Akasha and I rose early the next morning and headed off to catch our bus into the mountains. The others had most of the day to fill before catching their own buses home. Jesse had helped us check bus times with an official when we’d arrived 2 days earlier, but the woman at the ticket office assured us that there was no bus to Sibiu or Alba Iuliu. The trains, despite being a fraction of the cost of anywhere else I’d been in Europe, were too expensive for Akasha, so we were left with the option of the microbuses that act as shuttles. We found the right one, then after some quick negotiations with the other passengers, even managed to get 2 adjacent seats. We both wanted to start fresh, but it wasn’t easy to put the past week behind us.

“I’m broken,” Akasha said. “I feel like a single mother who’s lost her freedom.” The observation was the perfect compliment to my own feelings of being the child in the back seat. “I can’t support both of us.”

She told me that they’d been trying to reach me and that I’d been in dreamland. Perhaps they had. There were a number of times that I’d been shocked to find them speaking English to me. It wasn’t beyond belief that I’d missed some. And the previous night may have been better simply because I was less stressed and therefore more open, though I think they were making a real effort for the first time that week.

Our conversation was interrupted by an old woman behind us, who wanted to introduce her grandson, Robert. The boy of about 8 spoke a number of English words and helped to translate some of the conversation. Either he had an identity crisis or we still had a communication gap. Somehow he managed to have a German father, Romanian mother and Spanish grandparents. Still, I’ve found that anything’s possible in Europe. Like many boys of that age, he wanted to be an astronaut, which would make him the first Romanian in space – unless they start offering a passenger shuttle service to the moon.

They were very friendly and a great distraction from our previous conversation. Best of all, they helped us find the right shuttle on to Alba Iuliu when we changed at Sibiu. One more bus took us to Arieşeni, a town nestled in the Apuseni Mountains. Our destination was actually Pătraăhăiţeşti, about an hour into the mountains, the locals told us. “Just follow the trail. It’s all marked.” And so we set out just after 8, confident we’d make it before dark.

It wasn’t clearly marked and I wondered how Akasha could confidently choose from among the options at each intersection we passed, whether in the forest or villages. During the first half hour we’d found a number of locals to ask, but by the time we reached a large intersection in a clearing, we’d been walking for well over an hour and it was dark.

“There’s a sign on that road over there. Maybe that’s it.”

“We’ve been following a red dot until now.” So that had been her trick. “I don’t see any more red dots, so I say we keep going straight ahead.” It made sense, so we did. The name on the sign didn’t mean anything to us anyway.

Another half an hour later, I was getting really worried. We could barely see the road at our feet. As we approached a bend, we heard a cow moo, and both it and a man appeared out of the dark. We didn’t understand exactly what he said, but the shock in his tone made it clear. “What the hell are you doing up here?” After we said we don’t understand, he pointed up the road and said ‘only television.’ It was the maintenance trail for a TV tower.

We walked with him for a while, trying to chat with our basic Romanian and Akasha, who likes cows, tried to befriend the animal. It tolerated her but made it clear it just wanted to get home. When the man stopped to draw us a map in the dirt, the cow turned around and mooed loudly at him. “I need milking,” it said clearly.

It seemed the road I’d spotted was the correct one, but neither of us had the energy to keep going, so when we got to the intersection, we put up the tent and fell asleep. We woke with the sun the next morning, but lay there listening to the cows being herded within metres of the tent. Finally we got up and washed ourselves and our clothes in the icy stream below the clearing, and I was delighted to find Akasha smiling and laughing with me again. This was the girl I’d come away to be with. The sky was clear and the air warm, so we left our clothes on rocks to dry and walked back down into town to the tourist office. We had to remake our plans so that we could spend some time at Pătraăhăiţeşti and still get up onto the Plateau Padiş.

We decided we could afford to spend that evening in Pătraăhăiţeşti, but we loved it so much that we spent a second night and later returned for a third. We got back to the tent just in time to pull it down and pack our clothes before the rain started again. Then, just as the cow herder had promised, it was a short walk along the road to our destination. The village lay draped on a gently curving hillside and surrounded by dense forest. Each property was bounded by wooden railings so that we were walking along a series of railed paths. Our destination was a wood carver’s house at the bottom of the village. He’d opened his house to tourists and it had been recommended in the French guide.

Things had changed a bit since the guide was written and it now seemed to be his son that was the wood carver, but the old man was still there and loved to talk to the tourists, even in our fractured Romanian. His daughter seemed to be running the place now and she quickly directed us to a large room in a lodge set aside for guests. She spoke some French and practised as she took us on a tour of the lodge, showing us the dining area just outside the rooms and the bathroom underneath. Her weaving loom was also on this floor of the lodge that required you to go outside before entering again. As soon as we’d agreed to stay, she sent us on our way down a path that ran through the forest just below the village. It turned out to be a small waterfall that seemed to be the final destination of the red dot walking route.

