Day 10 - Tuesday 12th October - Towards Brasov
Official Itinerary says: "After breakfast at the hotel we will be leaving Durau and driving south to view both the spectacular Bicaz Gorges and the Red Lake. The Gorges form the narrow route from Moldavia back into Transylvania and we will be travelling a route known as the neck of hell, hewn through sky-scraping limestone cliffs. At the end of the Gorges is the artificial Red Lake, created from a landslide in 1838, which is notable for the sight of many drowned trees protruding from the water.
If there is sufficient time, we will take a short detour to visit Lazarea Castle. Built in the fifteenth century, the Hungarian castle is known as one of Transylvania's most beautiful Rennaisance buildings and is home to a group of local artists. Continuing south we have a long drive to reach our destination of Brasov, Romania's second city. However we will be stopping at the town of Miercurea-Cuic to buy food and breaking the journey at regular intervals. Finally we will arrive in the evening at Brasov for three nights at the Hotel Aro-Palace. Dinner will be at the hotel, and for those with the stamina there are plenty of bars to explore in the town itself."
Augh. Yesterday we seemed to spend practically the entire day on the sodding coach. We were supposed to be visiting a couple of monasteries, but Nicolae (for reasons best known to himself) rearranged the itinerary once again without telling us. We ended up having to backtrack to get to one of the monasteries, which he'd apparently just been planning to miss out and hope we didn't notice. This seems to be happening more and more frequently, and it's starting to piss off quite a few people.
Yesterday morning (shortly before I embarked on the drinking bonanza that cut short my commentary), Nicolae was on the mic at the front of the bus, telling one of his longwinded and highly improbable stories as we wound our way away from Hotel Castle Dracula. Halfway through the story, Blond Klif got to his feet and moved right to the back of the coach, where he wouldn't be able to 'hear any more of this bullshit'. Seeing as at that precise moment Nicolae was saying, 'As you know, water has memory, and for this particular spell to work the water had to be absolutely virgin, so I was not allowed to speak at all as I fetched it from the well...', I guess we can't really blame Klif.
We got to the first monastery and piled off the bus. All the exterior walls of the monastery had been covered with murals at some point in the past, but the elements had taken their toll on the ones not protected by the wide, overhanging roof. A lot of the other ones, especially around the entranceway, had been defaced and various names carved into them during one of the many times that the area had been invaded by various armies. On the back wall there's a massive mural depicting judgement day, with sinners being judged and sent to either Heaven (complete with palm trees) or the river of hell (complete with wolves, for some reason). Inside everything is gilded and painted, and there's a very nice mural that I take a liking to of the architect presenting the church to God. Admittedly, we all liked that particular picture because the architect looked just like Ginger Dave, which he wasn't especially amused about.
The second monastery is practically identical to the first, but it's still nice to walk around. There's a group of Orthodox nuns from America wandering around, and we stop to chat with them for a while (they're here for a pilgrimage to the place where their patron saint is buried). I don't know if this will surprise any of you guys reading this, but there's a vast amount of religious tolerance going on in our group of goths. Some of them make no secret at all about the fact that they don't believe in God, but they respect the fact that some of us do and just kinda shrug it off. In fact, they're a lot more tolerant of religious beliefs than of, say, a person's opinion on movies… odd that.
Random side-note: A couple of nights ago Becky was talking about how, on one previous trip, they'd had a hardcore satanist with them, who’d wanted to go into the Orthodox churches and spit on the alters. The rest of the group quickly disassociated themselves with him, I'm quite happy to say. (This random conversation led on to a long and quite fascinating discussion about religion, incidentally, which took up most of the rest of the night. Nerds are the most fun people in the world to have deep discussions with... did I mention this?)
Anyway, back to my point. After the monasteries there's another unscheduled two-hour stop for lunch. I can't even remember the name of the town, but we stopped there while Stephan the driver went to get an essential part fitted on the van. And it really was essential, since it was part of the heating system that hasn't been working for the past three days. I swear, I will never complain about the bus being too hot ever again. I cannot wait to be warm again.
After lunch, Stella and me devise a fun way of keeping warm. I move back a couple of seats to sit next to her, and we break out the vodka. What follows is the reason why I'm narrating this all today instead of yesterday. Several people are already referring to it as 'The Stella and Rakie Show', and basically it involved Stella's two bottles of vodka, my bottles of wine and plum brandy, and KT's Coke, which we steal while she's not looking. Yay for mixers! Although actually mixing vodka into Coke on a moving coach is a very delicate operation, and I end up with a lot of it all over my coat and trousers. We ask Ginger Dave if he'll mix it for us, since he's less drunk than we are, but he refuses – he has very definite opinions about vodka, one of which is that it should not be mixed. Apparently, we're philistines, on top of everything else.
