekend, a year's worth of unusual weekends, is published by Bradt, £9.99

Need to know

Beyond the Forest (01539 531258, www.beyondtheforest.com) offers a week's guided walking based at Viscri from £955pp. This includes full-board accommodation, flights from Heathrow and transfers. The Mihai Eminescu Trust (020-7603 1113, www.mihaieminescutrust.org) has houses in Malancrav and other locations from £25pp.

Dracula facts

- Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula, was born in Sighisoara in Transylvania in 1431

- Few Transylvanians had heard of Dracula before 1990, when Bram Stoker's book was first translated into Romanian

- Dracula has become the most filmed character after Sherlock Holmes

The vampire strikes back

travel.timesonline.co.uk

Old-time Transylvania — with its charming rustic dwellings — is being lovingly restored for the tourists. But don’t count on finding Dracula, says Clive Aslet

“Would you consider putting that mad lamp with the naked man in the corner?” David Mlinaric, the doyen of interior decorators, has come to Transylvania. Jessica Douglas-Home, champion of Romanian culture, shuffles a 19th-century ambassador’s uniform to the appointed position. We are in the village of Malancrav, for the grand opening its manor house after restoration by the Mihai Eminescu Trust. To many, the first word that comes into mind when you say “Transylvania” is Dracula, but not here. One of Jessica’s triumphs is to have defeated proposals for a Dracula theme park. Her passion is for another Romania: the peasant land of vast mountain landscapes and self-sufficient villages. Prince Charles loves it; he has come twice.

It was Ceausescu’s megalomaniac scheme to destroy Romania’s villages that stirred Jessica’s interest in the countryside. His execution in 1989 generated another threat to the Saxon enclave in the hills that roll up to the Carpathian mountains. The German-speaking population — about 70% of the whole — locked their churches and left. The Saxons had been invited to shore up what was a border of Hungary in the 12th century. There are over 200 of these villages, and almost as many Saxon dialects, which they kept after Transylvania (long part of Hungary) became assimilated into the new country of Romania in the 20th century. After the second world war, Stalin sent ethnic Germans to the gulags. When the Iron Curtain fell, most of the remaining population emigrated to the fatherland. Legend has it that the Transylvania Saxons are descended from the children the Pied Piper danced out of Hamelin. Now a new music of washing machines and factory jobs lured them back. Some villages lost all their Saxons, leaving nobody to ring the church bells or wind the clock. But the fabric of the Saxon culture survives.

I took the sleeper from Vienna to Sighisoara. Through the train window unfolds a landscape of wooded hills, vegetable gardens and meadows. Geese and turkeys roam over the banks of the village stream. The blues and ochres of the house fronts are mixed up from the bath of slaked lime kept in every cellar. The trust believes in discriminating tourism. Visitors will create a new village economy, providing a market for home-brewed schnapps, hand-woven rugs and lace.

Caroline Fernolend is councillor for the upland village of Viscri. Under communism, she worked at the state farm. When most of the other Saxons in Viscri left, she and her husband, Walter, stayed. The trust’s Romanian director, she has made it her responsibility to save Viscri’s Saxon culture from the 21st century. The trust helps villagers restore their houses and rents them out to visitors. Everything in Viscri is made at home: sheep’s-milk cheese, tomato and aubergine relish, blackberry jam, bread.

Hives provide honey. Lambs are slaughtered in the courtyard, as they always have been. Look on a road map and you may not find Viscri. It may have been left off by the map-makers. “They’re jealous,” sighs Jessica. “The Romanians don’t want the world to know about these Saxon places.” That hints at the region’s complexity, with its four communities: Saxon, Romanian, gypsy and Hungarian. Unlike the Saxons and the Jews, Romania’s Hungarians did not leave: they had no homeland to welcome them. We meet two of them in Saromberke, wizened, toothless people who turn out to be no more than 60. The authorities are making them change their Hungarian names to Romanian ones. When we stop to buy beans from a roadside stall, the 88-year-old shoeless woman at first smiles, then bursts into tears. Her pension is a few pence a month.