It was cool in the forest and the waterfall pretty, but we were keen to see how these people lived, so we walked back up and through the village itself. The wooden railings kept us firmly on paths and separate from the locals in a way that made me feel uncomfortably like we were watching animals at the zoo. Most of the locals we saw were piling the dry hay into massive stacks to store through the coming year. One person, usually a child would stand on the top of the pile, holding on to the wooden post that served as the centre for the pile, and step on each load as it was passed up. By draping the loads around the post and stepping on them, they ensured that the hay would stay in place and presumably the dense packing helped keep it dryer. Most looked up curiously when we passed, adding to the impression of a zoo, but they usually waved or called out in response to our greetings.

At the top of the hill, we saw a couple of people on motorbikes talking to a family of locals who were sawing wood in a shed by their house. They seemed friendly, so we decided to go up and have a look, but when we realised that the bikers were speaking Romanian, we began to worry we were intruding and turned to head back down. The whole family called out to us and gestured us back. In pidgin Romanian, they explained that the visitors were Romanian travellers and, although they weren’t a museum, they’d love to talk to us. We stayed, and the conversation progressed at snail’s pace until a pretty young girl sitting at the back admitted that she spoke English.

“My name’s Andrea. This is my grandmother and my aunt. It’s my grandmother’s house. The men are my uncles and cousins. I’m so sorry that my English is so bad.”

Her English was almost flawless and the accent natural – far better than even my Romanian colleagues in Brussels. “Your English is great. Where did you learn? How old are you?”

“No. I’m only 14. I just learnt a bit at school, but one of my friends speaks English well, so I talk to her sometimes. Everyone wants to know where you’re from.”

“France.” Nods all around showed that this was the expected answer, common for tourists to this area.

“I’m Australian.”

“Ooooh.”

“Ha,” I said to Akasha – somewhat snidely, I have to admit. “I always get a better reaction than you.” I felt good that they knew where Australia was, but also that for once Akasha had to take a back seat. I wish I could say I was more mature than that, but we all have our dark days.

While we were talking, her grandmother brought out some extra glasses for us to join them for a glass of something sweet and fizzy, then demanded we eat some cake with them too. I wanted to help the men saw the wood – to try my hand at the life of a Romanian, but I knew that I’d make a mistake and that would cost them time to recut. It wasn’t my place to impede their livelihood.

Andrea took us up the hill to show us their horses – enormous animals bred to pull heavy carts – and Akasha helped lead them down to the cart which was being put together. I got my wish to help by loading some of the wood onto the cart. In a struggled conversation, one of the cousins told me that the wood was destined for a construction site where a new house was being built.

When we turned back from watching the horses taking the cart down the hill, our hosts offered us another glass of the sickly drink. “No. No, thank you. We’ve been too much of a burden already… If you insist, OK, but we’d actually rather tsuika.”

Their eyes lit up in delight that we knew the local alcohol and that we’d drink with them. Soon small cups were being passed around and we were all toasting each other. Finally, we had to leave and Andrea offered to walk us to the intersection.

“I’m so happy. I have new friends,” she said. “And my grandmother really likes you two. It’s unusual to find such friendly tourists.” We were delighted to have found such friendly locals, but then most of the people we met were extremely friendly.

Dinner that night, prepared over a wood fire stove in the barn, was a heavy affair of beef stew and an accompanying dish of eggs and potatoes. It was delicious, but we were glad to take a break when the cows brought themselves home, dragging a little old lady behind them. She followed them into the barn and began to milk them. Akasha broke off her meal to join her, firmly telling me that milking was her privilege and to stay out of the way. She looked so genuinely happy for the first time on the trip that I couldn’t intrude. But I didn’t need to. I was content to just enjoy her smile.

The next day, we had lunch at the top of the mountains by the TV tower and ran back down in a storm. It was short-lived and we were almost dry when we reached the lodge again. Akasha found a young French man whose Romanian was good enough to help get me an invitation to cut hay with a neighbour. The neighbour showed me how to use the scythe, which I found at once surprisingly efficient and astonishingly difficult to use. He had to redo every area that he let me try, covering 100m in 10 minutes, then giving me the blade to struggle through 5 meters in 3 minutes. After about five turns, I felt I was getting the hang of it – resting the blade on the folded grass and swinging it around my body – but the man had had enough and it was clear he wasn’t going to offer it to me again.

