Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  I’d started early because I knew I had a long climb ahead of me, and because I didn’t want to mess up as I had the previous day. From Rosia Montan? I’d originally intended to hike along a cross-country path to Campeni – it had looked possible on the map – but everyone, including the luscious Adriana, had advised me to stick to the road. But by midday I was so thoroughly fed up with the extra distance and the traffic that I’d cadged a lift by flagging down a minibus. It turned out to be full of women workers from a knitwear factory, going home, and I’d had to stand up at the front, holding on tight, while the more gap-toothed of the women made salacious comments and asked me personal questions I couldn’t understand. Judging from the raucous way the rest of them laughed, it was probably better that way.

  And so at Albac it was a release to be leaving the metalled roads and heading up through steep fields where stooks of hay, like midsummer snowmen who’d got fat and tanned in middle age, were trying to slide surreptitiously sideways into the cool shade of the field-fringing trees, to wait there for winter to return. Some were grouped in silent conference, frozen in the act of whispering. Others were just companionable couples, sagging slightly at the knees, having been too long in each other’s company to care about how they looked any more. All of them shimmied with steam when the sun laid its soft hand upon them.

  It was a valley of natural abundance and of timber yards, mostly fed by illegal logging. Tomatoes and runner beans flourished outside the farmsteads, the breadmaking smoke from summer kitchens hung low, mingling with the dew. A clear river ran jauntily down past me, but I had to be selective in where I looked if I wanted to miss its eddies of plastic bottles, crisp packets, cement sacks and beer cans. From the far bank an old lady talking to her two cows turned her attention, and her tongue, on me, but all I could do was smile, tell her where I was going, and point. She seemed satisfied with that.

  The breeze-block architecture of the valley bottom evaporated as I climbed higher, and the farmsteads became all spruce-built, clad in shingle tiles, steadily diminishing in size in accordance with the increasing height and the diminishing means of their proprietors. Some had outhouses with floral balconies where granny had moved out to, now that the next generation had taken over the main building. Here her task was to look after the livestock and the vegetables, and I could see her resting on her pitchfork in the piggery, taking a break from mucking out, or appearing at the door of the cowshed with a pail of warm milk, while some large beast inside bumped complainingly against the wooden walls, impatient to be out.

  For a while I walked in step with three itinerant gypsy grasscutters whose portable scythes I couldn’t fathom until one of them saw I was interested, slid it off his shoulder and showed how the blade swung out and locked. After a half mile or so they sprawled over a grassy bank and produced bottles of beer from nowhere, suggesting by sign language that I should join them. I demurred; I was still nervous of gypsies, and besides I wouldn’t be able to walk 25 kilometres after a drink so early in the day. In order not to offend, I demonstrated the likely impact of a 9 a.m. beer on my walking stride, and they laughed and waved me on.

  At Horea the last bits of patchy tarmac vanished altogether. One of the hills beside the village – the Hill of Panting – had a reputation as a place for couples who were trying to conceive, or at least it did according to the local mayor, who described it as ‘natural Viagra’ and had had the local timber-workers carve a heart-shaped fountain decorated with a massive wooden penis to crown the hilltop. Not all the villagers approved – the ‘panting’ actually referred to nothing more than getting out of breath when climbing up it, they said – but the mayor had generated new business for the two village guesthouses and the café. None showed any sign of life when I walked through, but it was still early and their guests could have been up panting late into the night.

  I took the track out towards Matisesti, looping and climbing through a tartan of sloping meadows interrupted by gullies of firs and cross-stitched by home-made fences, until eventually I was up into scrubby forest, where pines were interspersed with hornbeam and oak. The main track had divided and subdivided, but I stuck with it until I reached the straggling settlement itself, trying not to pant unnecessarily. And then, using my compass and map, I struck off on a track that seemed to head due north up through a saddle in the mountain range, and which I hoped would eventually bring me down to Poiana Horea.

  It was easy enough walking, with glimpses of a giant view to the east and regular stands of wild raspberries close at hand. Bilberries, too, carpeted the clearings in the woodland. The weather was warm, but not hot, the birds were flying high, and there was a pleasant breeze. Ideal for making progress, provided I was going in the right direction.

  After an hour or two without meeting anyone, I began to feel nervous, not so much about my route (my compass bearing was still good, despite several diverging choices of path), but about the presence of bears, which I knew liked berries just as much as I did. I also knew they were here in quantities, with half the brown bear population of Europe (estimated at 12,000) resident in Romania, a statistic which surfaced out of my subconscious as I walked. The more I thought about it, the more anxious I became. For a hungry bear, this path was stacked with temptation.

