Beautiful Bucharest Rises from the Wreckage

Ever since Eastern Europe opened to tourists in the early 90s, it's been a race to find places that are truly different and get there before Starbucks and Gap do. If you're sick of doing cowboy slammers with IT consultants in Wenceslaz Square, then the place to head for is Bucharest. The crazy, beautiful capital of Romania, Bucharest regards the outside world as a distant, unattainable place of rumour. Its population is still coming out from under one of the most extraordinarily strange regimes of the 20th century. You won't find Bucharest easy, but you will find it different.

The first thing you need to know is that Bucharest is a wreck; a junkyard of remains and ruins from half a dozen historical eras. Concrete buildings stained black by soot crowd the boulevards that once featured the grand residences and elegant arcades that earned the city the nickname 'little Paris'. The boulevards are still there, but many of the impressive buildings were swallowed by the earthquakes that strike Bucharest every 50 years or so. The first earthquake gave the city a wealth of stylish Art Deco apartment blocks. A second, in 1940, gave the post-war communist regime a chance to throw up a series of gloomy Stalinist buildings into the wreckage.

By the time a third earthquake hit in 1978, the country's loopy dictator, the infamous Nicolae Ceaucescu, was determined to rebuild the entire place in North Korean-style splendour. He aimed to adorn the city's fountain-strewn avenues with bizarrely ornate apartment blocks. He was about a quarter of the way through when he was shot on Christmas Day, 1989.

The crazy, beautiful capital of Romania, Bucharest still regards the outside world as a distant, unattainable place of rumour.
That any part of the old city has survived is a miracle, especially since the country's desperate poverty has made restoration work all but impossible. But survive it has, and the area known as Lipscani is now one of the strangest and most alluring nightlife places in Europe. To get to the clubs you have to go down cobbled streets, complete with roaming dogs, gangs of kids and potholes. The area is safe enough, but it helps to have a bag of sweets or plenty of coins if you want to make it through easily.

It may not sound picturesque, but a visit to Lipscani is worth it. The old and new jostle together in a way that's vanished elsewhere. Two doors up from a rave bar, a wedding party will have crowded out a cafe, with ancient hipsters playing trad jazz; turn the corner and a gypsy band will be playing a beer garden, with people tucking into huge plates of pork sausage and marmelik, a sort of local polenta.

Alluring as Lipscani is, what really makes Bucharest otherworldly is its new sectors. The area south of Lipscani, once known as Socialist Victory Boulevard, but today called Unirii (Unity), was built after Ceaucescu visited North Korea in 1971. He became smitten with the idea that the best way to build socialism was to create an imperial cult of ancestry around himself and his family. Here, multi-storey apartment towers march to the horizon. Because Romanians are a Latin people, the style of the buildings was like a post-modern Italianate rococo, with concrete curlicues and parapets, flowery metal balconies and overhanging verandas. It's fair to say there isn't much like it anywhere else.

To get to the clubs you have to go down cobbled streets, complete with roaming dogs, gangs of kids and potholes.
And if the Unirii is distinctive, then what it leads to is like nothing on earth. This is the notorious Casa Poporului, the Palace of the People. A massive parliamentary edifice, it's the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon. To call it kitsch would be generous - marble inside and out, flute columns and more than a thousand chandeliers; it is the world's largest wedding reception centre, a monument to tawdry ideas of splendour. The building houses the Romanian parliament, but it is 90% empty - it is simply unfillable. After the revolution there were plans to blow it up - except there wasn't enough dynamite in the country.

Now it has become the symbol of the city, an undeniably unique feature, while around it swirls the old city: the broken streets; the roaming dogs; the sharp-suited EU elite, and the locals in dusty tracksuits; the cripples flashing their broken limbs outside the shopping mall; and the hookers near the ruined Metro entrance crossing themselves when a priest walks by.

It is a beautiful, tragic, harsh city. It is something else. Get there quick - it joins the EU in 2007 - because before you know it the world you left will be there with you.

Hitching in Romania

The first time I ever tried to hitchhike was in 1995, out of Paris, on a cold grey morning in March. I stood beneath a concrete bridge, clutching a cardboard sign saying AMSTERDAM as an endless stream of Renaults zipped past. Eight hours later, I had to drive back into town and buy a bus ticket.

When I got to Amsterdam, I met a Dutchman who explained that hitching from Paris was notoriously difficult. He scribbled rows of equations on a napkin, unlocking the secrets of roads from Amsterdam to Berlin. To complement these used-napkin equations I purchased a foldout map that depicted Europe from Ireland to Mongolia. Four tiny red lines represented all Dutch roads. Needless to say, I got lost.

Over the years I tried hitching in Western Europe many times - but was never any good at it. The romance of standing at the edge of a highway, waiting, was belted out of me.

Cut to the present day, Maramures, Romania. The Maramures county, snuggled against the Ukrainian border, is a land that time forgot, rural and remote, cut off from the rest of the country by the Carpathian Mountains. To go there is to step back in time. Public transport is practically non-existent. Locals hitch - and with no car, I suddenly found myself forced to return to the transport of my youth.

The first part of the journey I was able to do by bus, from the small spa city Vartra Dornei to Borsa, a town near a winter ski resort. Looking out the window I saw mountains rising up, covered by pine trees.