When I got back down to the lodge, Akasha had gone for a walk with the French man. That night during dinner, she spoke only to him and I was back in the isolated world of the previous week. Despair set in again – and perhaps a little jealousy – and I was glad when we left the following day to go hiking up to the Padiş Plateau, which is not flat at all. I’d been looking forward to this since we arrived. This hiking trip was the real reason I’d carried the tent all the way – not to save money on accommodation in towns – and it would be good to camp in a quiet place in the mountains. I would finally have Akasha to myself. But of course, this wouldn’t go to plan either.

Conversation was strained after the night before, so we settled into a silent trudge, speaking only to point out the coloured markers we were following – like a children’s orienteering course. The maps we had weren’t detailed enough to be helpful, so we had to rely on the red and yellow triangles painted on trees until we bumped into some other people. They told us that they were heading to the first cave and that we should join them rather than pitching out tents first. They were Romanian and one knew the area well, so I trusted him – against Akasha’s advice – and we ended up carrying our heavy packs down a steep, treacherous mountainside, wondering all the while how we’d get back up. Akasha was now complaining of a stomach cramp from all the heavy food, which also explained some of her unwillingness to talk. “I wish I could throw up,” she said, holding her stomach. “I’m sure I’d feel better afterwards, but I’ve never been able to.”

So we weren’t in a good state to enjoy the sight that awaited us at the bottom. A giant’s cave stood some 70m tall (at a guess) and seemed to keep that height as it cut right through to the other side of the ridge. A river ran right along the floor of the cave so we couldn’t walk the length and the other 40 people there made us keener to get to the designated camping area to get a place.

By the time we reached it, Akasha couldn’t stand up straight and we barely noticed the 500 tents filling the clearing. I ran to buy her a Coke – which she believed would help dissolve the knot in her stomach – from a little store in the centre of the clearing. When I came back, I found her bent over the ground. “I can throw up.” There was a hint of pride showing through the misery in her tone.

As awful as it sounds, I have to say I was happy that Akasha was sick. It may have been all that saved our relationship. The tables had now turned and she was totally dependent on me. The only thing she didn’t need my help for now was a toilet stop. When hiking in Romania, this isn’t a pleasant activity. A short walk into the forest by the tents showed a ground covered with toilet paper. No effort was made to cover up the refuse and – unsure if I was stepping on dirt or human waste – I was happy to leave her on her own for that task. I could wait until we got back to Pătraăhăiţeşti.

Our trip back was just as silent, but I no longer felt like a burden. Back at the lodge, Akasha made a much better effort to include me in the conversation with her French friend. The topic was gypsies, which brought our trip full circle.

“They’re not the villains that all the Romanians make them out to be,” said the French man, who’d been travelling in the country for many months. “They really don’t have a choice of lifestyle. Some go to university and study hard, but no one will give them a job. It’s expected that people put a photo on their resumes and as soon as the employer sees a photo of a gypsy, they’ll throw it away. The gypsies have no choice but to go begging and stealing to survive.” If everything he says is true, Romanians are very racist against their cohabitants, probably to the same extent that white people are to Aborigines in Australia. The gypsies are stuck in a similar cycle where their nomadic life doesn’t work in modern society and is rejected by the general population. But when some of them try to fit in, they’re ostracised. Akasha took a particular interest in their plight and has promised to do some research into what we heard that night. When I spoke of the beggars to my colleague, he told me that Romanians won’t give the beggars any money because they know it doesn’t end up helping the beggar. More often it goes to the pimp, or whatever the equivalent is in the world of beggars.

The next morning, we began our trip home feeling like a couple again. We didn’t experience much of consequence on the way out, except for the first bus. We’d been expecting a microbus like those we’d arrived in, but instead we were called onto a massive covered truck with bench seats lining each side of the tray. The old men inside were delighted to help us practise our Romanian – particularly Akasha, of course. They explained that this was actually a free truck but that it only went part way. We’d have to change for a real bus later on. From what I could work out, this was probably a service left over from the communist era. Just as some shop / restaurants were still owned by the government, this driver was acting as a public bus service, long after private buses had taken over.

It was a striking end to the trip, and it left me sad that I’d spent so much of it fighting for my sanity rather than exploring and understanding the people.

The new arrivals needed cash, so the first stop was a currency exchange booth. It took security very seriously. A guard at the door made Lestat show his cash before letting him into the booth then shut the door behind him so that no one else could enter until he was done. Out on the street, a pregnant beggar was accosting the rest of us. In an attempt to garner sympathy, she lifted her dress to show us the scars of a leg operation. It had the opposite effect on me. It wasn’t sexy, but the wound had healed well and it obviously didn’t affect her ability to walk. She either had enough support from the government or enough of her own money to pay for an operation, so why should we give her anything. When I – her last chance – refused to give her any cash, she spat on me. It was the only sense of superiority she had left and there was very little substance to it, so I shuddered briefly and turned back to listen to what the others were saying.

