This is our first group photo taken after nearly two days of travel. This was taken in the Transylvanian town of Sinia.
This is our first group photo taken after nearly two days of travel. This was taken in the Transylvanian town of Sinia. | |
 | Romania has not invented the pound or developed the concept of neutering pets and stray dogs are everywhere. This very friendly retriever followed us for the first two days of our trek. |
After a long day of walking Sarah and I dug into the bags to prepare supper. |  |
 | Breaking camp always takes ages during the first days of a trek, we didn't do half bad though with our 90 minute start on day 1. |
We made our way to a monastery deep in the mountains where a medieval monk swore he had seen Mary in a cave. The monastery itself used the cave chamber for its rooms. |  |
 | Sarah and Tim cralling along through the holy caves. |
Linda and Beccy in the midst of their cave explorations. |  |
 | A lone fellwanderer takes a moment to get the view of a lifetime. The rocky outcrops in this area were astounding. |
Amazing views. |  |
 | This is our second campsite. We had a bit of trouble finding the river marked on the map and eventually realised that the marked river was an underground river that only surfaced in a few locations. |
Shepherds, who all look like they are more closely tied to the 1400's than the 21st century, graze their sheep in meadows on top of these sheer cliffs. Their sheep dogs were really agressive and we frequently needed to threaten them with our poles to get them to back off. With our packs, poles, and glasses I can only imagine how alien we must have looked to them. |  |
 | Castelul Bran, more popularly known as the castle of the blood thirsty Vlad Dracul II (Vlad the Impaler), who Stoker popularised as Count Dracula. |
The trek got really tough halfway through. We had one day where we were on the move with nearly full packs for over thirteen hours. This was about a third of the way through that day when we had to climb the ridge surround the Falgaras mountains. Linda can be seen scrambling up the cliffside below. |  |
 | More climbing. Not easy with full packs. After we got off of this mountain we were greated with a really nasty thunder storm and an unpleasant river fording at the end of this day. I sliced my finger open on a rusty metal cable on this mountain, made the remainder of the climb a bit of a pain. |
A moment where I was marveling at how fortunate I was to have such experiences. I could have done without the sliced finger though. |  |
 | Linda fighting her way up the slope. |
If the ascent of the ridge was a bad dream than the descent was a nightmare. The trail slipped into a scree slope valley covered in monkey trees. With my particularly large pack I was knocked over by these blasted plants a half dozen times and getting really annoyed by the time this photo was taken. |  |
 | Being light-weight, fleet of foot, and excellent with his walking poles, Pete was the obvious person to send down the unstable scree slopes first. He carefully set a trail down the slope that we all attempted to follow without starting too large a rock slide. |
A few days later we finally made it to the Fagaras mountains and hit miserable weather. Strong winds, chilling rains, and relentless obscuring mists made the Fagaras ridge unpleasant to walk. We had originally intended to stay in the shelter shown here, but it was filled with excrement and in terrible condition so it was just as well that we had the bulk of the day to move elsewhere. We did go inside for lunch though... the stench was a small price to pay for the shelter the dillapidated metal walls provided. |  |
 | We ended up camping in a valley plagued by powerful winds and relentless mists. In this picture a cloud is about to envelop our camp. |
We decided to abandon our plans of climbing to the top of Fagaras and made our way to a mountain hut about 900 metres below us. It was a hard slog and we had to climb a ridge covered with icy snow before we could even start going down. Just minutes after this picture was taken I was knocked over by winds that picked up my pack rain cover like a parachute at the top of the ridge. Fortunately they were blowing into the mountain rather than off of it. If the situation had been reversed my fall would likely have been much more serious. |  |
 | Hours later we made it to Urlea Hut and spent an afternoon drying clothes and treating wounds before making the trek down to the towns in the valley. |
We descended the rest of the mountain the following day and caught a bus from the village of Brezei and went to the town of Fagaras where we caught a train to Brasov. We were all dead tired and ended up falling asleep on the train. |  |
 | After a day spent recuperating in Brasov we caught a train to the town of Sigihisoara where Vlad Dracul was born. We played tourist for a day in this beautiful area and did our very best to wipe out all of our Romanian Lei. |
This was taken at the top of the bell tower in Sigihisoara. I must say, a day of tourism was exactly what we needed after nearly two weeks of non-stop trekking. |  |
 | Final group photo taken the evening before our return to Budapest. |