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One of the main reasons we chose Brașov as our first stop in Romania was that it’s the main port of call in Transylvania, the western province both separated from and glued to the other two – Wallachia and Moldavia – by the Carpathian mountains, is that it’s relatively close to a handful of castles of varying historical and aesthetic significance. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out if this was pushed for by Her or myself. While in theory possible to visit by public transit according to the very helpful staff at the Brașov Tourism Information, it is, and shall remain, in the theoretical domain. The stars apparently would have to align in order for that to become anything more than an exercise to get stranded out in the Romanian country side. Couple this with our insufficiently diagnosed and perhaps not entirely rational aversion to renting cars in Europe outside Germany and France, we were left with basically no options that didn’t involve putting our lives and a measurable fraction of our net worth in the hands of a local tour operator. Leading up to the tour, by virtue of having found them myself online, I couldn’t really complain too loudly, but I freely admit that I wondered what I had gotten us into with a full day castle perusal through a company called Flip Flop Tours.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can safely say my consternation around this wallet-whopping tour was only partially merited. Flip Flop Tours was nothing like the ‘tour’ companies of Krakow, that are essentially glorified taxi drivers that shuttle you to the actual tours provided by the operators of the sites themselves (true for Auschwitz and Wieliczka, at least). Instead, as it turns out, Flippie, as it’s called by precisely no one, is a nano business where our tour guide was not only the owner and (sole?) operator of said establishment, but a quad-lingual, super sociable veritable fountain of knowledge of Romanian history, culture and folklore. His name is Florino and he singlehandedly made an otherwise prolonged, some might say gruelling, I know I would, tour quite enjoyable.

Along with six Spanish-speakers and one French, we set out on a minibus tour of Peles Castle, Bran Castle and the Raznow Fortress. Yes, all in one day and because there just wasn’t enough cruelty in the world before, unbeknownst to us, we had scheduled the tour on what is the First day of Summer and Childrens’ Day, June 1st. If you think this meant these sites would be somewhat busy, I can with some confidence say you don’t fully appreciate how right you are. The only glimmer of the glass being half-full in this slow-moving river of people as sardines that we were, was that half of the visitors were kids and more provided ground cover than obstruct things that were actually worthwhile seeing. For Peles Castle, for me it would have to be the wood work. With my untrained eyes, of course it was exquisite. The real proof of the quality of the workmanship was that there were rooms where the woodwork was so intricate, so delicate, so expertly done that today’s restoration experts doubted they could put it back together again and as such simply left it as is and blocked public access.

Bran Castle is, according to legend, the castle that inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, despite the link to Vlad the Impaler being tenuous at best. Suffice to say, local hawkers of cheesy knick-knack, t-shirts and all manner landfill-bound souvenirs and Dracula paraphernalia have created a figurative moat around the castle entrance that one must brave in order to visit this 14th century toll-booth / princess castle. While the setting against the mountains / hills is somewhat scenic, if you were to look up underwhelming in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure there’s at least a mention of the Bran Castle tour.

Due to the statutory holiday, coupled with Romania’s still developing and not quite caught up to demand, road infrastructure, it’s not hard to imagine that winding, often very scenic mountain roads became subject to severe congestion. We had little choice but to sit and suffer it out in our air-conditioned Mercedes Benz minibus stuffing our faces with Triogane cu Vanille (stupendously delicious Romanian custard pastries) for what seemed hours on end. The local law enforcement, were, incredulously, trying to keep things moving by selectively blocking off access through roads that otherwise may have distributed traffic more evenly. In the face of adding our bus to the end of a particularly long line of cars and trucks, our guide, and hero, presumably by virtue of this not being his first rodeo, expertly thought on his feet and made the police wave us through onto a now virtually deserted road as he had managed to convince them we were on our way to see a lesser known, yet somewhat significant, mansion that required us to take that particular road. The smugness knew no bounds at that point and it was one of the reasons we were able to get back only two and not three or four hours late after an exhausting day.

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