Below Belief

On for a lazy day today. The pace of travelling seems to have caught up with us and we want nothing more than to mooch around town in the sun. Our main activity is chasing round travel agents, all of whom claim to know nothing about Rhodes. Perhaps we have come up against the Greek/Turkish divide, neither side acknowledging the other. In the end we resort to ringing up a Rhodes travel agent who tells us charter flights must be booked in person four days before when they know for sure how many places are left. This adds a whole new element of risk to our return flight. Flights are apparently on Wednesdays and Sundays and we imagine a scenario and the dilemma which could face us – take a guaranteed flight on Sunday or risk an extra three days in the sun for a late flight. Next Wednesday is the point of no return in terms of getting back for Uni. The trouble is the excitement of all this risk detracts from the relaxation we’re supposed to be enjoying here.
We visit Doy-Doys, a restaurant we have been recommended and whose title translates as ‘Stuffed Stuffed’. The title is very apt. We get two huge plates of superb food for not very much money and resolve to eat here again as many times as we can. Later in the carpet bazaar we are greeted by ‘Hello, How are you?’ by one of the many merchants as we are walking through. Chris replies with ‘No. No thank you. No carpets’. A rather crestfallen carpet salesman shrugs and claims indignantly ‘I didn’t even say anything.’
A Turkish Bath, us being experienced connoisseurs, is on the cards this evening. We are handed cotton wraps and directed into a marble room where three worried looking chaps are already lined up for ‘the treatment’. It seems this is a pro-active baths – none of your ponsey plunge pools or your saunas – here they actually get you clean. It feels like waiting outside the head masters office, not knowing what is going to happen to you, but knowing it’s going to hurt. A vaguely triadic Turk with an enormous bowl cut and even bigger fists soaps us down on a marble slab. My legs and arms are stretched and pulled in ways I’m sure they were not designed to, while I slip and slide around on the soapy block frequently losing my loin cloth. The next stage is no less enduring. We squat down while a large bellied Turk sloshes hot water all over us and then rubs us down with a mitten which seems to be covered in sand-paper. I lose at least a pound of flesh in the process, and wonder if this is the price I pay.
Afterwards, feeling cleaner than ever before, we sit around in towels and head dresses sipping Turkish tea with the three other guys who turn out to be Dutch, like some Nativity play re-enactment. The Turkish guy in the corner is chatting away on the phone and I’m sure he’s saying ‘You should see what I’ve got these guys doing this time. Really stitched them up tonight’. I wish I had my camera, but then think otherwise and am quite glad I don’t. Outside it is raining huge drops and we dash home ducking under awnings and dodging the puddles. A Turk rushes past us and shouts at us ‘Umbrella for sale!’. We laugh. This seems to sum up Istanbul completely. Just when we thought we’d escaped the English influence, and getting the beers in in the bar, we bump into Dan and Simon, economists from Emmanuel. Ridiculous, but they met out here too.

We rise late and breakfast in style as the sun rises over the bay. Feel a little like we’re taking part in a Bacardi ad. Certainly the Australian girls we are sharing our room with have been cast as unacceptably gorgeous and totally inaccessible.
At the covered bazaar we dive headlong into the bartering, haggling world of Istanbul and just about avoid making expensive carpet purchases on the Barclaycard. We don’t get away completely without buying though. Chris purchases a colourful – okay, loud – ethnic top which is arguably made of camel hair and gives him a certain Chris Bayliss look. I am persuaded to buy a marble chess set which is too ornamental to play on and way too heavy to carry through customs. It proves to be a complete mistake because Chris promptly hammers me at Chess.
Over a few beers we plan the rest of our trip. It seems to be evolving into a coach journey to Marmaris on the south coast, stay for a few days and then take the ferry to Rhodes, a Greek island where flights home ought to be cheap. Agree to try to advance book a ticket so we guarantee ourselves a way out. Time is getting short now.
We cross the Gelata bridge and take the lift up the tallest tower in Istanbul, for an expensive but worthwhile view across the smog obscured river to the mosques and minarets dotting the opposite bank. The chaotic arrangements of tiled roofs beneath us, crammed into every last space, seem to sum up Istanbul for me. It is 5.30pm and still burning hot.

