Day 7 – Saturday 9th October – Bistritsa and Hotel Castle Dracula
Official Itinerary Says: "After breakfast at our hotel there may be some time to explore Sovata before we travel on to the typical Hungarian style town of Targu Mures, where we will stop briefly for sightseeing and shopping. We have a long day of travelling ahead and will continue driving north to Bistritsa where we stop for lunch at the Golden Crown Restaurant. This is where Jonathan Harker disembarked from the train and stayed prior to his final coach ride to Dracula’s castle. If time permits we will also have a short walk around the town. Back on the coach we travel on up the spectacular Bargau valley to Hotel Castle Dracula. This especially themed hotel sits high in the Tihuta ("Borgo") pass and if we’re lucky this is where we might get some snow. Dinner is at the hotel."
Wow, last night was so amazingly awesome. I really hope that my vocabulary is going to stand up to this, because I suspect that a lot of my photos aren’t going to come out and unless I find a useful website back home I’m not really going to be able to do justice to the place. We went down into the salt mines at Praid, and I swear that it was the most incredible place I have ever been to in my life. Praid is this small Hungarian town (where luckily everyone spoke English, since the extent of my Hungarian is ‘Keyzer Soze’) up in the mountains, and from there we took a bus actually into the mountain. This gives you the first indication of how big it is in there, since we could drive a bloody bus all the way in. The bus itself was ex-Soviet block, very old and utterly encrusted in salt. While we were waiting to get on, we all stood around trying to think up songs with the word ‘salt’ in their titles… although there aren’t really that many. ‘Salt on the Water’ by Deep Purple and ‘Rock-Salt’ by the Police were about as good as we could come up with.
Once on the bus, we went underground (with everyone singing ‘Going Underground’, predictably enough) straight into the mountain, ending up about quarter of a mile in and apparently with about the same amount of mountain over our heads. We all got off the bus and walked down some more goddamn steps – the constants of this holiday seem to be: plum brandy, polenta and walking up steps. I’m almost certain that we’re not going to miss any of them once we get home.
But at the bottom of the stairs, we get our first look at the first of the caverns… nothing in the world prepares you for the sheer size of the place. Organising Helen (who has shown herself to be the true brains behind this operation) is one of the few people in the group who had even seen pictures of the caves prior to this trip, and she didn’t say one single word about it, leaving it all as a surprise for us. I managed to be the first one down the stairs because I wanted to get video footage of everyone coming down the steps, and I turned around and it was just there. On the video you can hear me gasp in a really crap, girly way as I realise that the tunnel the bus drove in through is peanuts compared to this.
I can’t tell you for sure how big it is, because my spatial aware has never been particularly good, but even if I could it still wouldn’t give you the true idea of the actual scale. The first cavern is cuboidal, unlike any other cave I’ve ever seen (manmade or otherwise), and the entrance we come through at the bottom of the steps is actually in the top left hand corner of the cavern. So we suddenly find ourselves at the head of another flight of wooden steps, this one leading a legitimate fifty or sixty feet down to the floor. From that point, it looked like the cavern is about a hundred feet across and extends back maybe three hundred feet, floodlit by massive lights set on the walls at regular intervals.
Something I have to explain at his point is that I have a rather odd and very specialised phobia that doesn’t really cause problems most of the time. I’m mildly agoraphobic now and again, but what really, really gets to me are large enclosed spaces – sports halls, large empty rooms, anything like that immediately wrecks my head. If I was stood in the middle of an empty field I would be fine, but if you stuck of roof over it I’d freak out. I know it’s irrational, and I’ve no idea where it’s come from, but it really does bother me a lot. Dr Clague at work even reckons there’s a technical name for it (although how he found out is beyond me) – ‘Kentenophobia’, the fear of large enclosed spaces.
So now I unexpectedly find myself in the middle of a large enclosed space and my phobia kicks in big style. Michel our guide was thoughtful enough to ask whether anyone in the group suffers from claustrophobia, but since I’m usually fine down in caves I didn’t mention that I might have a problem. Now that I’m actually down there, I spend a lot of my time staring down at the floor, or through the viewfinder of my camera, or thinking hard about how much nice, solid rock is packed all around us. I’m still marginally terrified, but I manage to get through the evening without seriously wigging out or anything, which would admittedly have been embarrassing.