As usual, what I caught was meaningless – just a few words here and there. “… the … Bucharest … three …” I had no idea if that meant ‘one of the beggars in Bucharest had three ears’ or ‘the town hall in Bucharest is three times as big as the one in Paris.’ Keeping one ear on the conversation in the hope I’d pick up a keyword, I scanned the street to see if I could get a feel for how these people lived their lives. Further down the road, I saw the same beggar in trouble. One of the young men she’d approached got violently mad, kicking her repeatedly and shouting something obscene.

“Did you see that?” I said to the others. “That guy was just kicking the pregnant woman.” And I’d thought these people were friendly.

Akasha gave me a scornful look. “We’ve just been talking about this for the last five minutes. You’re in dreamland.”

There didn’t seem to be anything I could say to that, so I gave up on trying to find out why he was kicking her (my Romanian colleague later told me it was a rare case)or what had been said in the last five minutes and went back to scanning the street. Nothing else stood out before we had enough money and headed off again.

“What do you feel like for lunch?” It was such a shock to be spoken to without initiating the conversation that it took a couple of moments to realise Akasha was speaking English.

“Um…” I tried to remember what Romanian food I’d read about that sounded interesting. My trusty Lonely Planet was sitting at home because I’d bought the Eastern European edition and didn’t want to carry 800 pages around for the 80 pages on Romania when Akasha had 200 dedicated pages in her smaller French version. Before I could remember any of the dishes that had caught my attention, she said “too late. We’ve decided.”

The pause continued long enough that I realised she wasn’t going to continue. She wasn’t even looking at me any more. “Yes, but what have you decided?”

“We’re going to the markets to get some bread and tomatoes.”

Lunch was then eaten on a park bench. Like much of South America, it’s illegal to walk on the grass in the parks because it’s difficult to get it to grow. So five of us squeezed onto the one bench, juggling bread, tomatoes and cucumber on our laps. Finally the map came out and the planning began. Akasha and I had talked about what sights sounded interesting and I was confident that she understood my preference for settling in one place for a few days to get a feel for the culture. The only real touristy thing I was interested in was a castle near Braşov. So I continued to listen with one ear – still hoping to catch a few words – and watched their fingers move over the map. From what I could make out, we were going to Sighetu MarmaŢiei first, and then perhaps somewhere further east later on.

During the train ride, I let them continue their catching up and searched through my memories for what might have drawn them to Sighetu MarmaŢiei. All I could remember was that it was the northernmost town in Romania, but that didn’t seem to be a big draw. Eventually, I interrupted their conversation to ask Akasha.

“There are some good museums there.”

Museums? I had no interest in museums. I was here to experience the way the people lived. Still, I was a hanger-on for this trip. I hadn’t even met Akasha until after they’d planned the basics. I was just happy that she’d invited me and that I could get my first experience of Eastern Europe. I nodded and Akasha quickly turned back to her discussion.

After a couple of hours of fragmented sentences, Jesse jumped up and said, “we’re here.” Everyone reached for their packs.

“But this isn’t Sighetu MarmaŢiei,”I said, looking at the station name.

“We’re not going to Sighetu today,” said Akasha. “Hurry up.”

And so I found myself wandering through a village called Viseu de Jos in confusion. This place wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the Lonely Planet. I was sure of it. As a place to stop for a few days it seemed ideal, but that wasn’t what the others had in mind. I decided to leave asking why we were here until I had Akasha to myself, and concentrated on what was happening around me.

Jesse asked a local where we could camp and he was nice enough to walk us down to a field by the river before going on his way. I started looking for flat ground – rare in this lumpy field – and pulled the tent out as soon as I found it.

“What are you doing? Why would you put it up so far from the other’s tent?”

“Come on. It’s only a few metres. Do you want to sleep with them or me?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

It was the first smile I’d gotten from her since we’d met her friends, but it didn’t feel like a joke. I was about to say so when a shepherd passing by started shouting at us. Jesse ran off to see what the problem was and Lestat and Akasha followed.

“I think this is his field,” I said to Mekare in my best French. “He doesn’t seem very happy that we’re here.”

“Probably.” It was nice to know she acknowledged my presence, but the condescension didn’t inspire further attempts to talk. Fine. I had other things to do. I picked up Akasha’s pack and put it in our tent before she could turn the joke into reality.

“Do we have to move?” I asked when she came back.

“What? No. He was worried that the river might flood with all the rain and we’d be washed away. He was offering us his place to sleep tonight.” It sounded like a great option to me – a chance to see how a Romanian shepherd lived – but it seemed they’d decided not to take up his offer. “It’s great.” She smiled again, but not at me. “Romanian is close enough to French that I can make out a fair bit of what they’re saying.” She turned back to discuss this with the others.

