Adapt, Improvise, Overcome… Or Not.

I arrived in Brasov (terminal pictured here... isn't it picturesque? I know...not really) just after 5:30 a.m. with no idea how to start about trying to get to Curtea, and tried a number of options, all of which included, by the way, a significant amount of wandering around, pointing and grunting, trying English, Russian, Martian… whatever, all to an eventual no avail. You see, there’s really just no way to get to Curtea de Arges in a day, at least that I could find. I’m a big believer in the Green Berret maxim of “Adapt, Improvise, Overcome”, and so set to work on trying to figure out how to make it happen, but below is a basic outline of where my efforts got me.

• Train. Quite simply, no trains run to the Curtea. Period. If you look at a map of Romania, none even run close, except to the next most proximal town, which still leaves you some 50 km (30 miles) from the Curtea (which is too far to walk and back when you have to be back in Brasov by 9 pm the same day). Plus, said trains run infrequently, so even if you got out there, you might not be able to get back until the next day.
• Bus. Okay, get this. Buses run to Curtea, but it takes 8 – 10 hours to get there!!! Remember now, it’s only 100 km away (200 by road)! That means that the bus is only averaging 20 km/hr (12 mph). What the heck? The lady at the info counter indicated that I could catch a bus to Curtea at about 10 am, and that it would get into town around 6 pm. When I asked when it came back, she just sort of grimly smiled and shrugged her shoulders. Based on that, there would be no real way for me to get there and get back and still make my 9 pm hard deck for going back to Budapest.
• Taxi. I approached a taxi, showed him the map for where we were (Brasov) and where I wanted to go (Curtea) and asked him how much it would cost to get there. He scratched his chin in contemplation and then told me 100 Euro (about $200). “What?!” I responded incredulously, “it’s only a 200 km drive!” He just smiled and shrugged as well and said that it was a long way off, a difficult drive, and considering that he would need to take me there and back, plus waiting time in between as I putzed around the ruins, anything less than 100 Euro wasn’t really reasonable. After I thought about it for a few minutes, he was probably right. It’d be 400 km, easily 6 – 8 hours, and therefore the equivalent of a full workday, plus cost of gas and wear and tear. I thanked him and then turned back to the drawing board.
• Car. You can rent a car for about 20 Euro (about $40), which didn’t sound bad, and that included insurance. But by the time you add in gas (which is even more expensive than in the states), that would be another $75, plus mileage (the 20 Euros don’t cover an “unlimited mileage” plan and are intended for local driving, I think), you’re back up to what it would cost to just pay the cabbie for a taxi.
• Covert Air Insurgency. So how about it I chartered a plane from Bucharest and a parachute, and had them drop me somewhere above Curtea around 5 pm, leaving me to try to just “drop in” to where I was supposed to be. The problems are less daunting than the other options, admittedly, but I just didn’t think I’d have time to pull it all off. I mean, considering that I’ve never parachuted, the winds around here are fairly strong at this time of year, there is significant cloud-cover, the ruins sit next to a large hydro-electric power plant on a fast-moving river, and everything else is thickly covered by 50’ pine trees, with still free-roving wolf-packs on the forest floor, and that my knee surgery from May still isn’t 100% yet, not to mention that I’d still have to figure out a way to get BACK to Brasov by 9 pm, well...I figured I’d punt. I know. I’m a wuss. Sorry to disappoint.

So… I adapted, I improvised, but didn’t overcome. Maybe next trip when Sami is with me. If such a thing comes to pass. In the mean time, I decided to opt for my original plan and to visit Bran Castle instead. Bran has Drac history in it too, even if he did only hang out there for a few weeks at various times during his attempts at conquest, and since I was already in Transylvania, and since I couldn’t get to Curtea, it seemed like the thing to do.