We walk through the cavern and discover that it’s not technically a cavern – it’s actually an absolutely massive tunnel, uniformly fifty or sixty foot high and maybe a hundred feet across. There are tables set up down there and we have our evening meal sat at these long tables like the dwarves all sitting around in Moria or something. The air down in the caves is apparently very good for respiratory problems and the like (because there’s so much salt in it), but within ten minutes of us getting down there, all the smokers (and me – I’m blaming my usually very mild asthma) are coughing and wheezing like anything. So I’m not sure how medically good the air really is. We get entertained with Hungarian folk dancing, and I get dragged up (despite vigorous protestations, obviously) to join in the last two dances, which is great fun. There’s lots of good food, although at the end they bring out these traditional local cabbage rolls, that are essentially cooked mince and spices wrapped in a cabbage leaf. The meat looks, smells and tastes suspiciously like cat food, but a couple of us politely scoff them anyway.
Down in the caves there are a couple of other surreal touches – there’s a kiddies playground with giant wooden animals that looks like it’s jumped right out of ‘Company of Wolves’, and an Evangelical church. The acoustics are great down there, which makes the singing from the church sound fantastic. It also encourages Blond Klif to lead us in a round of ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’ to test the acoustics and confuse all the local Hungarians. There’s also no alcohol allowed down in the caves, so for perhaps the first night we’ve been in Romania we all remain sober and smoke-free. Of course, that pretty much goes out of the window once we get back outside and onto the coach and the vodka bottles come out, but never mind. It’s only a short drive back to the hotel after all…
I’ve already decided on an early night, since I’m feeling the effects of sleep-deprivation quite acutely now. Once we get back to the hotel I take a quick shower to rid myself of all the chainmail ickiness that’s still clinging to me from earlier in the day (and also discover a bruise right on the bridge of my nose where the chainmail got stuck going on), then head to bed.
And then about midnight I get woken up by a screaming nightmare. I’m dreaming that I’m down in a cave with some of the group and then all the lights suddenly dim and start to go out. I jump to my feet, screaming and yelling and asking where the hell everyone has gone, and try to claw my way back up out of the cave. Unfortunately I really do this. KT wakes up to find me screaming and yelling, standing up on the bed in my underwear and clawing at the curtains like a woman possessed. Fortunately, I snap out of it as soon as she hits the lights and asks me what the hell I’m doing. I look a little sheepish and explain I was having a bad dream. Oops.
Incidentally, you now know why I always sleep with some kind of light on, even if it’s just keeping the door slightly open. For the rest of this holiday, there will be no more sleeping with the lights off, I can tell you that right now.
So anyway, on to today. We’ve left the hotel at Sovata and are currently heading north to Targu Mures then on to Bistritsa and then the Hotel Castle Dracula. Actually, we’ve just discovered (as in just discovered this very minute) that we’re not in fact stopping at Targu Mures or even going there at all, because Nicholae has taken us along a completely different route. So I guess we’re heading directly to Bistritsa… which is a bit of a shame, since I could really use a pee.
Despite the fact that it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning right now, bottles are passing up and down the coach, and most people are in a big happy mood. Someone’s just opened a bottle of cherry champagne (mmmm… fizzy alcohol on a bumpy road… now there’s a fun thing), and I offered round my plum brandy (which everyone politely declined). Ginger Dave is currently curled up in a ball under his jacket after one of the girls, Sal, started abusing a comic in front of him. It wasn’t even one of his own, but these comic-book freaks are kinda sensitive.
Debs has got sick of all the flies on the bus and has turned into Lady Debbie the Fly Terminator, and is currently stalking up and down the coach swatting at flies with her itinerary. She’s already killed about twenty or so of them, but I would’ve sworn that there weren’t more than a dozen on the bus when she started. We reckon that they must just be getting stunned and then coming back again to irritate her.
