Day 3 - Tuesday 5th October - Targoviste
Official Itinerary says: "After breakfast at the hotel we will spend the morning sightseeing in Targoviste. Targoviste is a small town today, but in Vlad Tepes’ time it was the capital of Wallachia. We will be visiting the Princely Court where Vlad lived and ruled and the Sunset Tower from where he is famously supposed to have watched his enemies being impaled. We will also try to visit a bank to change money. Then it’s back on the coach, continuing north to our final destination of Curtea De Arges. We will be stopping briefly in Pitesti to buy lunch, before travelling on to visit the impressive hydroelectric dam at Lake Vidraru and the Poienari citadel.
Poienari is the ‘real’ Dracula’s castle. Built by Vlad using slave labour, the fortress perches on a craggy hilltop giving superb views across the Fagaras mountains. Today the castle is in ruins and is reached by a relatively easy walk up 1,400 steps through beautiful forest. Little visited, Poienari is an atmospheric and awe-inspiring pace, and we will be there to watch the sunset. Afterwards we travel a very short distance to the village of Arefu for an evening of folk entertainment and dinner. Back on the coach we will return to Curtea De Arges for overnight at the Hotel Posada. If you’re still awake it’s probably time to start demolishing your duty free at the first room party."
I suspect that a lot of this holiday is going to be spent with me scaring the hell out of myself, and not necessarily for fun. If you made a list of all the things that genuinely terrify me - heights, flying, spiral staircases, wolves, the dark, scary forests, being away from Jacob - I suspect that this holiday is going to be ticking just about all of the boxes. Blargh.
But anyway. Last night we eventually get to our hotel, the Valachia, which seems to be stuck in some kind of eighties timewarp, and have our rooms handed out to us. The decor in the hotel runs to a lot of brown and gold, and reminds me of the bedroom scenes in 'Goodfellas', for reasons I can't be entirely sure of. After enthusing about the room at some length (and discovering a secret party room with minibar/fridge hidden behind a curtain), KT and me run downstairs for our first Romanian meal. The starter is apparently a traditional Romanian dish made up of polenta topped with sour cream and Romanian cheese (which is white and crumbly and amazingly salty), and it tastes exactly as good as that sounds. I eat half of it out of politeness then have to give up.
In the morning we head out to the Palace of Targoviste on foot, since it's only a short distance from our hotel. In the fifteenth century, Targoviste was the capital of Romania, and the palace is where Vlad Tepes (AKA Vlad the Impaler, AKA Vlad Dracula, meaning 'son of Vlad Dracul', Dracul being the Romanian word for devil) and his family ruled from. There's a Byzantine chapel in the grounds which is absolutely gorgeous, and the Sunset Tower which is a very odd piece of architecture and where Vlad Tepes allegedly stood to watch his victims being impaled. The impalements took place on a hill just outside the palace grounds, not actually inside the grounds… because of, y’know, the smell.
Nicolae gives us a pleasingly graphic description of how impalement works (which I’m not going to repeat here, since mom will be reading this), along with outlining a few of Prince Vlad’s other favourite punishment methods. Incidentally, I’ve been fascinated by the story of Vlad the Impaler since I was about ten years old, not so much because of any tenuous link to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but because he’s an amazing character with a brilliant history and story. If I have time and inclination I’ll jot down some of the stories about him, but otherwise I’ll fill it all in when we get home (Note from Future Rakie: Oh yeah, great, just dump all the work onto me, why don’t you?). Anyway, when I was a kid, I had a book of "amazing true stories", many of which were obviously out-and-out lies, and was purchased from a charity shop for about fifty pence.
Some of the stories have stuck with me more than others - for example, the girl who was a grandmother at the age of sixteen; the children found living in a cave in the mountains who had green skin, spoke no recognisable language and ate only green beans; the boy with a rare genetic condition that meant that he aged ten times as fast as normal and died of old age at seven - but the page I remember best was about Vlad the Impaler. My sister Yasmin refused to read that page simply because of the picture that accompanied it - a black and white line-drawing of peasants being flung off a cliff onto a field of sharpened stakes. I did read it, although possibly only once because it disturbed me as much (if not more) than just about anything else I’ve read in my life. It stayed with me though, and that was pretty much the start of my interest, although I’ll admit that it’s kind of a latent interest, since I’ve never actively pursued it.
