45:52.6N  24:58.2E,  Fagaras, Romania

 

We spent last night in Julita â it was LOVELY, a deligtful lady in a pensione let us camp in her orchard with the chickens.  We had dinner there and it was under 20 quid the lot.  Julita is in the Transylvanian foothills.  But as soon as you leave the villages, it becomes

TERRIBLY poor, big cities rible, rubble & half finished jobs, scruffy buildings and poorly dressed people.  The main A7 road going W to E is incredibly busy today with truck convoys and very slow progress.  It all seems like post-communist chaos, abandoned power stations, HUGE pipes go along, up & over the road from power stations, all blackened, with lagging falling off.  There are prostitutes outside the truck stops, poor little things, it makes you sad to see young girls having to scrape a living like that.

 

At 7pm we said âletâs treat ourselves to a pensione tonightâ â but that turned out to be quite hard to find! We have ended up in this town of Fagaras in a dead posh hotel thatâs very fancy with horrible lighting and a sweet receptionist (35 euros a nite inc bâfast).  The town is 30,000 people & grotsville, but it has an incredible 14th C fortress which we were able to walk all over with no National Trust snoopers anywhere!  And thereâs an amazing cathedral in the town centre which must be having a fortune spent on it restoring, rebuilding the towers and re-gilding them.  A lovely service was going on inside with beautiful male voice song, and carpets all over the floor & pews.  In contrast, just outside on the traffic island was a pack of feral dogs, some missing limbs, conducting a complex conversation in Romanian barking and bonking eachother silly.  No wonder there are so many.  There are storksâ nests on platforms on top of the telegraph poles, some with resident storks.  What a place of amazing contrasts!