News from Nowhere

It's the pre-digital equivalent of closing some tabs, disposing of old newspapers I've put aside as containing something of interest. It isn't always obvious what:

Romania, fair enough. But did I really think an article about cycling in the Carpathians would be useful? Apparently I did.

I don't expect ever to visit the salt flats of Bolivia - but isn't this an amazing photograph?

Though I obviously hung on to that issue for this article about wine tourism in Savoie.

(Over the page, their intrepid explorer Kevin Rushby goes looking for wildflowers in Weardale - and very nice, too).

Wales has a Coast Path, it seems; well, I should think so. It has a bilingual website, of course. We never go to Wales, I don't know why. We should...

Why did I save that one? No idea. Next!

Ah, here's Kevin Rushby again, in Yorkshire this time, where Simon Armitage has been carving his poems onto rock faces. Should this sort of high-class cultural graffiti be encouraged in wild places? Don't know. I have a soft spot for graffiti - and a scepticism about the kind of public art that carves poetry on things. Maybe I'd need to visit to find out what I think.

Blue Cabin by the Sea, somewhere totally impractical to stay on the Berwickshire coast - lovely pictures, shame about the website (wouldn't take much to make it function as it's obviously meant to). Or for somewhere totally impractical in the opposite way, how about the house Pugin built for himself in Ramsgate: "The house has a private chapel and a tower, from whose roof Pugin trained his telescope on ships in distress," and which now offers a view of more modern shipping from the freight ferry terminal.

Walking the Rhine gorge

Cycling along the Canal du Midi doesn't sound much fun: the cycling is painful, and the level, tree-lined canal becomes monotonous eventually. But I'd like to see more of the Canal by other means, and the article does suggest some hotels.

The Guardian seems obsessed with bikes: this time it's wine-tasting in Croatia - Istria, to be precise - which sounds good, except for the bit about the bikes. And a couple of days later, more about Croatia, in the news section this time, as they enter the EU.

And that's the last of that pile - but there'll be another supplement in tomorrow's paper (perhaps it won't be very interesting...).

desperance has turned his ingenuity, and his network of expert contacts, to the task of identifying the mystery bird at Budapest zoo. We were initially tempted by the Crowned Crane, which is a splendid and elegant creature, and seems to display the right kind of behaviour, but after some squinting at a very bad photograph of the sign on its enclosure decided that it was a Crested Seriema. Here's another one: the text is in Magyar, which is more appropriate than helpful, but the picture does justice to its crest (not always the case).

Thank you, desperance. And thank you, too, David, should you happen to be passing.

Thanks also to people who've said kind things about the holiday posts: I wrote them to please myself, because it's my diary, after all, so it was a bonus to hear that others had enjoyed them.

Our walk around Castle Hill in Budapest brought us to the Mátyás Church - so called not because it is dedicated to Saint Matthew but because the fifteenth century king, Mátyás Corvinus (I am charmed by the existence of a king called Matthew the Crow, but that's a whole other story...) was married there - twice.

Our guidebook said:

...today the most attractive aspect of the facade is its reflection in the [Hilton] hotel. Even the interior fails to exude any sense of Gothic space. The wall paintings are somewhat far-fetched...

Such fervent dispraise was irresistible, and we went in to see for ourselves.

I'm glad we did, because I enjoy excess, and have a taste for Victorian Gothic: and this was certainly excessive. Imagine what Pugin could have done, if he'd really pulled out all the stops and let himself go. It's true that the interior is so crammed with decorative detail that it does not exude any sense of space, Gothic or otherwise: there is no unity, but a mass of details, each more irresistible than the last. I was particularly taken by a crow design for all the world like a 1950s wallpaper.

