by 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.