Back in Malancrav, a little of the Austro-Hungarian empire, circa 1880, has returned. Looking out from the Hungarian terrace, you see the Saxon village below. Beyond are the mountains. Slide too abruptly down a slope and you may find yourself next to bears gorging on wild cherries. There is harmony with nature here, and between people. For the moment. Go quickly to see this magic world, while it lasts.

Clive Aslet is editor at large of Country Life

The Mihai Eminescu Trust (www.mihaieminescutrust.org ) has guesthouses in several Transylvanian villages. Clive Aslet flew to Vienna with British Airways (prices from £120 return; www.ba.com ) and took the sleeper; prices from £330 first-class (www.raileurope.com )

A visit to Dracula's castle in Romania

By Laura Elliott, Special to the Los Angeles Times

After touring Suceava and the painted monasteries in Bucovina, I board a bus for the seven-hour ride south to Bucharest. When I take my seat, a friend turns to me and says, "Bucovina is seeing Romania in Technicolor and Bucharest is seeing Romania in black and white." I press play on my iPod and look out the window.

Red-tasseled horses draw wooden carts laden with potatoes or watermelons, sharing the road with cars and pedestrians. Haystack mounds march upon grassy fields and disappear over purple hills. Water wells, a symbol of good fortune, dot the roadside. Three carved wooden crosses, as tall as me and enshrined in a glass room not much bigger, give thanks for crops, water and good harvests.

Three small crosses top its blue-porcelain-tiled roof. Peonies, roses and marguerite daisies bloom around the foot of the shrine and cascade over a white picket fence in shades of orange, purple and yellow. A wrought-iron cross stands in front of the fence, staked in the grass. An ivy wreath encircles its iron beams.

I reach into my backpack and pull out a 100,000 lei note, worth around $50. Illustrations of hollyhocks on the plastic currency match the portrait of the painter Nicolae Grigorescu in size and detail. Romanians love flowers -- and artists. Fresh flowers adorned the darkest concrete stairwells of the Ceausescu-era block apartments in Suceava.

One roadside shrine blurs into another. How can a land of such beauty, with a people who honor art and literature, be synonymous with horror around the world? Tomorrow, my last day in Romania, I will tour Transylvania, the land of Dracula.

In Bucharest, I open my second-floor window at the Hotel Carpati, a not-quite one star hotel. Harvest fires scent the air. Crows swarm the city skyline. Their intense cawing sounds like screaming children.

Club Dracula in downtown Bucharest is the perfect place to crank up the scare factor.

My friends and I settle into our seats in the restaurant's dungeon.

Rubber severed human heads and skulls are mounted on the walls. A coffin nestles next to the bar close by. The menu reads like something out of the novel "Dracula."

I order a drink called the Longest Kiss. Veins of melted red sugar stream down the outside of my cocktail glass and taste of cinnamon. My friend orders impaled chicken. Skewered breasts, legs and thighs hang from black steel prongs, languishing over a wooden plate. On my walk back to the hotel, the cawing of crows and yelping of wild dogs increase my pace. I search the shadows thinking about the monsters I've met in Romania.

A monster simply defined: One who inspires horror.

My first encounter with real Romanian monsters happened a few days after I arrived. As a friend and I walked in Revolutionary Square in Bucharest I heard faint whispers. I glanced from side to side. A bunch of children, none more than 8 years old, had gathered around me. I bent down to hear them better. They wanted money. More children crowded around me. I felt a tug on my small backpack.

As I turned around to face the mob, a boy unzipped the backpack. My cellphone flew into the air, a football going to the best player. As the boys ran away with my phone, I knew the real monsters were not the children but the adults demanding that the boys meet begging quotas in exchange for food and housing.

On my last day in Romania, my guide Patricia arrives early. Her broad smile and excitement calms any lingering spooky feelings I harbor from last night even as I am about to meet another Romanian monster.

My friends and I get into the van and we chit-chat with Patricia on our hour-long ride to Transylvania. Carstic rock crowns the Transylvanian Alps and drips -- like the wet sand sculptures that my kids and I make at the beach -- into the woodlands below.

Patricia says in a thick Romanian accent, "Vlad Tepes, the real Wallachian prince about whom the story of Dracula is based, is a national hero because he saved Romania from Turkish invasion. His cruel ways of impaling his enemies reflected the violence and cruelty of medieval Europe, not of him personally."

