Travel: Romania

On the way back to Timișoara we stopped at the rhyming towns of Oravița and Moravița, the latter of which was a stone’s throw from the border with Serbia. Mum was surprisingly enthusiastic about crossing the border, which was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I think she was keen simply because she’s a fan of Novak Djokovic who hails from Serbia. Dad was a lot less keen, and said he would have put his foot down had he known that Serbia was outside the EU. We got through the customs grilling and made our way to Vršac, pronounced (I think) vr-shats; just like in Srbija, the Serbian word for the country, there’s no vowel sound in the first syllable. Another interesting point: the Serbian language uses both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. We sat in a café and had ice coffees. These were delicious; the best coffee my parents had during their Romanian trip wasn’t even in Romania. It was also the cheapest coffee they had. We had no local currency, no euros either, just Romanian lei, and they didn’t accept plastic. They decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of making us change money, so they gave us the coffees on the house. I might visit Vršac at some point in the future; I’ll need to change there if I ever go to Belgrade by train. We had a job returning the car at the airport; we hit Timișoara at peak time and the office was empty when we eventually got there.

Seeing such beautiful scenery and a completely different way of life was quite something, but with Mum the whole experience was extremely fraught. Even simple decisions such as what food to buy at a supermarket or a restaurant became almost politically charged. If Dad or I ever disagreed with anything, she took it as a personal affront and wouldn’t speak to us or would say that she wanted to go home (I never knew which home she meant). She accused us of ganging up on her and even, at one point, abusing her.

On Friday night, my parents’ last night in Romania, we had a meal out. Or tried to. At the third place (the others were expensive) we sat outside, but then a torrential storm literally ripped through, tearing shades from their poles and knocking over tables. At that point Mum just wanted to get a few slices of pizza from the kiosk downstairs, but when I suggested that I could do better than that by buying whole pizzas from a pizza parlour, again she didn’t want to speak to me. Shit, I live here, I know what’s available. Why do you have to make all the decisions? She didn’t even trust me to drive the rental car apart from on a couple of occasions when Dad basically handed me the wheel.

Money has changed Mum almost beyond recognition. She has worked hard, I’ll certainly give her that, but like many of her generation, she thinks her financial success is solely due to her own efforts, making morally right decisions at the right times, living the right way, being a good person. Her value as a person can be measured purely by her net worth. As a friend said to me last year, life has become a game that you win by having the most shit when you die.

I felt a deep sadness yesterday when my parents left. Mum and I love each other dearly. I saw the last two weeks as a big opportunity to get on with her, to enjoy spending time wth her, and even though we didn’t completely fall out, I felt I failed miserably. I’m at a loss as to what I could have done differently, apart from simply agreeing with everything she said and did, which is Dad’s solution far too often. I suggested that they come here earlier next year when it will be considerably cooler, and perhaps just stay in Timișoara which Mum seems to like. Perhaps they could go on a Baltic cruise – Mum has become a fan of cruises, which remove a lot of the stressful decision-making from the equation. (With so many damn people, they’re my idea of hell.)

For the last two weeks I’ve been full of cold. It’ll take ages for me to come right, not that I ever really come right. My parents said they’d pay for me to have an operation on my sinuses and I’m very grateful for that. This week I’ll find out what the procedure would entail and what it would cost.

Yes it’s hot. Right now it’s 31 with a cloudless sky and hardly a breath of wind. Later it should reach 35. I’m relieved to see that they’re forecasting only 35 for this Thursday, rather than the 39 they were predicting yesterday.

Next post: photos.

It’s been a funny couple of weeks. When I met Mum and Dad at the airport and for a short time afterwards, everything was fantastically wonderful. It was a pleasure to share such simple experiences with my parents. The river walks, the markets, the local beer. The sights, the sounds, the smells. Especially the smells. But on 14th June, Mum’s 68th birthday, we left Timișoara…

Dad drove our Budget rental car; I sat in the passenger seat and attempted to navigate. Mum sat in the back. Yeah OK, we ended up on some cracked, potholed, undulating roads that were marked in white on my map (white meant that all bets regarding road quality were off), and a couple of times we got well and truly lost, but Mum complained at virtually every turn of the steering wheel and made an interesting (if challenging) experience thoroughly unpleasant. I’d been extremely naive to think that, in Romania of all places, travelling with Mum would be anything else. Twice in sleepy but beautiful villages I asked old men for directions. It was fascinating to hear them speak the Banat dialect where the last ‘t’ sound of tot înainte (“straight ahead”) morphs into the ‘ch’ of ‘cheese’.

We arrived in Orșova, beautifully positioned at the confluence of the Cerna and the Danube, but what a dump Orșova was: dirty, crumbling in parts, and almost entirely lacking in places to eat or drink. Brutalist Ceaușescu-era blocks dominated the waterfront. Our hotel, two streets back from the water, was pleasant though, and there was plenty to see outside the town. On one (hot) day we went on a boat trip down the Danube from the Decebal sculpture to the Ponicova cave and back. We entered the Veterani cave which had been strategically important in the wars between the Ottomans and Austro-Hungary. On another day we followed the Danube south, and although we were close to the tripoint with Serbia and Bulgaria, it felt like deepest Romania. Hay was manually gathered into almost humanoid stooks; meadows were completely unspoilt and literally buzzing with life; majestic cranes had built huge nests on top of telegraph poles; horses and carts were commonplace. Every little village had a bar of some sort, and you could usually buy a coffee or a beer for a matter of pence.

From Orșova we made the short trip north to Băile Herculane, a town of faded grandeur situated on the valley of the Cerna River. It is still a popular spa town today, with the hot pungent sulphur springs a draw for Romanian tourists. Just down the road was a resort called Seven Springs which was hit with middle-aged (and older) men. Our hotel had a lovely setting on the bank of the Cerna but it was run by a shyster who had spent time building his empire in Australia and was the proud owner of two black Mercedes. He went by the name of Johnny; his sobriquet was plastered all over his vast complex and I winced every time I saw it. Johnny was usually in view, surveying his kingdom from on high, making us all feel uneasy. Johnny, could you please piss off?! On our first full day at Băile Herculane, we went on a hike to a waterfall and back, an ascent of over 900 metres. The previous day we’d been warned by a Romanian couple that the track was far from easy and it was a three-hour round trip, but Mum and Dad weren’t to be deterred. Romania is largely an OSH-free zone, and New Zealand-style steps weren’t to be seen. Dad forged on enthusiastically at the front, and as the climb became steeper, the rather apt red cross signs mysteriously petered out. I eventually persuaded my parents to stop climbing. We’d gone off-piste, and getting down wouldn’t be easy to say the least. Mum seemed quite spooked by the situation. But when we got back on track, we did get to the top and down again, and I was very impressed with both their fitness levels. It was a relief to get to the bottom even so; the track was dangerous, we were slipping all over the place on the jagged rocks, and any of us could have broken a leg. That was my favourite day of the whole trip; due to the slight emergency situation we were briefly a fully functional family.