I sat quietly through a dinner of leftover bread and tomatoes and then through the rest of the evening at a pub. It was more of a shack with a couple of tables and chairs for about 8 people. The tap she used to rinse glasses had so little pressure that it would have taken an hour to fill a bucket. There were a couple of unfamiliar bottles above the bar, but when I tried to ask the owner for a local alcohol, I couldn’t make myself understood and Jesse had to rescue me. I returned to the table with something like pear flavoured metho and listened to the others while Jesse stayed talking to the owner.

When she came back to the table, she was clutching an official looking piece of paper. “… wedding …” The woman had invited Jesse to her daughter’s wedding. These people were truly generous.

Back in the tents, I snuggled up to Akasha, delighted that I’d finally have someone to talk to. “So, how is it to see your friends again? What have you been talking about?” I asked as she reached for her book.

“We haven’t talked all day. Why do you want to start now? Go to sleep. I want to read.”

The ensuing argument faded into misery on both sides and the rest of the week was much the same. I wanted to scream at her that it was a tough situation for both of us, but at least she had friends to talk to. I had no one. But I knew how she felt. I’d been in her situation before and I hadn’t handled it any better.

I’d had an almost romantic friendship with one of my colleagues and when we went to Japan for a training course, the friend we stayed with put us in the same room to sleep. He’d obviously believed the rumours. So we spent our days together in training, our evenings together on the town and our nights together in the small bedroom. I was taking every chance I could to speak Japanese, and got frustrated when she kept asking what we were talking about. Eventually, I snapped and shouted at her to leave me alone. She cried. I knew I’d acted badly, but I couldn’t find it in me to apologise or try to include her. We still chat on the internet occasionally, but the friendship has never been quite the same.

I didn’t want that to happen with Akasha, so I trod as lightly as possible. I might have gone my own way but their plans changed so quickly that if I went off, we might never find each other again. On top of that, I had no money – only Akasha’s card had worked. And I had the tent – the other tent was too small for four people and I couldn’t leave Akasha out in the rain.

So I followed behind them, looking at everything through my backseat window. The country and its people were fascinating, but I can only speculate about the reasons behind what I saw.

Most obvious was the class gap. The next morning, while we were searching for a shop to buy bread for breakfast, I saw a number of strange sights. First was a bloke in a sports car, talking on his mobile phone and wearing… well, something trendy. He was parked outside the bar we’d gone to the night before that barely had running water. Further down the road, we had to step aside to make room for a large tip truck to pass a farmer’s cart loaded with logs and pulled by a single horse.

To my complete horror, the rest of the week was a series of tourist dots joined by a series of trains. We never spent two nights in the same town – unless you count the time we arrived at Gura Humurului at 3 one morning and slept in the station.

The next day, a train ride and a bus took us to Hărniceşti , famous for its wooden gates and wooden church. The gates were massive affairs. Striking as they were, the 3 foot high fences alongside them rendered them purely cosmetic. The church meant more to me. It was small and cozy with local tapestries covering every bench and wall. The woman who unlocked it for us spoke better French than me and told the others quite a lot. The only fact that I managed to catch was that it had been used as both a Catholic and Greek Orthodox church at different times in its history, depending on who was in power at the time. Perhaps this god is more tolerant than most history tells us.

We had dinner in a large shop on the main road and, like so many other occasions, we took most of our food with us, bought earlier at the market. The shopkeeper was quite happy with us messing up their only table when we’d given them no more revenue than it required to buy a loaf of bread. It was still owned by the government which probably meant the shopkeeper was on a wage and not worried about how much we spent.

Walking back to our campsite on the river, we lost our way momentarily. I looked down what I thought was our dirt road – but which turned out to be a driveway – and saw a light on in a hut. “Maybe they can tell us which way to go,” I said, but Jesse was already peeking in the door of the hut. She turned back to us and gestured for us to join her. Inside, we found a couple of men working at a distilling machine.

“They’re making tsuika.” I managed to catch it in French. Perhaps I was getting better.

The men were very friendly, inviting us inside, giving us – forcing on us – a glass of the potent alcohol, and explaining the process to Jesse. She translated for the others. As usual, no one translated for me but I got the idea. It was a partnership. Outside were barrels of last year’s apples from trees owned by one of the men. Inside was the distilling equipment owned by the other. While we watched, the machine man scraped the seal from around a pipe above the furnace and moved it aside. The apple man then carried buckets of fermented apple slop from outside and poured them into the vat. When he was done, the machine man replaced the pipe and sealed it with bread dough. The apples were boiled until the vapour rose through the pipe, then moved along until it was over a tank full of river water, pumped in from outside. There, it cooled and fell, cooling further until it dripped out a tap in the bottom into a bucket. Our glass had been scooped fresh from that bucket.