I think about the impaled chicken from last night's dinner. I also think about the closets in my bedroom when I was a little girl. Nothing scared me more than those closets at night. The small "way up" closets had little witches hiding in them, and the big closets below had big witches hiding in them.

I figure its human nature to make up stories about the things that scare me. Considering how closets haunted me as a little girl, I try to imagine the story I might tell if I had seen someone impaled. That's horror.

Patricia adds, "Vlad's father had shipped him off, along with his handsome brother Radu, to a Turkish Sultan to further the understanding between the two nations. Unfortunately the torture and abuse that the brothers suffered fueled Vlad's personal flame of hatred against them and caused his chilling policy of impaling the Turks in such a way as to cause the slowest death and most excruciating pain. For this reason it is difficult for Romanians to accept that their legendary hero is portrayed to the rest of the world as Dracula, a blood-sucking monster." That's horror too.

It was Vlad's dad, she said, who became known as "Vlad Dracul, after a brave Order of the Dragon (draco in Latin means dragon). His son became Vlad Dracula, meaning son of the dragon. Tragically, another meaning for draco is the devil. The peasants' legends ran away with this interpretation of Dracula, son of the devil."

So, the combination of impaling and misunderstanding created the legend of Dracula. But that doesn't explain why this place gives me the creeps.

Maybe it is all the talk of impaling. Maybe it is the strange magnetic field rumored to occur in this part of the mountains.

As our van pulls into the little town of Bran, wooden signs advertise "Vampire Camping" and "Vampire Wine." Kind of like a Dracula Disneyland, campy not creepy. "Cazare" (rent) signs hang from many homes in Bran and welcome visitors. Hotels here are rated with flowers, not stars.

At my first sight of Bran Castle high atop a hill, chills race up my spine.

"A beautiful garden once stood at the base of the castle, tended by Queen Marie who used the medieval fortress as a summer royal residence," Patricia says, flicking butts off her cigarette. Mountain winds whip as I walk up the long, spiral cobblestone path to the castle entrance.

"Saxons built Bran Castle in 1382 to protect the gateway to Transylvania at Bran pass. By building the castle, the Saxons gained their freedom from the Romanians. In order to provide rapid access to weaponry and fortifications, a labyrinth of secret passages and tunnels exist throughout the castle and beneath its courtyard."

I spot a water well in the center of the courtyard. A metal grate bolted over its opening prevents adventurers from further tunnel exploration.

Real bear skin rugs and winding secret staircases add to the Dracula legend. In the marketplace at the foot of the castle, elongated sinister faces carved into wood capture my imagination. I buy a few. They remind me that little about Romania is black and white, especially its monsters.

They also remind me of how setting, imagination and circumstance can inspire horror in anyone anywhere, even in a land of such beauty. I buy a watercolor of Bran Castle but pass on the vampire wine.

Romania's Maramures offers peek at peasant life

Quaint villages in a once-hidden corner of Transylvania are a cultural time capsule.

By Carol Pucci, Seattle Times

Last update: October 26, 2007 – 11:28 AM

Maria Stan sits in front of her house on a dirt street in the village of Sapanta, twirling a spindle as if she were spinning cotton candy instead of wool from her newly sheared sheep.

Dumitru Pop, a woodcarver, chisels grave markers from blocks of oak, creating images of his deceased neighbors the way he remembers them -- drinking, dancing or playing music.

Gheorghe Rednic, a shepherd, makes cheese by curdling milk over an open fire in the mountains.

This is life in Maramures, a once-hidden corner of Northern Transylvania known for its abundance of timber and villages filled with medieval-style wooden churches and log houses decorated with hand-carved gates. Isolated even today by mountains on three sides, Maramures was insulated from invasions by the Romans and the Turks. Religious traditions, food and dress that disappeared elsewhere survived. Even the Communists failed with a plan called "systematization" to raze villages and relocate people in "agro-industrial" centers.

Once prohibited by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu from housing foreigners in private homes, families now welcome visitors as part of an agritourism program aimed at preserving the local culture. And tourists come, for a glimpse of authentic European peasant life.