I just spoke to Dad and Jacob on the phone, and they seem fine. I really hope everything’s okay back home… it’s still scaring me when I think about how much distance there is between us. I’m not even halfway through this trip, and it’s getting worse and worse by the day. I really don’t know how I’m going to survive another week of this, especially since now we’re headed up into the mountains and there might not be much phone reception. It’d probably be best if I just didn’t think about it, but that’s a little bit impractical, isn’t it?
But things in Bistritsa don’t go quite as planned for us. For a start, despite booking the restaurant for lunch several months ago, there seems to be a wedding party going on in there. They won’t even sell us drinks from the bar, so suddenly we have two hours free in a not-very-interesting town.
(There seems to be an odd pattern to these ‘misunderstandings’ that we keep having at restaurants and hotels, incidentally. This is the second or third time that the plan has been changed with little or no warning, and certainly no discussion with the actual organisers of the trip. Each time we’ve only found out that there’s a problem when it’s too late to actually do anything about it. I’m beginning to think that Nicholae is very lucky that our group is so damn easy-going, because otherwise there would be a lot of ass-kicking going on right now.)
Anyway, to fill in time, Nicholae introduces us to a Baron (whose name I’ve predictably forgotten), who is the retired architect that designed both the Golden Crown Hotel and the Hotel Castle Dracula, and who offers to show us round the local Doll Museum. Since we’ve got nothing better to do, a lot of us agree to this plan, while the others go to find a nearby pub. Unfortunately for those of us that go to the museum, at no point does anyone warn us that the Baron is in fact a grade A fruitloop.
The ‘Doll Museum’ turns out to be the small tower where the Baron lives, and all the dolls are actually made by him. I will have to post a photo here, because there is no way to really describe the absolute freakiness of it all. We go into the tower and up into the first room, and the whole group just goes silent. At first glance, the dolls look like the work of six-year-old kids or mental patients. Almost all of the materials are reclaimed – bottle caps and lids, washing-up liquid bottles, ice-lolly sticks, beads, wool, old feathers, bits of bark – fashioned into these freaky dolls and puppets. On closer inspection, the dolls look even more like the work of a mental case: real time and effort has gone into creating the goddamn things, you can tell that just by looking at them, and yet they all look like something a kid would bring home proudly from school. And there are hundreds of them.
In the first room, the dolls hang on a large dead branch, which has been stood upright like a tree. Very few of the dolls have arms or legs – just heads, long beaded necks and a piece of cloth as a body. There are masks made of wood and wool on the walls, and EVERYTHING has a smile on its face. One doll, which the Baron points out as one of his favourites, has a huge wide-open smile filled with dangling teeth made from dried white beans. Upstairs from this room there is a second room filled with dolls and masks, and also a tiny work-room that is full of half-completed dolls and, stuffed into one corner, the Baron’s bed.
As we’re all looking round with a mix of fascination and horror, the Baron winds up a clown doll that sways from side to side and sings ‘It’s A Small World After All’. This is too much for some people. Darren makes a break for the exit, saying, ‘This is all too Texas Chainsaw Massacre for me’, and several others follow him.
At the time it’s almost impossible to even laugh at it all, although I suspect that we will do at a later time. Looking around those rooms is horribly like looking straight into someone’s mind… and a very disturbed mind at that. I video a lot of it and then play it back later to Debs, who works as a doctor of psychology when she’s not swatting flies, and she agrees that the Baron is almost certainly insane.
Before we leave, the Baron offers to sell us puppets from a rack that are obviously made for this purpose – they look to have been made quicker and with less effort and patience put into each one – for one dollar each (or the Romanian equivalent). I buy one, mainly because I know that no-one will ever believe how freaky the place was unless they see it for themselves. Now that I’ve got it on it’s own though, separate from the rest of the collection, it doesn’t look nearly so scary and disturbing, although the rest of the guys have told me to put it away in my bag and stop waving the goddamn thing at them. I think I’ll take it home and scare the hell out of Jenny with it. And if nothing else, every time I look at it I’ll remember meeting the Mad Baron of Bistritsa, who lives alone in his tower and makes dolls out of reclaimed rubbish to sell to tourists for one dollar a time…
TO BE CONTINUED!