I came away from that experience elated. It felt like the first time I’d really gotten to join the locals living their life rather than just watching from my window. I would only have that feeling once more while with the whole group.

The museums ‘we’ chose to visit in Sighetu MarmaŢiei were surprisingly interesting, focusing as they did on the culture and heritage of the Romanian people. One displayed Romanian armour, national costumes (which look decidedly South American) and the simple wooden furniture used in peasant’s homes. The museum had few visitors so the woman in the shop was delighted to show us around and explained everything to Jesse and the others. She tried to include me, but I had no idea what she was saying and if I asked any of the others to translate, I felt like I was depriving them of their tour, so I made do with the 4 word English signs next to each item.

The same town had an outdoor cultural museum that was effectively an entire abandoned village, complete with houses and farming equipment. Unfortunately, there were no signs in this one and we spent half an hour trying to work out how the oil press worked. Without a guide, I was on the same footing as the others, and I came the closest to understanding it – assuming I was right about a piece being missing. It was a giant nut cracker with one handled moved by a corkscrew lever. The logs weren’t close enough at the crushing end, so I surmised that there should have been a stand in the slot of the bottom one to meet up with the flat surface of the top log. Even so, we all decided, it didn’t seem to be able to crush many seeds each turn.

After such a full day, I’d hoped to find a place to camp, but it seemed we were on a roll. The next train took us to Gura Humurului and arrived at 3am. After a brief stroll around the dark town, unable to find a hostel open, we settled on the floor of the station. That was an amazing experience – not for the comfort, but to see the level of respect people gave us. Romanians are typically loudly aggressive people, as I’d found out in the embassy when applying for a visa. There, the diplomat and his countrymen had secretly enjoyed shouting at each other for hours while I stood shaking in the corner. In the country itself, people shouted at / to each other in the streets but I realised that there was no malice in it. But on that morning, despite the first train arriving at 6am and plenty of people waiting for it and the following trains, they all talked in whispers around the 5 heaps curled up on the floor.

That day I stumbled along behind all the others as we walked around to a series of monasteries famous for their painted walls. Unlike other churches, these were painted inside and out, and the pictures were violently graphic. While there was the occasional haloed man on a cross, the majority of scenes depicted haloed men driving swords into unhaloed kings and queens or enemy (unhaloed of course) knights.

I found two other distractions at these monasteries. The first was a priest tapping out a rhythm in the bell tower. I couldn’t see him, and we weren’t allowed up, but the first sounded to be made by some collection of sticks with different tones. He then began the same rhythm with the two church bells, then reverted to the sticks for the finale.

The second distraction was at the top of a separate tower, looking down on the nun’s quarters. Akasha and Jesse were in deep discussion so I looked silently over the wooden structure and the fruit garden surrounding it. Suddenly Akasha turned to me and spoke – what seemed to me to be her first unprompted words to me in at least 3 days.

“Jesse’s just telling me that the nun’s here have the best farming knowledge in the country. You can see the way they prune the trees to be spherical.”

Once I found my voice, I took up the conversation. “What does pruning the trees do? Do they produce more fruit that way?”

“Yes. It’s common practice in most countries, but the people here don’t know. The nuns might hire some people and show them how they want it done, but they don’t tell them why or teach other farmers. They just produce the most fruit and sell it all to fund improvements to the church.”

“Rather than helping people, which is their job…”

The two girls looked at me in astonishment – as though they hadn’t realised I was capable of independent thought. “Yes. Exactly.” Then, just as you might after hearing a dog talk, they shook themselves and went back into their discussion.

That night, the last before heading to Braşov where Akasha’s friends would leave us, we camped on a local’s farm. He was a French teacher and most of his helpers spoke a little French too, so I was still the outsider and felt it keenly. With the rain pouring down, I felt closed in with our morbid group under the small sheltered dining area. We needed some more water, but the bottle we had was too tall to fit under the tap in the camper’s bathroom so I sloshed through the mud to find one of the helpers. I used one of the few Romanian words I knew, holding up the water bottles and asking ‘apa?’ She caught on and took me to the well. Many farmers still use well water as they don’t have plumbing. This one seemed to use well water despite having good plumbing. Like the others we’d seen, it was in its own little hut, with caged walls and a pyramid roof. She unlocked the wheel attached to one side and let it spin, lowering the bucket, then after a splash we wound it back up again. I had to squeeze between the well house and the fence to open the ‘gate’ on the hut before I could get at the bucket. When I returned to the dining area, the others all laughed at the child-like grin on my face. I didn’t care. These experiences were what I had come for.

Getting tickets wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped and the next morning, the four French were running around madly. When they finally stopped, I risked interrupting them. “So, what’s happening? Have we got tickets?” I felt so helpless, not even knowing what the real problem was.