The train clatters on for ages before arriving in the station a full 20 hours after we boarded. When it arrives, however, I am excited and ready to explore Istanbul, the place we have so looked forward to and bolstered our moods with the hope of through Romania. We visit the bank first and Chris manages to extract 20 million from his account. Always thought he was loaded. Realise a little later the rate is higher than we expected and he now has £130 to his name. Split between us, however, it should be about right for our four days here.
We find a great youth hostel – The Orient – with 94 rooms and a fantastic roof-top bar looking out over the bay of the Bosphorus. It is full of travelling types and we are instantly hooked. Chris is clearly in need of a rest after his bad night so I leave him to sleep while I trek off to see what Eastern delights Istanbul has to offer in the early morning sun. I walk down to the edge of the Bosphorus where the water is clear and calm. It is not long before I have my first encounter with the entrepreneurial tendency of the city. I am approached by Ahmed, who asks me the time and clearly doesn’t need to know. He has a toothy grin and asks me if I like Istanbul. Within seconds he has me sat on a wall and is polishing my shoes. I am in no way prepared to resist – I have, as they say, just come down with the last shower. When it comes to the crunch – and he is joined by his friend – he says the shoe shine is for free but that his son is sick and he has no way to pay for a doctor. He demands 1 million lira. I guess it’s just a good way to claim over the odds for a shoe shine and £7 is definitely over the odds. Unfortunately, I have no smaller change than 1 million and he seems to misunderstand when I gesticulate that I only have 1 million notes. There is an awful moment when between them they hold £21 of my money in their hands, but they are not thieves, just Turks working for a living, and I can do nothing except take the notes back and walk away.
I do, however, walk with a spring in my step knowing that I got my shoe shine for free. I take a walk in the sun around the peninsular and then back into the city where I phone home on my Mum’s birthday. It is kind of nice to hear that home is still there. It seems so long since I left it.
In the station I meet the Harris Isles guys for the third time. This random event thing is becoming oversubscribed. They have had a single expensive night here getting wasted but seem to have really enjoyed the place which is encouraging. They are now moving back north towards their Munich Beerfest goal. Evidently their childhoods have at least given them the right idea in this direction. I return to the hostel through wonderfully aromatic streets. There are donor kebabs roasting, spices in huge vats being sold and the general smell of all things cooking.
Back in the hostel, Chris is just stirring so we have lunch on the rooftop. He wants to sleep again this afternoon so I decide to head to the bazaar and wander the streets some more – still full of enthusiasm for this place. I wander without direction – a single blonde Westerner lost in a sea of Turks. I sit down in the middle of a park near an elaborate monument to watch this strange world go by. I see an Arab man come up to the domed monument, which I notice has taps arranged all around the outside. With great precision he removes first his shoe then his sock and stands on one leg while he carefully washes his foot in the cold water. He then repeats the process with the other foot while I look on with fascination. I guess any religion which requires ‘shoes-off’ during prayer must, for the sake of its priests, make adequate provision for foot hygiene. I sit in peace watching the people come and go : the loud American tourists, the quiet Arab women, the running children and the shifty traders. I take what seems to be a fairly main street and am quickly caught up in all the bustle.
It is all I can do to refuse the offers for carpets, leather jackets, lighters, postcards and shoe shines but it’s great fun to experience the industry with which these people go about selling their often shoddy wares. It strikes me that the bazaar is not just a gimmick for the tourists, the majority of punters are Turkish. It truly is a way of life. I wind up lost in some back streets where my blonde hair is definitely not an enviable attribute. I feel more than a little uneasy to be alone here – dark eyes are watching my movements – and so I make my way as quickly as possible back to the tourist areas. There are cars pressing their way arrogantly through the patient crowds but the selling just continues across their bonnets. I feel worn out by the constant pressure and have a weak moment while I sit and drink a fanta on a bench. It is a fatal and costly mistake. Istanbul is the city where you can never pause, never offer a chink in your armour where an enterprising Turk can apply pressure to open your wallet.
Before I know it, I have a shoe-shiner – maybe 12 years old – applying paste to my shoes. He is persuasive, persistent and for the second time today I am unable to refuse. Halfway through I realise that the paste they apply is sticky and critical to the furtherance of their income and expansion of their markets – all the dust of the streets sticks to the shoes, making them appear dirty almost as soon as they’ve been polished. The lad is joined by three of his friends – this seems to be a recurring pattern – and claims that 500,000lira is the price. I say more like 50,000 but he claims this is what you pay to go to the toilet, which is true.
