Jones

Departure came late chez Raoul, we were off by 10am. Headed kind of south to Suceava where Steven the Great set up rulership in the C15. The citadel was nice but like a lot of Romania it’s being renovated and the renovation is straying into “rebuilding”. There’s obviously a ship of Theseus argument but this is quite complete rebuilding and It’s not clear how much the builders know about the original buildings. I don’t think I like it. Still, the general feel of the place was impressive and the views were great. The exhibition was good but as the only voivod I knew about before today was an 80s heavy metal band from Canada it all went a little over my head.

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We left the citadel for lunch – definitely not up to yesterday’s standards – then went to see the museum of cultural artefacts (i.e. houses) reclaimed from communism and creeping McMansions. These museums are a common theme in Eastern Europe (and, to be fair they exist in UK, hello Repair Shop). The big difference here was that we had Raul’s first person accounts of these buildings. He has lived in and worked on buildings exactly like these. The history shown in this museum was daily life in 1980s Romania.

History lesson over we set off south. The drive was a couple of hours through a few cities and over a small range of hills to the Ceahlau Camping on Lachlan Izvorul Muntelui. Raul has a CB radio and could hear all the truck drivers complaining about the Englishman who stuck to the speed limits. I think he’d sanitised the language in telling me.

At Ceahlau Camping we were greeted by the owner who took our money and then returned with four tiny bottles saying “Welcome, my cousin makes this drink, you will enjoy it”.

We needed the fortification. About 30 minutes after we’d parked up we spotted the rain moving quickly up the reservoir. We tried to wait it out but had to give up after another 30 minutes of increasingly heavy downpour. We grabbed rain gear and decamped to the well equipped kitchen cum dining shelter.

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We’d planned to eat out so we weren’t that well prepared but between the two vans we managed a selection of grilled pork products, tomato and avocado salad, sweetcorn and three different types of bread – sadly mainly stale.

Some Germans arrived and we tried to persuade them to join us but they retreated into their van never to be seen again.

The campsite is great and only 70lei for the night. It’s right on the lake and, when it isn’t raining they have SUPs, canoes and there are fish in the lake – well, there are old guys fishing by the lake, I didn’t see any evidence of a catch.