“We’re going back to the first plan.” Which was? “I told you!”

“Hey! The plans have changed so often that I don’t know which one is which, so don’t shout at me.”

“Well, stop using that tone whenever you talk to me. It’s annoying.”

I knew that if I tried to say anything more, my despair would come through in my tone even louder, so I shut up for most of the trip. When I did speak, I kept it to a whisper so that there would be no tone to betray me.

I’d well and truly had enough of the other’s company by the last day and since we were staying in Braşov for two nights straight, I had my first opportunity to go off alone. As soon as I could get away, I ran up the hill next overlooking the town to get some fresh air and to make a map in my head. Instead of finding a lookout, I found the large flag flying proudly at the peak, but surrounded by trees at the base so I couldn’t see the town. After a little more exploring, I ended up at a lookout point at the base of the cliff, and saw one of Romania’s most popular cities sprawled out around a central hill. The national flag flew from hundreds of buildings and houses all across the city. I’d noticed it even on farms in small villages and had to wonder at the national pride these people have. Perhaps it came from being under foreign rule for so much of their history. Once home, I asked my colleague about it and he said that the ‘hole in the flag’ would make a good symbol for these pages.

“The flag originally had the same three colours – blue, yellow, red – in the same vertical stripes, but there was an emblem in the middle that represented the five regions of Romania. When the communists took control, they replaced it with their emblem to represent the workers, but it was seen as a symbol of the oppression, so when we finally got free, many people cut the emblem out and flew it with the hole in the middle.” And so my symbol was found.

I really wanted to visit Raşnov castle which I knew to be near Braşov, but it didn’t appear in the French guide and I had no idea how to get there. If I’d had more time, I might have found a way to visit the more touristy Bran castle, famed for inspiring Dracula, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose Akasha on this last day. So I spent it buying supplies for the following week, peeking into churches, walking up the hill in the centre of town to see the wall and the citadel fort. In amongst all this, I still found plenty of opportunities to watch the people going about their lives – students sketching the panorama, children playing in the piaţa and the farmers selling their produce in the markets. One guy in the markets showed me that teasing is the same all over the world, by miming to me that the girl behind the counter was attracted to me. While she blushed, the woman beside her nodded slyly and the young man escalated his antics to demonstrate dinner, dancing and whatever might follow. I ended the day with my energy restored, ready to face the next week alone with Akasha.

And that evening, I found a group of people I could talk to and who seemed quite interesting. To my surprise, it was the group I’d been travelling with for the last week.

n the moment before the train passed into the tunnel, I stole a glance at the couple sitting across from us. Both were tall with hair slicked back from widow’s peaks. They wore capes with high collars and the man’s incisors gleamed threateningly.

“There are no vampires in Romania.” The man’s voice was chilling in the darkness. He’d obviously seen me look across and knew immediately what was on my mind. I guessed this wasn’t the first time a tourist had looked sideways at him.

When the train came out of the tunnel, I felt very silly. Neither of them was particularly tall, though the young man wasn’t far off six feet, and neither had widow’s peaks or long incisors. They weren’t even wearing capes. In fact, the man had unruly brown hair and his girlfriend’s long locks might have been permed. Both were wearing jeans and t-shirts.

“Sorry. I’m a bit jumpy. We just came from Sighişoara and the whole town was crawling with teenagers dressed in black.” The black had been Metallica and Megadeath t-shirts, but even vampires couldn’t go around in long capes and high collars these days.

“Oh, were you there for the medieval festival? That’s not something I’d expect tourists to go to.”

I wanted to agree that we weren’t your everyday tourists, preferring to join in the local culture of places we visit, but the truth was that today we were amateurs. It was our first trip away together and, looking back, it was too early in the relationship to be going so far out of our comfort zone. Tensions had run high from the moment we arrived in Budapest and the mistakes weren’t helping. Primary among them was forgetting the cardinal rule that you should never arrive in a new place on a Sunday.

We’d been unable to get a night train to Cluj-Napoca, so we took one that went to Sighişoara, thinking to catch a local train the next morning. But that requires money. So does food and despite the mass of teenagers that had descended on the town, none of the currency exchange booths were open and it took us four hours of wandering in the rain to find a bank machine that would let us withdraw cash.

“It was an accident. We didn’t know anything about the medieval festival, but that would explain the music we heard.” It was like something from a Robin Hood movie using what sounded like a mandolin and a flute. “I wish we’d had more time to look around properly.”

The four of us chatted for a while about what we might have seen at the festival and the unseasonal rain. It seems that we’d chosen the only summer in memory that it had rained constantly. Most of the east was flooded, apparently, but we weren’t planning to go too far east. Finally, I drew the conversation back to where we’d started. “Why do you get annoyed by vampire comments?”

