“3 May – Bistritz. – Left Munich at 8:35 p.m.on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early the next morning. Should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late.” (From Jonathan Harker’s Journal – Chapter 1 – Dracula)
The above are the first words of Stoker’s classic, and so here I sit musing about what Munich might have looked like in 1897. Doubtless, I wouldn’t be sitting in an airport with the smell of smog and jet fuel all around. Doubtless as well that I would have a laptop computer with immediate access to all the world’s information resources, a digital camera and an iPod either. More likely, I would fancy myself being perhaps at least a little better prepared for the rugged terrain than Jonathan, and hopefully at least a little more aware of the mythology than our hero is at the outset as well. In addition, unlike Jonathan, I will not be traveling to Vienna, nor arriving directly to Bistritz as my trail will take me through Poland, Slovakia and Hungary before ending in Romania, but all things considered, the starting point is at least similar, and I will hopefully end up in a lot of the same places as are mentioned in the book. For reference, if you look on a map, you’ll notice that Bistritz is relatively “high” (i.e. north) in Romania, with subsequent waypoints being Borgo Pass (farther south), and eventually Brasov, the nearest modern jump-point before hiking the 15 miles through pretty rough Carpathian country to get to Bran Castle (the “actual” Castle Dracula), though in Stoker’s classic, Bistritz is actually the closest “post town” (i.e. mail stop), and lends good reason as to why correspondence took so stinkin’ long a hundred years ago.
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