Weather: ☁️🌥️🌥️⛅☀️
Picnic: 🥪 (1 out 5, tasteless cookies that have been in the shop for to long and whatever else we could find. Beautiful view though)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩🇹🇩🇹🇩🇹🇩🇹🇩 (6 out of 5, great trail in the mountains with amazing views. Autumn hiking in the mountains doesn’t get any better than this)
Pension: 🛏️🛏️🛏️ (3 out of 5, basic, cheerfully decorated room in a rustic mountain farmhouse with traditional meal. Overall: great experience)
Name of followed trail: Via Transilvanica
We wake up at 5.00 and are ready to start at dawn. Planning with the daylight is going to be challenging, so we’ll be more aware of the sunrise and sunset than ever before I guess 😅.
We start a short walk uphill and then down to the road. I see a sign ‘Baile Herculane, 16 km’. On E8, we had a zero day planned there. It’s a place that is so familiar on the map (and always so far away), and now only 16 km from here! Sometimes it’s really strange to see my paper planning on the maps in real life…
We continue on a steady trail up into the Banat mountains. It’s absolutely beautiful here. The streams running through the forest and the mountains with their rocky outcrops… What a picture perfect hiking day today.
Along the way we meet a lot of policemen, by car, on patrol or walking through the forest. They are searching for a man here. It’s a rather impossible area for a search, so we wish them lots of luck. We’re just happy that we didn’t see the man either…😅!
We don’t pay much further attention to the search going on and enjoy the dramatic landscape around us. What a great day of hiking! After a cloudy start, the sun comes out, making it even better.
We have our cookie-lunch after a long climb and dry out our tent. The cookie-lunch sounds better than it tastes, but it’s all we have. It’ll have to do. After we’re done, we go down into the valley and up again. Then the trail undulates for the remainder of the day to the mountain village of Inelet. Here we stay at casa Luca, a farmhouse owned by the Luca family. It’s an old-fashioned household in a house that uses woodfire to heat the rooms, the water and the stove, using their solar power for lights and washing. They have pigs, sheep, chickens, cats and dogs walking around on their farm, that also includes a vegetable garden and probably some fields for hay and corn.
The family doesn’t speak any English and use of Translate apps is not something they do much. So it’s a lot of pointing and smiling tonight 😅. They’re very friendly, making our experience here a memorable one with good food, sharing of a drink in an authentic Romanian farm household in a mountain village. Life here is tough, but the people are resilient because of it.
What a great place to stay.
After dinner we go to our room and relax under a blanket on the bed. Blanket time! A little while later it’s hikers bedtime again.