“Because it’s not even our legend. It’s just a butchering of our history. Some English tourist came to Braşov and thought the castle looked threatening. He put that together with an inside out version of Dracula and came up with this ridiculous story.”

“I didn’t realise that Dracula was a real person. Who was he?”

“Dracula actually means ‘son of the dragon’ because his father was a knight of the Order of the Dragon. His real name was Vlad Ţepeş and he was a hero of the resistance against the Ottoman invasion in the 15th century. He was famous for torturing his enemies by driving a wooden steak through their spine.”

“I see what you mean by inside out. He was a kind of anti-vampire.” If Romanians didn’t like the story, it ruined my plans to use a vampire as the image to represent their country on these pages. I’d have to keep searching.

“Yep. Foreigners always get us wrong. It’s the same with the gypsies. They don’t actually come from Romania.”

This was new to me. I’d never heard that gypsies did come from Romania. If they came from anywhere in particular, I’d have guessed Spain or Italy, but I couldn’t say why. In Europe, though, it’s apparently a common misconception that gypsies come from Romania.

“They’re originally from India, but they base themselves in Romania now because the government gives them a lot of freedom. They can come and go as they please while the rest of us are stuck here. And they don’t have to pay taxes.”

The girl proffered a bag of tiny apples and insisted we take one each. They’d already told us that you need to be careful of the meat sold by peasants, but that fruit was safe and always good. I bit into a crunchy little apples and found it had all the flavour of its cousins in Belgium, packed into something with half the diameter. It was a while before I could speak again.

“What do you mean you’re stuck here? One of my colleagues in Brussels is Romanian and he’s not a gypsy. Besides, I thought communism had fallen. How can they stop you leaving?”

“Oh, we’re allowed to go, but we have to show that we have enough money. Can you imagine how difficult it is to raise 500 Euro? The average salary is only 100 Euro and that’s barely enough to survive on.”

The Romanian currency is actually Lei, and even the smallest coin had a few trailing zeros, so I was glad that he was doing the conversion for me.

It seemed that it was rare to have a salary in Romania too. The man had studied Civil Engineering at university, but until he could ‘sign’ his own projects, he would just get whatever money the actual signatory handed down to him. Signing meant planning and recommending a project, getting approval and taking responsibility for the result. It sounded like a dangerous game to me, but our new friends assured us that all the work was done by new graduates and the signatories kept most of the spare cash for themselves without any real risk.

“So the gypsies can go out, steal in other countries until they have enough cash to get by for a while, then come back here and live comfortably while the true Romanians struggle.”

This was my first glimpse into the unrest in the country. Gypsies seemed to be at the heart of most of it. Famous for stealing in the rest of Europe, they generally limited their activities to begging in Romania out of fear of losing their refuge. And so we were safe from both vampires and gypsies, but I didn’t need them. It turned out I’d brought enough demons with me.

The word ‘holiday’ conjures up images of sun, parties and relaxation – a good time for all. But we weren’t just holidaying. We were ‘travelling,’ and that word can be associated with concepts like language gap, culture shock and just plain stress. In this case, it was compounded because I was travelling with four French people.

I had some doubts when Akasha told me how many were coming but, to date, her friends had been very good about including me in any conversations. Not that I understood much of what they said, but every now and then they’d stop to give me an update in slow French or even in English. With that, and a little time alone with Akasha in the evenings, I’d survive. But when we caught up with her friends in Cluj, the horror story began. Jesse and Lestat were nice enough from what I could make out of their rapid French, but Mekare didn’t even bother to look at me. As soon as she’d greeted the others, she began a 5-hour tirade of the problems of her 30 hour bus trip. And Akasha was so excited at seeing her friends again that she didn’t think to introduce me.

I knew from what Akasha had told me before that short, freckled Jesse had spent the last 4 months studying farming in Romania and that skinny, blond Mekare was between jobs and living in Toulouse. Gangly Lestat was a friend of theirs from university prep school, also between jobs. Akasha herself was working for a non-government organisation in Paris to represent cattle farmers in science and government policy. Her muscled yet curvaceous figure, vibrant hazel eyes and a thousand different smiles make it difficult to remember the others clearly. She seemed like my perfect match, with her love of travel, culture and outdoor activities – but even that’s not enough in situations like this.

For most of the week, they walked in a bunch that excluded me and spoke in rapid-fire French that I had no chance of catching. Jesse spoke to the locals and translated for the others. No one thought to translate for me. We spent so much time on trains city-hopping that I could never follow the itinerary and I soon began to feel like a five-year-old in the back seat of the car. My conversation was limited to asking ‘are we there yet?’ and ‘where are we going now?’

I saw an amazing array of interesting things, but it felt like I was watching them through the window of a moving vehicle.