The bartering starts here, but I have not as much experience of the game as he does and wind up learning by my expensive mistake. I pay 300,000lira, about six times too much and feel momentarily annoyed with myself for being so weak. This is reinforced by an old Turkish guy sitting nearby who, judging by his unfathomable shouting, thinks I am to blame for the state of the Turkish economy. I shrug, tell him I don’t understand and walk off, knowing that next time I’ll agree a price in advance.
Chris is still fast asleep – unbelievably – so I sit in the bar, look out over the bay where dolphins are dipping in and out of the water under a beautiful sunset and sip my cold beer. I end up staying there until 9pm talking to two Americans who met on a forestation programme in Albania and have only two weeks left before they return home to find jobs in Alaska. They recommend we head for the Turkish coast rather than the Greek islands because it is nicer and cheaper. Perhaps we will. I go to bed, exhausted but happy to be in this lively city such a contrast to yesterday’s Romania.

Arrive on Bucharest station at 6.30am, tired and uncomfortable. There are huge crowds of people all around, even at this ungodly hour. We try to leave our bags but we must pay 28p up front and our lei supply was drained by beers last night. We make our way to the reservations office where we must book couchettes on the train to Istanbul this afternoon. We discover our tickets are being sold at Casa 1 – the only counter with a 50 deep queue behind it. We try to ask elsewhere how much it will cost, since we have no money and cannot face queuing up for half an hour just to find out how much it is. The other kiosks are singularly unhelpful and keep telling us ‘Go to Casa 1. Casa 1′. I lose my rag at this point and swear loudly at the clerk and to Bucharest in general. Really hope she doesn’t understand.
We really need money to stop this helpless feeling. We’ve heard that a hotel nearby does a good rate but it is 7.20am and when we eventually find the place in the rain outside, the two 13 year olds who seem to be running the place and are smoking behind the reception desk, tell us it is closed until 9am. Frustrated and helpless, we sit on a park bench in the rain while the sky above grows dimly light. We are quiet and subdued, neither of us enjoying the Romanian experience any more. At 7.50am we roam back into the station, dodging the Taxi drivers who seem determined to get us in their cabs, and the begging children who come and kiss your feet until you give them money. Outside the station there are open manholes and to see children crawling from them to yawn and stretch after sleeping the night in the sewers will remain one of the most appalling and vivid memories I have of Bucharest.
We wait outside an exchange office which supposedly opens at 8am. A young Romanian nearby asks us if it is open and we talk to him. He has a relaxed manner and a cheeky grin and wears a flying jacket. He studies Economics here in Bucharest and thinks Cambridge is the ‘finest university in the world’. We like this guy. We tell him of our problems and he agrees to help us find out how much couchettes will cost. He adopts the Romanian approach to queuing by jumping in at the front and asking straight away. Unfortunately, the outcome is deeply unsatisfactory. There are no sleepers left on the train, nor first class seats and we get that sinking feeling that the next 18 hours are going to be spent in the same uncomfortable and sleepless manner as the last 8. Travelling, we decide there and then has not the glamour we imagined.
We need to change money but the exchange office won’t open up until 9am. Our friend suggests we cut a deal and draws our attention discreetly to a huge wad of notes in his inside pocket. We are extremely cautious at first, having heard so many stories about the black market, but eventually agree to change just $15. The deal is actually quite good and there is no sleight of hand involved. We are genuinely relieved and wave this guy off. Not everyone’s heart has been tainted by living in such a stricken city as this. We put our bags in storage, for the ridiculous sum of 28p and decide to head for the centre and, shamefully, a McDonalds.
It is miles away and turns out to be a pilot restaurant only a year old with a limited menu. Perhaps it is just our own helplessness, but it feels far more welcoming than the McDonalds in Prague. There, it seemed to sum up all that was bad about society. Here, it offers the friendly staff a new start and a good job. It is deeply ironic and poignant to sit here, as if in a sterile glass cage, sipping our drinks and listening to Phil Collins’ Another day in paradise while outside the Dacias flash through the decaying street and we watch the people shuffling by stooped under the bags on their shoulders.
