Weather: ☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪🥪 (4 out 5, bread with quit a nice combination on ‘whatever we could get’ from the supermarket)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩🇹🇩 (4 out of 5, really nice trail through the hills, fields and villages, with great mountain views)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️ (2 out of 5, basic room, friendly host, relatively expensive)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
After a good night of sleep, we make our breakfast and leave before 8.00. The trail starts uphill, quite steep sometimes and makes for amazing views across the valley. In our way, we see 2 more fire salamanders.
We walk through the grassy hills and sleepy villages. In one of the villages we find a relatively large shop, where we buy some extra bananas and drinks for lunch.
At lunch we have a ‘whatever we collected the last couple of days’ lunch, with bananas, apples, capsicums, cream cheese, paté, bread and Nutella.
The shops here are generally small and not always well stocked. You can get what you need, if you’re a bit creative and not too demanding.
They always have plenty of cookies and nibbles like pretzels and crackers. Therefore our food during the day are our childhood dream come true: eat a whole pack of cookies as a snack and as many nibbles as you can carry!
After lunch we continue our hike past some historical sites from the Roman era. From there the trail gets onto an old railway track for the last 9 kilometers. It’s easy hiking through a beautiful forest in the valley, but it does get a bit monotonous after 7 kilometers… We’re happy to get to Bucova around 17.30.
We try to get into our pension, but no one answers the door, or our calls. We go to the nextdoor shop, that points us to a party in the church. We go there, to see if our hosts might be there. We find a group of local hunters at tables full of food. Our host isn’t here, but one of the men calls him. We immediately get a beer and get invited to stay for dinner. We say yes to the invitation, but first bring our stuff to the pension and then go back, with our bottle of Peach Palinka from Ditrau. The Palinka is well received by the hunters, just as their food is well received by us. The Wild boar stew is really tasty! After sharing some stories and drinks, we go home again. Grateful for another evening or f Romanian hospitality.
At the pension we talk with our fellow guests who are from Danmark. A Romanian family living in Denmark that is on holiday here with their Danish friends. We have a lovely time with them, and get invited to eat with them too. So we go for a second dinner, fish with polenta this time…😁
After dinner we go to our room en go to bed, contemplating in another great day in Romania.