Anyway, now I’ve got the chance to walk in Vlad Tepes’ footsteps, and climb the tower that he ruled from. It’s an awesome feeling. Despite the fact that the Sunset Tower combines two of my biggest fears, as listed above (heights and spiral staircases… I don’t know what it is about spiral staircases, they just scare the living hell out of me), I manage to get all the way to the top of it, which I feel quite proud of. Nothing so much fun as conquering your fears (although it does lead to a long and involved conversation with KT about why fears often get worse instead of better as you get older - I get the feeling that long and involved conversations are going to be another feature of this holiday). It’s unspeakably cool, standing up there on the parapet and looking out over the ruins of the palace, the Byzantine chapel and the impalement hill, as well as the rest of Targoviste.
Y’know, there’s so much stuff to talk about here, and it’s kinda difficult to make adequate notes while riding in a coach (due to a combination of impending motion sickness and the bumpiness of the local roads), plus I’m having real problems thinking up the right words to use. Really, I ought to just sit here typing ‘wow wow wow wow wow’ all the time, because that’s pretty much how I’m feeling. It would probably get boring for you guys reading it though.
Something I will mention here is our guide, Nicolae, who so far seems to be ace. He’s almost exactly the perfect image of rural Romania as I envisaged it - talkative and full of local knowledge and improbable stories, but also with a good share of quirks and superstitions. There seems to be no question of his belief in ghosts and spirits, although his belief in vampires as such is more debatable. As he talks (which he does more or less constantly), he keeps giving out hints as to the depth of his knowledge about the ‘dark secrets of this country’, telling us that he won’t tell us these secrets until we are fully ready. Otherwise we either wouldn’t believe, or our unprepared minds wouldn’t be able to deal with the new knowledge.
At this point, I begin to suspect that Nicolae is distantly related to Corff. Of course, that means that the ‘Corff-management-rules’ apply - do not argue, at least not to their face, because you will lose. I make it a rule never to argue with anyone who has more conviction that I do, since I’m fully aware of my own ignorance and I won’t argue about stuff I don’t know about. So if Nicolae wants to argue the finer points of the supernatural or the true purpose of evil (and anyone wants to take him up on that argument), then I’m going to be staying well out of it. Well, maybe not that far out of it… I’d definitely like to listen in.
Something else I’ve just realised - I’m really enjoying myself at the moment. That’s one heck of a thing to have to suddenly realise, but it’s true. I’m having a lot of fun right now, and I quite like the fact that KT and me are the babies of the group. It makes a nice change from hanging around with sixteen-year-olds all the time. I also like the way that everyone dresses like proper goth freaks, because you just know that they’ve been doing it for years and years and will almost certainly keep doing it for the rest of their lives, unlike all the ickle baby nu-goths that I know back home. And they remind me of why I’m not a goth myself - I don’t have the motivation to even paint my nails black or put on eyeliner, never mind sustain an entire, constant goth look. These people have a dedication that I could never match.
Of course, smokers have a dedication I could never match as well (they stand outside in the rain just to smoke, for God’s sake!), so that’s not necessarily a great thing.
We travel to Poienari along these tiny winding roads in an extremely large coach, which disturbs me a great deal. Someone up front starts whistling the theme from ‘The Italian Job’, which is so not a good thing.
Then finally on to Poienari. The itinerary tells us that it’s a ‘relatively easy walk’ up to the castle. The itinerary is lying. Anything that involves 1,400 steps is never going to be easy. Some of the group manage to get up there easier than others, and everyone who wants to get up there does, eventually. But there’s a lot of swearing from many in the group, and Ginger Dave spends most of the walk trying to remember why this is the fourth time he’s making this climb.
We get up there in time for the sun setting, which is very pretty, although not completely awe-inspiring. The scenery is beautiful, and the ruins are lovely and picturesque. We get some brilliant photos (including a hopefully great group photo) and watch the sun go down.
As I said, it’s surprisingly difficult to describe everything that we’re seeing here. There’s just so much, and it’s all so fantastic. Picking the right words is turning out to be impossible, so I think I’m going to have to post a load of photos for everyone to see… although I suspect that even that’s not going to do it justice. A lot of it is simply the history of the place - standing there in the ruins, knowing how and why it was originally built and everything that’s happened in that place is just plain weird. That’s the best word I’m going to be able to come up with. It feels weird. And it’s kicked the hell out of my vocabulary as well…
When we finally get down to the bottom of the hill, about a dozen bottles immediately come out and are passed around the coach. Well, we need a little something to steady our nerves before dinner, don’t we?
TO BE CONTINUED!