The following morning we visited the Great Synagogue which had intrigued us on our outward journey: this time a genuinely nineteenth century building, and one which had been designed all of a piece. The contrast was astonishing, and not just because this was nineteenth century orientalism, rather than gothic. I was forced to concede that, wonderful though the church had been, the synagogue was better. The decoration was equally rich, but co-ordinated, harmonious, and the result was not to reduce the exuberance but to focus it: yes, I know this is the theory, but I've rarely seen it so clearly demonstrated.

Next door is the Jewish museum.

We left Romania on the sleeper to Budapest. This sounds very romantic, and romance means adventure, and adventures - well, I'd rather read about them than have them. So I was a little nervous, standing on the platform at Sighisoara at eleven o' clock, wondering if the train will arrive, if it will be on time, if we'll find our compartment, if we'll sleep...

The train arrived precisely on time, with helpful staff to show us to our compartment. The berths are wide and comfortable (durham_rambler was persuaded to take the upper berth), the lights, blinds, windows and heating are all capable of adjustment, and I slept soundly. Except, of course, that you are woken at three in the morning so that the Romanian police can check your passport before you cross the border, and again forty-five minutes later, so that the Hungarian police can check it after.

Things that you don't order with goulash (as determined by the demeanor of the non-English speaking waitress at the Hotel Fortuna, Baile Tusnad):

• rice


• potatoes


• vegetables


• tomato salad

Things which do accompany goulash:

• bread


• plum brandy (from a miniature teapot

The plum brandy - clearly a local and traditional treat - came unordered, and at first we weren't sure what it was (not salad dressing...). Later we learned that you knock it back as an aperitif, pouring from the spout of the pot into your mouth. With the excuse of ignorance, I enjoyed mine from my wine glass, as a digestif, when we had finished the wine.

Dinner, after an afternoon dash round Sainsbury's, was mussels and focacia and a bottle of Santa Rita Reserve chardonnay (reduced), which leaves me in the mood to write about Romanian wine. Once upon a time, eastern Europe was the place where cheap wine came from from. We joked about Algerian reds, labelled as French, but in fact they belonged to an earlier era; the suspiciously cheap plonk of our time was from Hungary, Romania, maybe even Bulgaria. The first wine durham_rambler and I discovered for ourselves was Hirondelle rosé: we weren't keen on their red or their white, but we loved the rosé, which we discovered was Hungarian.

Later, the flying winemakers moved in to Hungary, and it became a fashionable source of pleasant white wines, easy drinking at easy prices. But Romania continued to produce the most accessible pinot noir on the market, the three pound bottle, fruity as the best strawberry jam.

Then somehow they vanished. I thought we'd simply been distracted by the arrival of wines from all over the globe, from the Americas and elsewhere. But since we returned from Romania, I've been paying attention, and eastern Europe has simply been squeezed off the shelves - somewhere near floor level you'll find a Bulgarian merlot, and maybe a Moldovan rosé, but nothing like the diversity - of geography or of grape variety - that there used to be. Eventually I tracked down a Romanian pinot noir in Sainsbury's, and it was fine, but both the flavour and the label design had gone stylishly minimalist while my back was turned.

We didn't make great discoveries within Romania, either. We drank whatever wines were on offer: the Vampire merlot obviously, because how not? a Cotnari merlot which tasted of damsons, a Cotnari dry white, light and acid, a Fetteasca neagra - none of which was dreadful, but none of which we wanted to order again, because it was always possible that the next bottle would be better.

With two exceptions: the only wine we did actually order twice within the country was a dry muscat from Jidvei, like a mouthful of ripe grapes. As the Jidvei web site says:

Wine - a paradoxal comparison with the woman - is it a pleasure or a sin? It produces euphoria, it brings you to the realm of phylosopy and love. It can lift you to the highest levels of methaphysics or get you down into the hell of unconsciousness.

Each people has its tradition, those peculiarities that characterize it and offer it personality, that build it up during the centuries that pass over its teritory and its generations living there.

It would not be an exageration to overlap this potion extracted from the grape with the millenary history of the Romanian people in the Charpatian-Danube-Pontus territory.

