Welcome to Part II of our Romanian Road Trip! In case you missed out on Part I, you can find it
here.
Day 2
On our second day, we woke up in Vlaha. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and we had breakfast outside in this lovely place that belongs to the guest house:
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| The guest house. |
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| In front of the guest house. |
After the breakfast, we stuffed our bags back into the car, said bye to Hector the house dog (he was an Alsatian) and set off towards our next stop - Cluj-Napoca (in Hungarian: Kolozsvár). Cluj is the second biggest city in Romania based on its population, and I really liked the place! I would've wanted to stay there a lot longer, especially since I have a friend who lives there, but we were kind of in a hurry to get to other places and only had an hour to spend looking around in Cluj. It seemed like a quirky and vibrant student town with a lot of restaurants, coffee shops and street art - and the people can speak English so you'll survive quite easily.
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| King Mathias's statue. |
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| King Mathias's birthplace. |
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| We went to a bookshop to try and find literature in Romanian for Julcsi, who can actually speak the language. |
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| Bye bye, Cluj! |
Seriously, an absolutely lovely city - highly recommended! However, we were already on to our next destination, namely
Salina Turda, which is a museum dedicated to salt mining, and also an actual salt mine, in Turda (in Hungarian: Torda). Let me tell you - I had never visited anything quite like it! If you go all the way down to the bottom of the salt mine, you'll find a lake with rowing boats, a small Ferris wheel, and all kinds of other activities like that.
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| The entrance. |
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| Going down to the mines! |
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| Salt on the walls. |
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| The view down! |
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| The view even further down to the boats! |
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| The lift! |
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| Some of the boats. |
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| Us on the Ferris wheel :). |
What a cool experience! Once we'd come out of the mine, we all had some lunch outside, and also had a look at the tourist stuff they were selling there, mainly fridge magnets. I also want to say that there were a lot of stray dogs there, which made me so, so sad :(. I love animals, and the sad truth is that it's heartbreaking to see all these poor animals wandering around with no one to love them...I gave them food - I'm sure someone would like to tell me not to do it, but the thing is that if I lived in Romania, I'd set up some kind of animal shelter and start rescuing all these dogs. In Hungary, stray dogs are not an issue, but there, it's all about stray cats. I can not take it. In Hungary, I always buy food for the stray cats that live more or less permanently in a specific place, and if I lived in Hungary, I would take these cats home. So yeah, dealing with all the stray dogs wasn't easy...
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| Dracula is everywhere... |
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| <3 <3 <3 |
From Turda, we drove on to Gheorgheni (in Hungarian: Gyergyószentmiklós) where we would spend our second night in Romania in a
Hét Virág Vendegház cottage. This part of the country is Székely Land, which is an ethno-cultural area in Transylvania. The area is filled with natural beauty! To get there, we had to drive through downtown Turda, too, and it looked really pretty:
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| Roadtripping! |
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| More horses mid-gallop... |
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| Storks in their nest <3! |
Once we'd arrived in our very spacious cottage and settled down, we were starving, so with whatever minuscule energy we could still muster, we drove to the centre to have a pizza before calling it a day. What a fabulous day yet again!
In the next post, we'll visit Lacu Ro
șu and Cheile Bicazului, so stay with me :)!
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