Maybe when hitchhikers die and go to heaven they find themselves in Maramures - a place where drivers actually stop...
At the edge of the road running through Borsa two women were already hitchhiking. I stood nearby, backpack leaning on my leg, and observed.

Americans, Australians and Brits stick out their thumbs. In some countries you lazily extend an index finger. Here in Romania, the two women were waving their hands frantically.

It was with some embarrassment that I stretched out my hand to do the same. Locals walking past stared. I stuck out because of my Western clothes and backpack. I could see what they were thinking: where the hell was my car?

Horse-and-cart is a standard form of transport here. Two passed by, and then an ancient, battered vehicle stopped. The two women got inside. So did I, sitting beside our driver - an old man with golden teeth in a cowboy hat. He didn't say a word, just put the car into gear and drove.

In the morning sunlight the mountains were stunning.

We passed a gypsy camp, then a hermit living in a tent in the middle of nowhere, selling honey. The driver got out, bought a jar, got back in. Pot-holed, bumpy, the road worsened, bringing us to the town of Moisei, which with its dusty streets had an almost Latin American feel. The women paid. I did the same.

Hitching in Western Europe in the 90s, I often found graffiti scrawled on road signs next to hitching points. There were messages of encouragement, but usually they were darkly pessimistic. 'I have been here 2 days', or 'This is the worst hitching site in Europe'.

In Maramures there aren't such problems. Cars pick you up quickly. After Moisei I was dropped off at a petrol station and joined a group of about 20 locals, all hitchhiking. They stared, for once again I stuck out - they had farm equipment and bags of grain, I had a backpack. There were so many of us I thought we'd be there forever, but as almost every car in Maramures stops, it was a surprisingly short wait.


He dropped me off near Botiza, my main destination in the Izei Valley. A river winds through the village, with many rickety wooden bridges leading to individual houses. The village also boasts an impressive wooden church, built in 1694. I dropped the money I'd been given in its donation box
Maybe when hitchhikers die and go to heaven they find themselves in Maramures - a place where drivers actually stop, and the people are remarkably generous. But if you do get stuck at night, one person told me, you can knock on any door. You'll be given a room and food in exchange for a little money. Botiza is the perfect end to the hitch through rural Paradise: a place to kick back, savour the remote beauty, and let time slip by

DRACULA, BETWEEN LEGEND AND REALITY

Dracula or Vlad the Impaler was the son of Vlad Dracul (1436-1442; 1443-1447) and grandson of Mircea the Old (1386-1418). Vlad Dracul was dubbed a knight of the Dragon Order by the Hungarian king. All the members of the order had a dragon on their coat of arms, and that is what brought him the nickname of Dracul (the Devil). Vlad the Impaler used to sign himself Draculea or Draculya - the Devil's son -, a name which was distorted into Dracula.

Dracula's renown reached the West through the Saxons from the Transylvanian towns of Brasov (Kronstadt) and Sibiu (Hermannstadt), who often gave shelter to those who claimed the Wallachian throne. In order to escape the peril of losing his throne, Vlad would punish the Saxons. Sibiu and the neighbouring area were pillaged and burnt down by Vlad, and many Saxons were impaled. The same happened to the Saxon merchants who came on business to Târgoviste.

In fact, Vlad was called Tepes (the Impaler) only after his death (1476). He ruled in Wallachia between 1456-1462 and in 1476. In 1462, having been defeated by the Turks, Vlad took refuge in Hungary. In 1476, with the help of the Hungarian king Matia Corvin and the Moldavian prince Stephen the Great, Vlad took over the Wallachian throne again for a month. A battle followed, during which Vlad was killed. His body was buried in the church of the Snagov Monastery, on an island near Bucharest. His body lies in front of the altar. In 1935, a richly dressed but beheaded corpse was exhumed at Snagov, a fate known to have overtaken Dracula, whose head was supposedly wrapped, perfumed and dispatched as a gift to the Turkish sultan.

They say that impalling was one of Dracula's favourite punishments, but he was not the only one who made use of it at the time. Other German and Spanish princes would do the same. He used the method for boyars, thieves and criminals, Turks, Saxons and those who conspired against him; more than once it happened that a whole forest of sharp stakes with enemies' heads would rise around Târgoviste, the capital of Wallachia at the time.

Horrified by these atrocities, the Saxons printed books and pamphlets in which they told about Vlad's cruelty. These booklets also reached Germany and Western Europe, where Dracula became known as a bloody tyrant.

In 1897, the Irish writer Bram Stoker published Dracula, which made Vlad the Impaler famous world-wide. Stoker read the stories about Dracula printed in the 15th and 16th centuries and was struck by his acts of cruelty. He decided to make him his character; he also read several books about Transylvania (a name of Latin origin, meaning "the country beyond the forests"), and thought that this "exotic" land would make a proper setting for Dracula's deeds.
In fact, Stoker used Vlad only as a source of inspiration, since in his novel, Dracula is not prince Vlad the Impaler, but a Transylvanian count living in a mysterious castle where he lured his victims. His story takes place in the Bistritza area, and the castle lies near the Bârgau Pass (in the Carpathian Mountains). As Stoker had never visited Transylvania, most places and happenings were pure fiction.

Legend and true history about Dracula intermingle and are being kept alive by tourist destinations like the Monastery of Snagov near Bucharest, or Bran Castle near Brasov