Guesthouses promise home-cooked meals, cozy rooms and bottomless glasses of homemade plum and apple brandy. All you have to do is get here, easier today than it was for the Romans and the Turks, but still enough of a challenge to deter the Dracula-themed bus tours.

With Nicolae Prisacaru, a local guide I hired for the first few days, it took two hours to drive the 40 miles from the train station in Baia Mare over a winding mountain pass that cut through pine forests. When we reached the other side, it was like walking onto a movie set where all the actors were dressed in period costumes.

It was nearly 10 p.m. when Prisacaru dropped me at my first guesthouse in Vadu Izei, a village of thatched-roofed houses in a valley a few miles from the Ukraine boarder. Our hosts, Ioan Borlean, an artist who paints religious icons on glass, and his wife, Ileana, had dinner waiting in the century-old wooden house they restored.

First came the plum brandy, called tuica, then a light red wine and homemade vegetable soup. The main course was a steaming pot of bulz, a traditional polenta dish made with sheep's cheese and sausage. Dessert was a dreamy Boston-meets-the-Balkans cream pie.

Like most everything in Romania, a home stay in Maramures is a bargain. We paid $34 each a night, including breakfast and dinner, for a second-floor room decorated with pine furniture. Wool blankets dyed in bright reds and greens covered the beds, and the bathrooms were new. The Borleans didn't speak much English, but we managed to communicate, using gestures, sounds and a little Italian and French.

From Vadu Izei, we moved on to the village of Botiza.

Eighteen years ago, there were just two cars (one owned by the priest) and one color TV (also owned by the priest) in Botiza, a village of about 3,000 known for its Ukraine mountain views and hilltop wooden church. Botiza doesn't yet have a high school, but horse carts share the roads with plenty of cars. It seems most everyone has a satellite dish and cell phone. New-home construction is booming as locals find work in Western Europe, and return to invest what they earn in new homes or guesthouses.

"Soon," predicts local guide George Iurca, the land of wood "will become known as the land of concrete and asbestos."

For now, though, life remains simple, and the villagers friendly to outsiders. Social life centers on church, and everyone turns out Sunday for a service that can last two hours or more. The older villagers arrive first, the men wearing nubby wool vests and felt hats; the women in black knee-length skirts, dark scarves and vests of wool or leather. Literally fashionably late are the younger women in short pleated floral-print skirts, heels, fitted jackets and flowered scarves.

We stood watching one afternoon as 100 or so turned out for a funeral that began with a procession through the streets, and ended with a feast in the town hall.

Three priests led a graveside service that was brief and filled with chanting. Then everyone walked down the hill to the hall, where long tables were set with cakes and plastic bottles of orange drink.

"Familia," one woman said to me, putting her hand to her mouth in a gesture inviting us to share in the meal.

Men and women sat separately, as they do in church. Everyone stood while the trio of priests blessed the bread, and each man put his hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him.

It wasn't the first time I didn't understand all that was going on. That's the mystery of Maramures. For a traveler who's content just to be included, it doesn't get much better.

A new air service between Essex and Romania has been launched.

BBC News

Romanian low-cost airline Blue Air has started its new direct service between Stansted Airport and Bucharest.

Blue Air said return flights will start from £1.50 excluding tax, and will operate twice daily on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

"This is a new direct link and is the first of a number of new route launches set to start from here this month," Nick Barton, from Stansted, said.

American Airlines is also to begin new daily flights to New York's JFK on 29 October offering 220 seats.

New flight to Romania launched

Budget airline Wizz Air has launched a new service between the UK and the Romanian capital Bucharest.

The carrier will fly between the city and Liverpool John Lennon Airport three times a week, potentially boosting investment prospects in the Romanian market.

Neil Pakey, managing director of the portal, said that routes to eastern Europe had proved to be highly popular and that the Bucharest flight was likely to follow suit.

Wizz Air's Natasa Kazmer added: "We are glad to expand our network from Liverpool to a new EU member state."

She predicted that Romania would become the new "must-see" place of Europe, due to its good beaches, cities and picturesque countryside.

Ms Kazmer also said that travellers and investors would be able to reach the country in a short time and at an affordable price.

According to the American Automobile Association, Romania saw a seven-fold increase in the number of bookings from US tourists during summer this year.