Once again we are amazed and speechless at Romania. At once frustrating and thought provoking. We feel as if we should be able to help these people, and yet to approach them or generate resentment by showing them what we have seems dangerous and prevents us from doing so. Perhaps we are selfish and cowardly. These people have so much in their friendliness and kindness and yet so little in material wealth. It strikes us everytime we speak to people that we have nothing with which to return their hospitality. On our return to the station, we spot the sure sign of a travelling Kiwi – a MacPac rucksack. Chris is instantly keen to speak to a fellow ‘owner’ and we are both in need of hearing some friendly western voices in this sombre place. They turn out to be a couple who met in Jordan and have been travelling since January. They’ve been here for a week in a hotel with sinks but no showers.
We get our 2nd class seat reservations and the sinking feeling returns. The options – to stay in this depressing dump a night or spend the next 18 hours sitting both upright – are depressing and equally unappealing. We have about two hours to spare so decide to see at least something of the city and give it the benefit of a fair trial. The Kiwis recommend we visit The House Of The Republic, Ceausescu’s incredible development on the south side of the city. He decided that instead of feeding his people, he would build one of the world’s largest buildings as a monument to Romanian dominance and with the aim of making Bucharest the Paris of the East. He built a huge underground train network, diverted the river so it flowed along the ‘Champs Elysee’ of Bucharest (creating a dam and a massive lake which flooded many historic buildings) and constructed huge fountains all over the square. The building is currently standing empty and unused.
On the underground, which seems unreasonably slow, Chris feels increasingly pressurised by our 12.55pm train departure time. I have blown my top already today and am now resigned to taking Bucharest as it comes. Chris seems to have this frustration to come. He desperately doesn’t want to miss the train. After initial confusion with our direction of travel on the circular underground, we find ourselves on Plaza Ulliri and find it is raining. We see the park and the fountains but either the Romanians have moved the largest building in the world, or our directions are not what they should be. The rain and our growing hatred for the place quickly have us returning to the station and running around trying to purchase bread and fruit for the journey. We end up changing another $10 at the hotel to pay for chocolate and 7UP to take with us. The bread is nice and for a moment our train seems uncrowded. However, the compartment quickly fills and our false hopes are dashed again.
There are a mixture of swarthy Bulgars and Romanians with us, but we hope they will leave us at the border. They are unlikely to be travelling to Istanbul. In Bulgaria a softly spoken Gypsy lady with twinkling eyes and a creased face gets on and offers us crisp sticks. We offer her some bread and are momentarily confused by the response until we remember that in Bulgaria nodding the head means no. Our companions gable on at length in the soft Bulgar tongue and show no sign of leaving. Chris braves the toilet which really is far more monstrous even than that in Trainspotting, and discovers he has so-called Ceausescu’s Revenge. He doesn’t look too happy about it either. We thought we’d been careful about what we ate but there is no justice. It is particularly bad to have it on this train with its notably hygienic facilities. The only water we have is carbonated and stale.
A group of rowdy soldiers, on a break from their Military service, introduce themselves. Dmitri is a Bulgarian economist who has finished studying and is halfway through his year of Army life. He is happy because he has twenty days holiday. The grins on all their faces tell of their happiness to be free again. Magdelene, a tall girl with long brown hair and a nose stud, bursts through the carriage door and demands to borrow Chris’ walkman which he is clearly using. Yet another random event. Chris hands it over and she plays The Prodigy loud and dances to it down the corridor. The soldiers seem happy to practice their English on us so we talk to them for a while but admit afterwards that all we really wanted to do was go to sleep.
Luckily about fifteen minutes later our dream comes true. Most of them leave and our carriage is plunged into delicious, silent, velvety blackness. Apart from being disturbed for passports and customs in the night, and by two Turks with a ridiculous dog which yelps uncontrollably, we actually sleep quite well. At the Turkish border, bureaucracy is out in force. We are all herded off the train to queue in the cold for our visas to be checked (and purchased in our case). Back on the train they are checked again, so quite what the point was, we never find out. After this, I remember absolutely nothing except waking to a beautiful sunrise in Turkey.

We rise late and without more insect bites, this time having killed all the mosquitoes before going to bed. Realise that the beds are possibly the worst we have ever slept on, but reserve the right to take this back when we get to Wolfson court, our hall of residence for next year.
