Page 3 of 6

Our young hosts entertained us for the three days it took for the petrol to arrive. We drank sulphur tasting, health giving water from the local well, explored the belfry of the towns old Roman Orthodox church, and had piano recitals at their family home. They took us to the rundown local cinema to watch ultra violent, ultra cheap, subtitled American shoot-em-up movies, and in the evenings we toured the bars and clubs. The morning the petrol turned up, Mike rushed around to tip us off and so we were lucky to get in the growing queue early. Our introduction to Romanian generosity and hospitality was moving and unexpected.

After a breakfast of neon coloured fruit loops, washed down with coke, we left Ineu, and headed south east through a hilly rural landscape. The sky darkened, lightning flashed, and thunder boomed. Lightning struck a hill, and we sought sanctuary in an open sided, stone floored hay barn. We were soon joined by three cow herders and their nervous stock. Another terrifying bolt of lightning, this time striking not a hundred metres from the iron roofed shed, felt terribly foreboding as we neared the Transylvanian, mythical home of Count Dracula.

At the risk of inciting the wrath of the Transylvanian Dracula Society, Count Dracula is a creation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, and has no real life, or living dead equivalent. The character however is loosely associated with another delightful chap, Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler, to his mates) who passed through these mountains between bloodthirsty encounters with the invading Turks. He punished his enemies by carefully driving a stake through a victims backbone, avoiding vital nerves and organs, to ensure at least 48 hours of conscious pain before death. Apparently he rarely ate, without a Turk writhing on a stake in front of him.