Road trip – Cluj, Romania

We really wanted to go and see Cluj, a “student” city in the north-west of the country, around 4hrs or so from Brasov. Trains over here are, well, slow, so either we could get the 4hr train at 4am or if we left at a more reasonable hour, it goes to 6hrs or more. With our previous average experience on Romania’s train system, which isn’t cheap, we thought we’d hire a car, considering there was 4 of us – Larissa (California), Vicki (Melbourne & more recently, Cyprus), Deb and myself.

After stuffing around with car hire places and not understanding the concept of holding a booking (Seinfeld lovers – it’s basically exactly like that episode), we found a place which was relatively cheap & could supply a car for the weekend – a diesel powered Renault Megane sedan. We picked it up, the guy gave us some handy tips on where to go, what to see and how to get there, and then we braved the crazy Romanian roads. More on that later.

We picked up the girls, finally found our way (no GPS sucked early on) and made it onto the country roads heading towards a fairly big centre, Sibiu. Driving in Romania is an odd, and rather frightening experience. For the majority of the roads, there’s no such thing as overtaking lanes let alone 2-lane highways. It’s all single lane stuff where you have to contend with cars that are slow to say the least (1970s Dacias), trucks, cyclists and of course, guys on horse-and-cart, which are by far the most dangerous, particularly at night. With such a system, it’s slow going, especially since every 5km it seems, there’s another town where of course you have to drop back to 50km/h, but even on the “open” road, if you hit and stick to 90km/h, you’re doing pretty well.

We stopped pretty often on the way there, purely because it was really interesting scenery and quite the experience. It’s really difficult to explain what we saw, but the towns all looked very, very similar, compete with wall-to-wall houses, some painted quite brightly in yellow, orange, red, green, blue – and of course, standard issue grey.

The fields were covered with corn crops, mainly grown by the gypsies we found, and many times we saw cart-loads of corn on the cob being transported or stored at the back of houses.

We had lunch @ Sibiu – a reasonably tasty kebab served to us by locals who just laughed at our accent. Fair enough too, we were laughing at their shop (just kidding). This was only about half way, and we had been told about this very cool tourist attraction in Turda, which was quite close to Cluj, but it was looking less and less likely we’d get there in time, so we took our time getting to Cluj and figured we’d come back via Turda.

Eventually we arrived in Cluj (about 6.5hrs in all), a relatively large city of 350,000 people, around 60,000 of which are university students. From my brief reading, in the 90s, the mayor did a very bad job of publicising the city and brought a lot of unwanted attention on some of his policies – such as making sure everyone knew it to be a Romanian city, not Hungarian which it once was. As such, he ordered that park benches & light posts and anything else the county owned be painted in Romanian colours – red, yellow & blue. This obviously didn’t sit well with the minority Hungarian population or anyone else for that matter and the population decreased during his tenure. Once he was finally ousted, the city has flourished it seems. It’s by far the most modern place we’ve seen in Romania thus far, complete with shopping malls, decent transport system and a vibrant nightlife. Lots and lots of accommodation too as it’s one of Romania’s most toured cities, which isn’t surprising given it’s proximity to Budapest and given it’s Romanian-cheap.

Our hotel wasn’t too shabby, relatively close to the city centre and after a quick shower, we headed out on the town. We asked the taxi driver to take us where there’d be plenty of people, assuming he’d take us to the local restaurant haunt. Instead, he took us to Iulius Mall, a fairly new mall which is as good as anything Australia has to offer. The place was packed and we were after something a bit more local than a food court, so back into another cab and asked the taxi driver this time to take us somewhere good to eat. He took us into Centru (Romanian for “city centre” – unfortunately it’s not always that easy) to a rather kitch restaurant down the backstreets of the main CBD area. We ventured on from there into the main street/city square and found a very nice Italian restaurant which fitted the bill beautifully. 2 course dinner with drinks amounted to a whopping $25 for both Deb & I, which is relatively expensive for here. Great food though.

Heading out, we almost bumped into a couple we’d sat opposite to on the train to Sighisoara 2 days earlier. Apparently Romania is quite the small place too! We had a few recommendations thanks to Wikitravel website on where to go for a drink, but we ended up finding a random place down some dark side-streets where all we could hear was music. We saw a few student-aged people go in, so we thought, why not? We headed up the stairs and came across a big room of tables with 20-odd year olds sitting around, smoking (of course) and having a drink. The music was eclectic to say the least, but the whole mood, surroundings, music and that it was totally random really made our night. We made our way back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep ready for another big day on Sunday.