At breakfast, some of the builders are already well into the vodka. We settle for the tea this morning which is far more palatable than the ness but equally sweet. Showers and long-winded jokes about blank Czechs and slippery Poles mean we don’t leave the hotel until 12pm. However, since we have already exhausted Cluj’s attractions, it’s not as though we don’t have time to spare. We get little help with how to spend our day from the tourist office in town, though they are friendly, English spoken and willing to sell us a map.
We decide to mull over our options at the Hotel Continental which we have to persuade to serve us lunch. In overly grand surroundings, and alone in a spacious dining hall, we are served by a Manwellian waiter who cannot do enough to help. We have goulash soup and pork escalope but at £4 each, pay dearly for the service. In the hotel bar, I notice a bottle of vodka costs 4000lei (80p) so it is little wonder that this country, like so many Eastern ones, has problems with alcohol.
We leave and chance upon a bookshop selling English books. Our passion for reading has only been partly filled by the lonely planet with its brisk, concise facts and so we can hardly resist making a purchase. I buy an autobiography about a BBC director general – all very high-brow stuff – and Chris goes for the slightly less impressive ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. The long journey begins to look decidedly better.
So overjoyed are we with our purchases, that we spend most of the afternoon sitting on the grass at the top of the citadel – out of the smog – reading them and falling asleep in the sun. Romania is so much more bearable in the sun. At 4pm, we return to the busy streets to watch the Rock at the cinema. Outside, we are first distracted by a stuntman who abseils down the front of the cinema and proceeds to eat a sandwich on the way. he receives great applause from the crowd who gather beneath him, even though he also drops and smashes a glass of orange juice which he should have drunk.
The cinema is huge and after convincing the ticket girl that we want two tickets rather than five, we sit down and really enjoy the film. It is bizarre to imagine that only seven years ago, these people would have had no access to films like this. What impression must they have of America, the place they see so much of and yet have no chance of ever going? We walk to the station where we find a good bar and sit down to order a beer. The prices are much higher than expected, possibly because we’re westerners but more likely because this is the station. We have just enough money left for two beers. We’ll have to change more dollars for the food we had hoped to purchase in Bucharest tomorrow morning. We are just working out how to sustain two beers until 9pm when a man comes over and sits at our table. He seems to want to buy us some beers. Recognising the pattern, we explain that we have no money to return the favour, but he shrugs and suggests it is ‘hospitality’. Conversation in mixed and equally poor French and Romanian doesn’t really entertain us. At one point we think we’ve established that he is going to visit his Grandmother in the Mountains near Transylvania but this is more than a little tenuous. Trying to understand him is a bit like playing charades with blindfolds. He urges us to share his vodka, which we do, but he moves on to trying to beg another drink and our being rich seems to feature frequently in his confused conversation. He has clearly lost the plot. It is a shame that what started out as apparently open-friendliness had to degrade to this, but we genuinely have no money and make our excuses to leave.
We have such a varied impression of Romania and our time here has been so interesting. The people are easily the friendliest we have met – so willing to smile and help where others have frowned or resented. But we cannot help but feel sorry for them and the lack of opportunity they have been given. Romania is a place we are not sure we want to return to. There is a feeling of helplessness for us being here, that nothing we can do can make things better for the people. It is 19th century England in all its harshness but with the West permeating every level with its promises, its glitter and its greed. Can the East turn out as anything more than just a cheap copy of the West? The future, it seems, has already been mapped.
In the waiting room back at the hotel, we meet a Romanian doctor and his wife and daughter who luckily can speak German well. They have been on holiday in Cluj, and are travelling, like us, to Bucharest tonight. We talk to them about England, Romania and tourists. He thinks Ceausescu was very bad, naturally, but believes things are worse for the people now than when under his rule. He says he works ‘lange Tage’ for very little reward and most people are very poor. The train is crowded – seven people in our eight berth carriage – and all hopes of a good nights sleep go out of the window. Next to Chris is the man who helped us in the ticket office, Csaba, a Hungarian Romanian working for a British software company and also in the Medical library. He knows Sally Woods. Small world. He tells us entertaining stories. In particular, we find out about the far-right mayor of Cluj who ordered the huge archaeological dig in the main square so that he can prove that Cluj is of Roman rather than Hungarian origin. He is widely disliked but won by 100 votes in the recent elections. Alexandria, the daughter of the doctor, comes to talk to us and practice her English. She offers us bread, bananas and a foul concoction of ness made with cold sprite not water. We drink for politeness alone. She is going to study philosophy next year at University and is interested and amazed at the amount we have written in our journals. I tell her we are too.