Stella, incidentally, is the most fun person in the whole wide world when she's drunk. You think that I have a limitless capacity for talking crap? You should try hanging out with Stella. She's amazing – I swear, she could babble for England (if they ever made babbling an Olympic sport, which they probably should). It was the most fantastic, stream-of-consciousness stuff that I've ever heard, like there was no pause at all between a thought popping into her mind and the words coming out of her mouth. I tried to keep up, with the result that we were both babbling away about absolute and total crap for about three hours, barely pausing for breath and with everyone else at the back of the bus laughing at us and trying to figure out what the hell we were on about. Our favourite two moments were accidentally calling Tom Cruise's girlfriend 'Penepolie', and a joke that she made me tell three separate times that ends with the line, 'Smee again, goan fuck yerself!'... which probably shows just how drunk we both were.
(Note from Future Rakie: Becky actually recorded some of the Stella and Rakie Show on my video camera. This is an extract from the exact transcription:
STELLA: I remember that day because I was eating a Pot Noodle, and it was a Nice and Spicy one…
RAKIE: Can anyone turn on some more lights here? The light’s a bit dim in here…
STELLA: And then a plane crashed on Fred and I remember that day because I had to go to the laundrette and wash my smalls… I kept me bra on though.
RAKIE: I can’t adjust my lighting… oh, there we go.
(At this point, Ginger Dave switches on his annoying blue pocket light that he’s been shining in our faces all week)
STELLA: And fuck! I’m in a disco now! We can all go ‘ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDDD!’
(I pass my video camera over to Becky and jump back into camera shot. I seem to have a sticker in the middle of my forehead, incidentally, and I believe it was ‘so that Stella could mail me back to my own seat when she got sick of me’.)
RAKIE: Ooh, it’s all blue now.
STELLA: ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID! You do it! ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!
RAKIE: ACIIIIIIIIID?
STELLA: No, rubbish. Do it again.
RAKIE: What? No… how does it go?
STELLA: ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!
RAKIE: ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID! Is that better, Ms Stella?
STELLA: I’m not sure.
RAKIE: Well, I don’t know. Why is there a blue light on us?
And this went on for THREE HOURS. Bloody hell.)
I'm almost certain that some people were getting royally pissed off with us towards the end, but by that point we were obviously too drunk to care. Becky especially was getting that evil look in her eyes that I've already come to know and fear (although I’ve discovered that it's usually possible to smooth it over with beer at a later stage).
So (finally) on to today. I'll start things off with a mental note: When I get home, I must buy some 'Bear' comics. Sal was nice enough to pass her copies round the coach this morning, and they are the funniest thing I've ever read. Everyone should buy them, they're superbly surreal. (Note from Future Rakie: Check out the website – www.bearfoo.com – or buy 'Bear Immortal' off Amazon. I swear, you won't regret it.)
Also today, Nicolae is seriously pushing his luck. We've had to make a huge detour from our planned route because there's a tunnel that's too small for the coach to pass through. Everyone is pissed off about this to greater or lesser degrees, particularly because it means that we've got to bypass the Bicaz gorge and the red lake, which I was really looking forward to seeing. The other thing is that Nicolae MUST have known about this, probably pretty much from the start, and yet he only saw fit to tell us about it this morning. This is getting ridiculous.
And now he's just called another unscheduled stop to go look at a partially ruined castle... which is admittedly pretty and everything, but it would have been nice to have had a bit of warning. Especially since we've got a lot of distance to travel today and can't really afford too many impromptu stops. Blargh.
A lot of the people in the group are amusing themselves at the moment by thinking up ways of getting back at Nicolae. The girls are especially pissed at him, since he's taken to refusing to even discuss travel details with anyone female (Helen tried to talk to him when we stopped at the castle, but he just shrugged and walked away). Earlier on in the trip, he expressed a vague interest in joining the LVG, so Helen, Dave and Debs have been sitting around dreaming up induction trials to put him through. A few of the best suggestions so far include:
1. Dying his hair and dressing him as a girl, since he's so big on equal rights and everything.
2. Tying him to a tree and saying that we'll come back and untie him in two minutes, then going to the bar for an hour. When we come back, tell him that it was an 'unavoidable delay' or a 'small change of plan'.
3. Getting Stella drunk again (shouldn't be too hard) and handing over Nicolae's precious microphone to her. This suggestion got my vote simply because I'd love to hear a Stella commentary of the journey – ‘Oooh now that's a mountain I like mountains I think we should all name ourselves after mountains how do you spell "mountain" I think it's spelt with an "ARSE!"...'. That would be ace.
The monastery isn't technically a monastery, but I've forgotten what it actually is, so that word is going to have to do for the moment. Inside the main wall there's a large open grassy area, with the usual stray dogs wandering around and looking hopefully for biscuits (Stella, Lawrence and KT immediately go to their aid... bless them). There are a couple of ruined building that I happily go and potter around in (I like ruined buildings, there’re so much more fun than fully built ones), and a large gallery filled with random paintings and sculptures. KT also finds a lizard. Bless.
Stella and Becky arrive late to the monastery-thing, because they were having a rather more extended liquid lunch than the rest of us. Oh good, hopefully this means that the rest of the day will deteriorate nicely, just like yesterday!
TO BE CONTINUED!