Week in Review: Week 12

This is our second week in Romania, and we are having a blast so far! We are in the Bucegi Mountain range, in a small town called Busteni. We’ve been hear for just over a week now, and we have one week left before we continue with our travels in Romania. This is the longest we have stayed in one place, so it’s been really great to have some down days and enjoy some quiet time. We kind of see it as a vacation from the busy travel pace we’ve had up to this point! There is lots to do around here, so we are enjoying seeing the sites and being close to nature.

Highlight of the week

Sharleen: Hiking to Heroes' Cross on Caraiman Peak. There is this huge cross on top of the mountain that overlooks the town of Busteni (where we are staying). The cross actually holds the Guinness World Record for the largest summit cross. It is 39.5 meters high, and sits at an altitude of 2,291 meters on Mount Cairaman. It’s one of the best hikes to do in the area, so we definitely had it one our list of activities to do while in the town. Since there is so much rain in the forecast during our time here, we opted to do it early on in our stay, on a not so rainy day. We took a cable car up, as we had heard some mixed reviews about the safety and challenge level of the hike. We were lucky, and had great weather the whole hike to the cross. However, when we got there, thick clouds rolled in and we couldn’t see any views of the town below! We waited for around an hour, but the clouds didn’t clear, so we left and decided to try a different route back. It was an awesome path! The clouds were still super thick, but it made the scenery awesome. We were literally hiking through the clouds - it was unlike anything we had experienced before! We had so much fun hiking, taking pictures, and watching the scenery change before our eyes as the clouds cleared for a few seconds. It was a really fun hike. We didn’t get a drop of rain, so we really lucked out, other than not seeing the view of the town. The hike was not so challenging, so we may try to attempt the whole hike from the base, instead of taking the cable car. We will see how the weather looks early next week!

Darrell: Rally race in Sinaia. I have watched a bunch of different racing events throughout the years, and I like to think of myself as a car enthusiast. I definitely don’t bleed motor oil, but I do love cars and I definitely enjoy watching races. So when we found out there was going to be a rally/hill-climb event in the next town over from us, it was a must see! We perched ourselves almost half way up the 3km course, at the end of a short straight-a-way that turned into an elevated hairpin corner. We sat through a ton of rain for about 6 hours watching cars take the corner on two or three wheels, and it was awesome! Physically being at a race takes everything to a new level. The smell of burning race fuel, the sound of the tires locking up while trying to take a corner, and the screaming sounds coming from each cars exhaust makes for quite the experience! Again, this is one thing that I took for granted back at home! Every year the Rocky Mountain Rally has an event right outside of Calgary, and I have never been. There will be no more excuses now – I have to attend more races!

Least favourite part of the week

Sharleen: Costs and wait time at the Busteni cable car. To get to our hike we decided to take the Busteni cable car. Fortunately the Tourist Information Centre warned us to head there early – stupid early. They said if we wanted to get on the 9:00am cable car (first one of the day), we should line up by 7:00am. He said that the cable car only holds 25 people, and only comes once an hour. He also said that the lines get so long that you could wait for 5 hours before going up. We thought this was kind of crazy, but we didn’t want to risk staying in line forever, so we headed to the cable car for 7:30. Sure enough, there were already people there, and we were about 15th in line. Fortunately there was no rain, so the wait ended up going pretty fast. We had looked into prices online, and we figured it was about $10 CDN for a return ticket/adult.  We planned to buy return tickets just in case we didn’t want to hike down after heading to the cross. After waiting 2 hours in line, we finally got to the ticket centre to get on the cable car. The prices were not the same as online, and were kind of crazy! It cost $50 CDN for the two of us to go up. Just before paying we were second guessing the purchase, but we had already waited so long, and wanted to get hiking, so we paid it and went up. However, for that price we decided not to hike down and to take the cable car back down – we wanted to try to get our money’s worth! There was also a line to go back down after our hike, and we probably waited another hour before we were able to get on a car back down the mountain. It was a cool ride through the clouds, but definitely not worth $50 and a 3-hour wait.

Darrell: Rain in Sinaia. Although attending the race in Sinaia was my highlight, we had to endure through some intense and torrential rain. It never fails that we will forget to bring one of our umbrellas randomly throughout our day trips. We usually do a good job of making sure our daypack has our rain jackets, umbrellas, extra batteries for cameras, and other essentials, but this was not one of those days. I was lucky to have my rain jacket, which is a really nice Gor-tex golf jacket, but I didn’t have my umbrella and my jacket doesn’t have a hood on it! So I ended up having a nice additional shower while watching the race! I was pretty much soaked from head to toe except for the middle section that was protected by the jacket. So my takeaway from this week is: on our next trip, bring a rain jacket that has a hood (basically a built in umbrella) and/or just bring the umbrella that you already own!

Favourite city/town/village visited

Sharleen and Darrell: Busteni. We are staying in the small mountain town called Busteni. There are huge mountains all around us, forests behind us, and our Airbnb host is super friendly and hospitable. There isn’t too much in this town, but we’ve loved being able to plant ourselves in one spot and take short walks to everything we need. There are three awesome grocery stores, all within walking distance, and some really good local restaurants. We’ve been having a great time exploring the area and getting some much needed down time. We are staying on the west most part of the town, very close to the woods and forest. It’s so peaceful, but it also means we are quite close to the local wildlife. Twice in our first week there were bears outside our villa complex, and we’ve also seen some wild pigs! It’s quite an ordeal when the wildlife comes out, all of the dogs in the town start going crazy And every house seems to have at least one dog, so it gets quite noisy! It’s made for a few exciting evenings. We haven’t been able to see any of the bears, we’ve just heard them. So hopefully one night we can get a good view from the comfort of our villa.

Favourite meal

Sharleen: Homemade Pho. We quite love Vietnamese Pho, and it’s been getting harder and harder to find Vietnamese restaurant as we travel in smaller towns. We found a recipe online and decided to give it a try. We were lucky to have a grocery store that had an amazing oriental section, so we were able to find almost all of the spices and ingredients we needed. It was a cool rainy day, so Pho was exactly what we wanted for dinner. It turned out awesome! We were so happy with it that we made it again a couple of days later. We will definitely need to stock up on some of the spices before we leave so that we have everything we need next time our cravings for soup kick in!

Darrell: Dinner at Canta Cuisine Restaurant. We decided that we were going to splurge a bit for our anniversary dinner, so we chose to eat at the castle here in Busteni. It was a pretty nice place and the meal ended up being even more expensive than we had originally thought, especially because we are in Romania. We ended up ordering a local wine and splitting a couple of appetizers to start. One was a tuna tartar with avocado, mango, and pomegranate sauce and the other was a duck liver with caramelized apple and cherry sauce. These were both delicious!! If we ended the meal there I would have been satisfied and happy! We then both ordered a steak with a pepper sauce, which came with creamy mashed potatoes and grilled veggies. By the time we had finished eating, we were stuffed and happy! It was a great way to spend our 7th anniversary away on the road.

Our time in Romania has been awesome so far, and we’ve really loved being in the Bucegi Mountains. We’ve been in Busteni for a week, and have one more week here before we head south to Bucharest.