Weather: ☀️⛅⛅⛅⛅
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, wraps under a big oak tree)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩 (3 out of 5, dirt road through forest, fields and a few villages with nice churches. Very well marked and really walkable)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️ (2 out of 5, basic room, friendly host)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
We have a breakfast at 8.00, so I get to sleep in a little! Our host tells us that all the meat and cheese comes from his farm. It indeed is good.
Well fed, we leave Rares. We walk along a dirt road, mainly through the fields to San Paul, where we get a few bananas from the shop. Luxury lunch today! We continue through the fields into the village of Daia, where we visit the Hungarian reformed church. Inside there are beautiful medival murals that are still partly visible. After this nice visit, we walk through the village until we see 2 hikers sitting in the grass. They are in front of a shop, so we get a drink and have a chat with them. Alina and Ralunka are from Romania, also hiking via Transilvanica. We stay in the same pension tonight, so we will see them then. After this nice break we continue and walk through the fields until we get to a field with large oak trees. A perfect spot for lunch. We see people collecting acorns as animal food here. I keep realizing how much of these things we let go to waste at home… mainly because we don’t know how to make better use of what nature provides us. I want to become beter at that. Not by starting to eat acorns, but by utilizing more of the plants in my garden and learning about preservation methods.
We continue through the fields and forest. sometimes we have to pay close attention to the markings, but all well within reason.
We like the Via Transilvanica quite a lot so far. The trail hasn’t been special so far, but the scenery is nice and we see beautiful things along the way, which is equally important.
After a very enjoyable day of hiking we walk into Darjiu, where we find our fellow hikers (now 4 of them) on a bench across from the supermarket, with an ice cream. We get something to drink and after that we go to our pension together. We are really happy that they speak English, because our host doesn’t. We put down our bags and visit the fortified church. The door is locked and there is a phone number to call if you want to visit. We don’t want it that much, so we want to leave when a car stops. A lady gets out. “I’m a guide”, she says. “Did you call?” We didn’t, but she opens the door anyway. The interior of this medical walled church is again impressive, with murals and a lot of skillful craftsmanship.
We also find the bacon tower, the place where the villagers store their dried and smoked meat, even until today. They can come to collect what they need on Sunday after the service. What a great thing to see this tradition is still alive today.
From the church we go back home and have dinner, together with our 4 fellow hikers. We enjoy a good meal together, which became slightly hilarious because 2 of them are vegetarian and our host insisted that she only used a little meat to make the soup and took it all out (exept for the small bit that one of our vegetarians had in her bowl…) The vegetarian ladies swear that something like this hasn’t happened before, but to us it confirms our thoughts on how easy it is to be vegetarian here…😅
After a good meal, we go to our room to relax a bit before going to sleep.