We were travelling from Budapest to Istanbul by train and it wasn’t just the scenery that was getting better. By Transylvania, scenes of pocket-sized farms carved into dense forested hillsides were becoming secondary to what was really capturing our attention: our fellow passengers.
Upon leaving the lush, green mountain town of Sighișoara in Romania, we meet a young American videographer who has just returned from Ethiopia where he had been filming skateboarders in Addis Ababa. A grassroots movement, coupled with a coterie of international supporters, had led to the establishment of a new public skatepark; the Addis Skatepark, and Matt’s videos were vital to securing ongoing international interest and support for the project. Still vibrating from his experiences in Ethiopia, freshly showered Matt is on the way to another assignment. As we head deeper into Transylvania and Vlad the Impaler’s hunting ground, he turns north towards the Ukraine.
Ground central for Transylvania is the city of Brasov, named and built by its Saxon founders. Finding its cobble-stoned streets more akin to a scene out of the Pied Piper of Hamelin than one backdropping Vlad’s reign of terror, we nonetheless play along with the dominant tourist schtick in the town and the macabre humour that it had engendered. Vlad was not a man to be trifled with: 100,000 people had been subjected to his brutal means of torture and death. Our city guide reassures us that, other than inspiring a book – Dracula by Bram Stoker – Vlad’s techniques have fallen out of fashion.
Brasov to Bucharest is a morning’s train ride away, so it was no surprise meeting Arlene and Larry, two other senior backpackers, upon reaching the station. Their swing into this legendary corner of Romania was via Bulgaria and, according to Arlene, a sizzling tour with Road Scholars, a not-for-profit educational travel company.
“It was a fantastic tour,” she tells us. “They took us to all the historical hot-spots in Bulgaria. We had no idea that Bulgaria had been so powerful, particularly during the Second Bulgarian Dynasty, so the country teems with artifacts from those eras. You should have seen the fresco work – inside and out – in some of the monasteries. Stunning!”
It seems that Road Scholars is a way for seniors with a bent for culture and an aptitude for dates to unearth and explore their inner archeologist, and Arlene’s retelling of their trip through Bulgaria attracts a few eavesdroppers. Eager to practise a language she is learning, a young woman, who introduces herself as Chantel from Sicily, chimes in. She has no problem swinging the conversation over to a subject she is passionate about – her mother country. She highlights the areas on Sicily once settled by the Ancient Greeks and, within moments, we could feel the searing sun and the dust between our toes as we imagine scrambling about the ruins scattered across the island.
But we had a train to catch first. As we board the busy Friday afternoon train to Romania’s capital, a family clan of many, with children too excited to sit, crammed into the seats across from us. Their conversation is animated, switching back and forth between Romanian and German. One of the women slips seamlessly into English to inquire, mirth dancing around her eyes, how we were enjoying Brasov and Romania and the always-late trains. She translates our responses to her eight-year-old son who, having found out that we live just north of the US, reiterates to his mom that though he liked Obama, he is no fan of Trump. We find out the precocious boy’s mom is a German teacher, with a PhD in English literature, and his father is a mechanical engineer working for a German company in Brasov. They have taken the Friday off for a family trip to a local castle, and I catch a photo of them in the full flush of “flying the coop.”
When the Brasov family leaves the train – children and baggage and laughter trailing behind them – their seats are taken by Paula, a young Romanian woman. She is keen to converse (being fluent in both English and French) and tells us she is taking a reprieve from work.
“What is it you do?” I ask.
“I animate kids,” she replies.
Well, that needed some unpacking. Turns out she works in the children’s activity department for Club Med. Her last post was in the Dominican Republic and, in a few weeks, she will be heading to Tunisia (well away, she assures us, from “the trouble” there) to help the children learn to kitesurf while their parents sip cocktails by the pool. She tells us she will be looking for a new job after this posting as she finds working with kids exhausting. She is 29 years old.
Animating kids for Club Med, filming Ethiopian skateboarders, two seniors on the road to scholarship in Bulgaria, one scintillating Sicilian, a Romanian couple with five university degrees and a Trump-intolerant son between them – these are the treasures uncovered within three days of train travel in Romania. Now, that’s what I’d call a meet-up extravaganza!
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