Which brings me neatly to the wine we had drunk before when a friend brought us a botle home, and hunted throughout our holiday, finally finding a bottle just in time to take it home in our turn and share it with friends, Lacrima Lui Ovidiu, Ovid's Tears, the aromatic dessert wine whose name commemmorates the poet's exile by the Black Sea, in what is now the city of Costanta.

Wednesday - the mid-point of our holiday - was hot. Really hot. We spent much of the day looking for somewhere shady to sit.

At the café in Targu Neamt, I asked the waiter "Do you speak English?"
"No. Do you speak Romanian?"
Fair point. And between us we had no problem placing an order for coffee, fizzy water, alcohol-free beer. Later, he asked if we were Dutch, and I said no, English.
"Ah, English - Liverpool, Manchester United..."
"No," we chorused, "Newcastle."
"Ah, Newcastle..."

Later, we sat in the car park by the Neamt monastery, too hot even for monastery tourism, watching an orthodox priest, black robes billowing as he paced to and fro, talking on his mobile phone.

From Probota to Cotnari by the back roads took us two hours. There was only one actual retracing of our route - when the road was reduced to a mud track which led into a clearing where a solitary pig was browsing peacefully. So we tried again, this time taking the less promising of the two roads, which climbed up into the hills, through villages of little houses constructed on the plan of the log cabins we'd seen in the museum (entrance hall with a room on either side) and many appeared - could this possibly be right? - to be built of mud bricks. Yet many were brightly decorated, and some were obviously new.

The shrines became more and more elaborate. The flat crucifix had already given way to three-dimensional figures, and these began to be roofed over in a style similar to the well covers - some were even glazed in.

Up the valley again, between meadows and walnut trees, and at last we emerged onto grass upland, dotted with flocks of sheep, often with a scattering of goats among them. A group of wagtails took off in a flurry of white undersides.

And there were people everywhere: in ones and twos accompanying the flocks of sheep, or whole families sitting at the roadside by their houses, where the maize was stacked, stripping the heads of corn from the long stalks. Overnight harvest time had arrived. Pumpkins had been gathered from the maize fields, where they seemed to be grown in among the maize, and arranged around the hems of the haystacks.

The main road from Cluj to Gura Humorului was our baptism of fire; thereafter the main roads varied from OK (with the odd pothole) to new, smooth tarmac, sometimes as many as three lanes of it, with white lines.

Off the main roads, it's another matter. Minor roads were often unmetalled, and liable to fizzle out. You'd turn off the main road onto a good metalled surface, only to find yourself, a mile of so further on, driving on loose stones and dust. No doubt the problem was in the map as much as in the road.

So, for example, on Sunday evening we took what we thought would be a short cut back to Falticeni, but which turned out to be a meandering drive through the hills in fading light.

On Monday, the map implied that there was a direct road connecting Humor and Arbore. We took the only turning in the village, which lead us along a good road, which gave way in turn to a good metalled road except over bridges, to an unmetalled road, to:

a point where the road was cordoned off because it ended in a sheer edge where the bridge had been completely removed, and beyond this point (by way of a ford) to a pair of closed metal gates.

It was a beautiful drive, from the broad river plain up into green hills strewn with haystacks and meadows thick with autumn crocuses, where geese wandered between the wooden houses with their elaborate metal roofs; there was something to look at for every yard of the ten miles of that dead end. And when we had retraced our route all the way back to Humor, we still couldn't see what other road we might have taken, nor identify on the map the road we had followed.

At dusk, the roads fill with pedestrians each leading a single cow - or at most, two.

For the first several days, we saw no cats: but there were small, quiet dogs prowling around the edges of public spaces, curious but wary, not unfriendly.

...

Later I discovered that this was yet another illustration of how much the regions of Romania vary. Suceava has cats. And Sighisoara has dogs who bark, in chorus, at some certain hour of the night.