Spa towns, tomatoes and the Motz people

After breakfast and paying for the night (a stunning 10.000 Lei, or $1.5) we set off for the market in Baile Felix , another spa resort a few kilometres further south. Whereas Baile 1 Mai is a peaceful village, this resort has been commercialised big time: high-rise hotels, disco’s and large swimming pools and lakes here and there, but not many visitors. Baile Felix was one of the most popular spa’s of Transylvania, but internal tourism in Romania has dipped since 1989 (not so many trade-union subsidised spa treatments for workers any more) and the hotels are seldom booked full. Still, the small market in the centre was lively, and we got some fresh and delicious tomatoes, cucumbers (small ones, the size of pears), green/yellow paprika’s (you eat these raw for lunch) and plums. This is usually the moment that Westerners get their second Romania-shock : for some reason fruit and vegetables taste much better here than at home. The difference between Dutch greenhouse-cultivated and over-perfected tomatoes (which taste like hard bags of sour water) and Romania home-grown non-insecticided tomatoes (which taste even better than Italian pomodores) is striking. Funny that the EU is lobbying to allow large-scale export of their subsidised agricultural products to Romania... can the fledgling local tomato market survive this invasion? For taste’s sake, let's hope so.

After leaving Baile Felix in beautiful weather (sunny and not too hot) on the now peaceful road, we got to cycle through the real Romania: rolling hills, long villages, chickens on the road, people watching their geese or working on the fields (something not seen much in the ‘richer’ countries of Eastern Europe) and pretty good roads. The contrast with Hungarian villages, just a few kilometres to the west, is very large: not so much western cars (not much cars at all, really), not so much large new houses or recent renovations, no ATM’s in larger villages, no tourist information signs. On the other hand there’s more to see for visitors: more animals pecking around, more people who wave or stare (or do both) at you, more horse-drawn carts, more old women letting their cows out (yes, holding a leash). The difference with Hungary becomes more striking when you realise that this is one of the richer rural parts of Romania.

As we proceeded south-east, the 1800 metre high Western Carpathian range came into sight to the left of us. We were planning to cycle straight through (or over) this range and reach Cluj avoiding main roads. We passed a number of hay-filled horse-cart ‘road-trains’. These belong to the lumberjacks who transport logs from the mountain valleys down to the towns and villages on the plain, and haul hay for their horses back up the mountains. Some of these people belong to the intreaging Motz ‘minority’: a special extra-stubborn group of Romanians (said to be descendants of the Celts) that fled into this part of the Carpathians after the Habsburg Empire ordered the men to serve in the army. They still live up there in characteristic villages and thatched houses (most found in the mountains south of the Aries river valley) in an almost mediaeval setting. Modern life has brought the lumberjacks easier ways of getting their carts uphill: they’re hooked in a long train behind a tractor, and the younger men gallop the horses up the road. On the steep way down, the cart’s brake is a piece of plastic or an old tyre, weighed down by large stones, that is dragged along behind the cart. Sometimes the stones drop off. The main cart route is the (asphalt) road from Stei (called Dr. Petru Groza on old maps) towards Arieseni and Campeni (which we didn’t take).

In the town of Beius we visited the market and bought enough food to survive a mountain trek. After another couple of kilometres we took a left turn from the main road that we had been following since Oradea, and headed over the last stretch of flat grasslands straight for the Apuseni (or West Carpathian) Mountains. To the south we could see dark rain clouds gathering against the range (which eventually decided not to rain on us), and increasingly had to struggle against a strong wind. We reached Pietroasa, a village beautifully situated at the foot of the mountains. No campings or hotels here: we wanted to camp in someone’s back yard or field. The wise old men of the village, discussing today’s events on a bench in the centre, advised us to go further towards the mountains and find a spot near the road. Heading on, the road soon turned from asphalt to gravel and after leaving Pietroasa the road entered a small valley gradually ascending into the mountains. After having passed a few horse-carts loaded with villagers returning from the fields and woods, we turned on to a steep and rough track, and found a nice spot of grass next to the stream. We also asked a woman who was hand-mowing grass in a nearby orchard if we could pitch the tent there, but the field still needed mowing, and she didn’t want us to flatten her grass. Next to the stream it was, then. After another successful joint-venture Dutch-Romanian meal we picked our dessert from nearby bramble and raspberry bushes. As a precaution we decided not to chain our bikes to a tree, but to lay them half under the front of our tent. Lots of people had seen us turn into this road, and we didn’t want to take any risks on our first night camping wild. After a very cold and very short semi-bath in the stream it took some acrobatics to get into the tent, but it was worth the peace of mind. Of course, nothing happened.