Fairytale castle of Peles
Even though we started out of bed at 6am this morning, all we’ve had time to do in Romania is collect our hire car and drive to our first night’s lodging. We paused briefly to admire an astonishing Disney confection of Peles Castle in the woods above Sinaia and to chomp through a tasty grilled corn on the cob, but that was it.
So. The southern half of Romania seems very flat and rural, with just the same dusty haze hanging over the landscape as we remembered from Bulgaria’s flatlands last year. Romanian drivers are moderately insane, but at least the roads seem mostly in one piece. When you do get to the mountains they seem gloriously craggy and forested, though the towns in the valleys are often littered with monstrous crumbling concrete blocks from a few decades back, not all of them abandoned.
At the end of our drive we hit a dirt road and climbed switchbacks through a forest into a completely different world. The rural landscape of Magura is scattered farm houses on rolling hills and tightly folded valleys, with background music of tonkling cow bells, barking dogs and twittering birds. Pony carts trundle past nearly as frequently as cars. The mountain crags form a grand backdrop.
View from our balcony, Magura
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