by Yesterday – another scorcher – I met up with the English couple from the doctor’s surgery. We had some drinks in the centre of town, in the square and down by the river. They already seem to be fans of Timișoara – much more so than Bucharest where they spent a year. She’ll be working full-time at the €8000-a-year British School which opened in 2019. Soon after that I played tennis. The 86-year-old bloke, who by now shuffles on and off the court, never ceases to amaze me.
My trip. I made an early start on Tuesday 20th July, the day after Britain declared freedom from Covid restrictions. I had a very long train journey in store. Romanian trains are notorious for their delays, so who knew how long. When I left home, the binmen – and women – were out in force. It started to spit with rain, and the rain intensified as we left the station at 6:50. Everyone, as far as I could see, was complying the the mask requirement. We had allocated seats, which considering the train was barely half-full, were more of a pain than anything. Look, the row behind is empty. I know your ticket says seat 64, but you don’t have to sit next to me. Maybe that’s my Britishness coming out, but mainly I had a heavy bag and I didn’t want to be cramped. You’ve got to be fully equipped on these long trips, as if you’re hiking, because they don’t provide anything. It’s madness really. You’re just about gagging for a beer after a while.
The CFR, the state-run railway, had clearly been the pride of Romania in communist times and before, but investment since then has been minimal. I saw rusting hulks of carriages, some carrying passengers, and I could make out dates on the engines, mostly from the early seventies. Many of the stations were decaying. The journey was roughly 800 km, about the distance from Wellington to Whangarei. I tried to figure out the train’s top speed. Most railways have mile or kilometre posts, and this line was no exception. When we were racing along, comparatively speaking, I timed how long it took to get from one white post to the next. Thirty-eight seconds; we were doing 95 km/h. (A few days later, on an even slower train, a younger guy wanted to know how fast we were going, and he just brought up an app on his phone. Bob’s your uncle.)
Despite the wet weather, I got to see a large cross-section of Romania on that train. The communist blocks. The abandonment, seemingly everywhere. Oradea, the thriving city I visited when I arrived in the country. The beautiful Vadu Crișului, not far from Oradea, in the middle of a forest and with a stunning waterfall. I had the trip mapped out, with a list of stations, before I went, so I could track our progress. I could see the car number plates change as we passed from one județ (county) to the next. Occasionally I needed to relieve myself. A numărul unu is doable on these trains, just. A numărul doi really isn’t. At about 8pm we stopped in Suceava and they briefly cut the engine. For a couple of minutes it was blissfully quiet. To my surprise, I reached Iași, my destination and the 40th stop on the line, bang on time, shortly before ten.
My guest house wasn’t far from the station. After checking in and having a relaxing bath for the first time in five years, hopping into bed felt so good. It had been a long day. When I got up, it was time for breakfast. This took place at a hotel just around the corner, which had a couple more stars than the place I was staying at. Breakfast was, if I’m honest, one of the highlights of Iași for me. They had the whole shebang. Bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, cold cuts, fried vegetables, yoghurt, pastries, even slices of cake. That did me for almost the whole day.