Our carriage proves very difficult to sleep in comfortably. The bench seats are at just the wrong angle. Seven pairs of legs are fighting for space and I alternate between hunched forward and slumped sideways without any luck in either position. At Brasow, Csaba leaves and this gives Chris and I the luxury of a whole three seats between us. We share the pleasure of curling up horizontally for the last two hours. At 6.18am the nightmare is over and a new one begins…

It does indeed! I wake up having been bitten by a hellish mosquito of some sort on the lip, temple and neck. My lip is swollen to three times its normal size and I look like some bloated elephant man and feel really stupid. I hope desperately that it will subside naturally but this doesn’t stop me feeling that I have suffered a near terminal lip-inflation. Unfortunately, I can imagine better places than Cluj to obtain medical treatment.
Outside, daylight does nothing for the hotel. The builders who have been bashing and crashing since 7.30am are doing something to the walls. They have made so much mess, it is difficult to see if they are actually demolishing the hotel around us, or just rendering the walls. Whatever, their plastering technique seems to rely heavily on slapping on as much as possible and then, when it’s dry, carving it back flat. Breakfast belies the chaos outside and is hot – omelette with salami and salad. Unfortunately, since coffee is scarce here, the drink is Ness Cafe (not Nescafe), a dreadful coffee substitute made from ‘vegetable extract’ of unknown origin and served thick and sweet.
We leave in search of the Medical library where Sally Woods, someone a friend of Chris’ knows and who may be able to help us find alternative accomodation, works. When we do find her office, she is away in Bucharest so we decide the hotel will have to do and return for a look around the town which is pretty in parts but full of terrible pollution. Our morning is spent searching for the best way to get our hands on some money. We settle for $150 dollars from my visa account and split the proceeds. The book tells us getting a cash advance on a credit card is nigh on impossible in Romania, so we feel triumphant to have proved them wrong. What we end up with is a huge wad of thick, dirty notes too big to fit in my wallet. We go out in search of food and find a place called the Brerarie which has an empty self-service restaurant serving congealed sausages in gravy, plus a simple restaurant. We choose the latter, but no sooner have we sat down than a fat, unshaven man in a black leather jacket comes over and joins us at our table. He speaks in slurred German which is what initially gains him our attention. After this, our meal goes downhill and with it our at first good impression of the Romanian people. He just won’t go away and can’t even translate the menu for us. The waitress seems unphased by our plight but we have to buy two cokes before we can easily make our excuses to leave. The man just keeps asking us to buy him schnapps. We move on to the Hotel-Melody where, apparently, by night residents can enjoy an erotic show, but which by day seems perfectly respectable. The chicken we try to order is ‘off’ so we order steak instead. It turns out to be very tasty and at £2.50 each, pretty cheap. The meal lifts our mood from the depressions of the morning and we resolve to spend the afternoon enjoying what Cluj can offer.
We realise now that the guide books, which said we’d always be travellers rather than tourists in Romania, were right. There are very few Westerners here and the people seem very friendly towards us because of their curiosity. Disregarding the old lady and the drunkard, everyone has been eager to help us. In the banks and station office, there were always at least three people behind the counter helping us at once. Perhaps they have not yet learnt how to rip-off tourists. For now, it’s a refreshing change. We decide, however, that refreshing and interesting though it may be, we will curtail our stay here to two nights before heading off to Istanbul. The grass seems, from our current viewpoint at least, to be very definitely greener in Turkey. At the CFR train ticket booking office where we wait in a stuffy queue for twenty minutes, we are dealt with by a rather large lady who seems to have no idea what an Interrail ticket is. We enlist the help of a young Romanian behind us who speaks good English and eventually determine that all the couchettes have gone for tomorrow and it’s seats for us for the night. Good thing is they’ll cost 6p for both of us.
