Halloween in Transylvania

Everyone wants to scare you on Halloween, I want to make you feel safe and secure. Here's a 76-Second Travel Show episode from two years ago that tells how.

76-Second Travel Show: "Halloween in Transylvania"

Episode #004

F E A T U R I N G * 3 5 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

Transylvania is best known for a possibly bi-curious fanged creature who was concocted by a Irishman, Bram Stoker, who never visited the country. Some who visit have Dracula in mind, but it starts to dissipate around the time one sees the hokey Dracula souvenir stands outside Bran's "Dracula Castle" -- s0-called because the real-life, quite-moustached Vlad Tepes (after whom Dracula was based) may have come by for an overnighter and a steak sandwich. Or not.

The book took places in the valley northeast of Bistrita, far north. The campy (in a bad way) "Dracula Castle Hotel" built by enterprising communists in the '70s is far from the medieval flavor you'd expect. And the $1 trip to "Dracula's tomb" one-time so startled a Canadian tourist, he suffered a heart attack when a costumed Drac burst out of his coffin. It's not really worth the drive.

But TRANSYLVANIA is wonderful, weird and gorgeous, possibly the most bizarre and interesting part of Europe I've seen. With countless Saxon villages with churches and homestays to the south and the ethnic Hungarian heart of Szekely Land, including great destinations of Cluj Napoca and Targu Mures.

You can hike, ski, castle-hop you're way across the huge area between Bucharest and Hungary, but best -- if you don't mind the drivers -- is renting a car and hitting backroads, where you are the alien to most locals, who whip off mountains, over the road, and up another hill via horse cart.

Cars? Roads? Who needs them in Transylvania?

Three things I tell my friends to do in Transylvania:

1. Spend a couple nights at Mioritica, a homestay in Sibiel village west of Sibiu. It's run by a local teacher, who shares the drinks, invites clarinetists over and puts the beer in the chilly brook running by the few rooms. Email coldeasv [at] yahoo [dot] com.
   
2. Rent a car a couple days. Roads can be awful, but back roads to random Saxon villages, with churches and homestays, opens up the region's past.
3. It's fine to go to Bran Castle (the over-billed Dracula castle), but spooky castle at Hunedoara (an otherwise gray, communist town most miss) looks more the part.

This episode's footage includes a Roma (gypsy) horse fair outside Odorhieu Secuiesc, the Praid Salt Mine (I think -- maybe its the one in Turda?), the mountains of Apuseni Mountains west of Cluj, and a certain scientist from the Pharmacy Museum in Cluj. Some of it may seem a bit grim. That's on me and this Halloween theme. Transylvania is worth it.

Regretable Travel Brochures

HOW NOT TO MAKE TRAVEL BROCHURES
Romania is a wonderful country to visit -- I might call it Europe's most fascinating, considering its mountains, traditional life, and its horse carts rolling over highways and onto ancient paths as if the new age had never come. But there are somethings about it that is a bit unnerving.

• The drivers are crazy.
• The stray dogs of Bucharest.
  
• Then there's the Dracula thing, which manifests itself in hokey 'Dracula hotels' and restaurants and at least one castle where Vlad Tepes -- the real life Dracula -- may or may not have dropped by and defecated on a lone overnighter in the 15th century.
  

None of this can rival the horrors found in even a random sample of Romanian tourist brochures, each peppered with unexpected collage techniques, models in painful positions, actual torture, blurry borders on aged photos, scary guys with beards.

Of course, Romania is not alone in poorly conceived travel brochures, so I've thumbed through a stack and come up with TEN TIPS on how you can make your own travel brochures.

--> ACTION POINT: If you've come across questionably planned travel brochures, REPORT THEM. Please scan and post at the new 'Regretable Travel Brochures' group on LonelyPlanet.com.