We leave the smog and confusion of the city for the airy views of the Citadel, a monument on the top of a large hill overlooking the crowded streets. The city is far more impressive from up here but we laugh once more that we have in fact exhausted all of Cluj’s tourists attractions without visiting any and still have another night to spend here. On our return through the town to the hotel, I notice once more how strikingly different we are to all the locals. I stick out like a man with a super-inflated lip, or a moose on the cattle train to Minsk. Later in the self-service restaurant next to the hotel, where the food is actually quite good, we meet an American called Charles. If we are to believe his hints, his three months in Europe and five weeks in Cluj have been spent solely in the search for cheap women and erotic clubs. He is staying in some seedy hotel and plans to go to a club tonight where you pay $50 for ‘the whole night’. We consider him to be the worst possible kind of tourist and make our excuses as he slopes off in his spooky mac. An onerous journey to Istanbul lies ahead of us tomorrow and now all we need is sleep.

I wake up in the morning surprised to find that where there were blokes sleeping yesterday, now there are girls. Lots of them. They are mostly Australian and American but we have a train to catch and have, unfortunately, no time for socialising.
We have heard the Hotel Astoria does great breakfasts, but are disappointed to be told by the rather rotund porter as we try to get in that it is after 10am and thus ‘Breakfast is off’. We settle for all we can realistically afford : a slice of pizza on the street and head for the OTP Bank where Chris eventually purchases some English money which we are assured is the only thing which will get us into Turkey. He tries asking for some Romanian Lei too but this just makes the cashier fall about laughing. We cut the train times a little fine and arrive on the stinking platform with 5 minutes to spare. We are depressed to realise that we have an eight hour train journey in front of us and yet all that our money will stretch to is two rather dried salami rolls and some sprite. We forecast a long and uncomfortable trip.
Inside a stuffy carriage and just settled down, we discover we are on the non-Cluj-Napoca section of this, the train to Cluj-Napoca. We are forced to shift all our bags down the train to an even stuffier carriage occupied by a Romanian girl who tells us, in broken English, that she has been playing volleyball for Budapest for the last two years but now must return home. Chris and I wonder if the translation is quite correct. Perhaps she is a volleyball international for Romania, but it seems unlikely. I vaguely remember German aural tests where the only thing I could think of when asked ‘what do you like doing?’ was ‘Ich spiele gern Tennis’ even though I had played it perhaps twice in my life at that point and wonder whether this is a similar situation.
Our tickets and passports are checked an uncountable number of times and at the border station we are given entry/exit cards for Romania which we must keep. One particular guard checks our tickets and, with prompting from the girl, we thank him in Romanian – ‘Mortsumeska’. He smiles and translated by the girl, responds with, ‘My pleasure.’. It is a touching moment for Anglo-Roman friendship.
Later, several shady characters present themselves and their briefcases full of inflated currency trying to sell us Romanian Lei. Chris says he remembers sitting in the thermal bath yesterday and wondering where we’d be in 24 hours time. As it turns out where we are is equally wet, not quite so comfortable or warm but seems to have just the same number of dodgy blokes lurking around. Finally, a soldier comes in to check our carriage and under the seats – presumably looking for the hoards of passport-less Gypsies who accidentally slipped through the net of all previous checks. There are none in our carriage, we’ve looked.
At ten o’clock we roll into Cluj Napoca, where it is dark and rainy. We feel powerless as usual in a new country, since we have no money and surprisingly the taxi driver we find is reluctant to accept dollars. We end up walking the mile or so into the centre and the nearest hotel. Crossing the river, we stand at a pedestrian crossing watching the Dacias flash by in clouds of oily smoke. The rain splashes down into puddles filling the deep ruts in the road and we feel instantly at home. A little old lady, hunched over her heavy bags and wearing about eight layers of clothing stumbles across the road and nearly gets run over by a particularly speedy car. We locate our hotel, the Vladeasa, and wait in the reception area which is straight out of the 1960′s. The little old lady who nearly got knocked over turns up behind us and sits down – very strange. The rate for a double room for a Westerner (twice, I notice, what a Romanian is charged) is 92,000lei or £22. Not too bad. As we are paying I notice the old lady shuffling up the stairs. We are shown into a sparse but clean room and the receptionist shows us the showers down the corridor. As we return to our room, the old lady bursts round the corner and with surprising speed, forces herself into our room. She stands in the corner whimpering, pretending to cry and clearly begging to stay the night. She looks confused and sad. Despite our claims that she cannot stay, she will not leave. It takes all the shouting of the receptionist to send her off down the corridor, but afterwards she returns and scrapes and taps on our door, trying to get in. We can do nothing except lock the door and wait. We crash on the beds and decide that Cluj-Napoca probably has worse things in store than this when daylight comes around.