  And then, around virtually the very next corner, I nearly collided with an old lady in a headscarf, a pail of bilberries at the end of either arm. Her lips were blue, indicating either a weak heart (a close encounter with a bear?) or that she’d been snacking while she picked. When I asked whether I was headed in the right direction, she simply nodded and walked on. I felt reassured. If there was any real danger, she would have said something, I felt sure.

  Half an hour later and the track threaded between a handful of glorified mountain huts that were plainly occupied, judging by the laundry and the well-tended flowerpots. I didn’t see their occupants until a few minutes later, when my eye was caught by movement through the trees when I’d nearly crested the ridge. I could make out a family in a rough clearing engaged in making hay, the father scything a poor crop, the children tumbling over one another in his wake, and the mother raking and stacking. On the surface it made an idyllic picture, but on spotting me they stopped and stared, and the family dog, until then unaware of my presence, came hollering down towards me through the brush. The family stood and watched without attempting to call it back, so as it came lurching downhill I felt for where I’d hung the Dazzer on my belt, and when I judged it close enough I gave it an electronic squirt. Instantly the dog skidded to a halt on its haunches, turned and hared back uphill to its owners. For my part, I hastily turned and walked away up the track, acutely aware of their eyes on my retreating back. Whether they’d seen or understood what I’d done I couldn’t be sure, but I very much doubted it. They certainly wouldn’t have heard anything from the Dazzer and nor had the dog yelped as if it had been hurt. From their perspective the little scene had probably been a touch mystifying, but from mine it had been an unqualified success. I was impressed.

  The path eventually emerged into grassy flatlands at the saddle of the ridge at 1,400 metres. Here a handful of sleek, fat, hobbled horses galumphed slowly about, grazing steadily, plainly too good to be hauling timber. Their owner, sitting with his shoulders against a stockaded shrine to the Virgin Mary, seemed completely unsurprised to find a foreigner materializing at his shoulder. He confirmed that, yes, this was the way to Poiana Horea. I just needed to follow the valley down, and he waved his finger in the general direction that my compass also suggested I go.

  By now I was getting used to the idea that, unlike in Western Europe, these mountain tops were settled and busy. They had yet to become a leisure facility, as in the Alps or the Pyrenees, and instead presented the opportunity of yet more, albeit seasonal, back-breaking work. Accordingly there were more wooden houses scattered over the edge on the other side, and a couple more dogs which came at me baring their teeth through gaps in wooden fences. Whether they intended to do more than
just encourage me on my way I don’t know, but I wasn’t prepared to wait and see. When they were close enough a judicious squirt stopped them in their tracks. I was starting to get an idea of the Dazzer’s range: if they were more than 5 metres away, they would just look mildly surprised.

  Descending steeply now, with a whole new range of aches in muscles that had just spent the last five hours climbing, I passed whole families out haymaking, constructing stooks around the spine of what had once been a small fir, with several branch stubs left intact. This skeleton would be supported by staves and as it was piled higher with hay, a couple of the children scrambled up and walked around the top to tread it down, dodging the pitchforks raining new hay in their direction. The adults may have been doing all the hard physical work, but the children were an integral part of the whole operation.

  The track became more substantial. Now that I was descending I could see it looping through the trees below me and could therefore judge where to cut the corners by plunging down through the scrub, as many a walker had plainly done before me. Eventually it stopped its hyperactive pirouetting and settled into the groove of a valley bottom that ran it down directly into Poiana Horea, a scattered village of summer hill-farmers. In the village shop I bought a large and ludicrously expensive bottle of lemonade, and feeling that its price earned me the right to ask for information, I quizzed the proprietor about somewhere to stay. Despite having listened to, and repeated from, a teach-yourself-Romanian tape for much of the last couple of days, my Romanian was still extremely basic, and in the end we resorted to sketch maps, from which I understood there was indeed such a place. I needed to ask for ‘the engineer’.

  The engineer’s tin-roofed house was about 2 kilometres east of the village, and it reassuringly carried a Pensiunea sign. Its dog was there, but its owner was not. Fortunately, unlike the other dogs I’d encountered, this one was calm and welcoming, so I settled down outside the porch and the dog settled with me.

  We didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later a moon-faced middle-aged man, a touch too overweight for a farmer, came ambling through the garden gate dressed in what looked like his pyjamas, his trousers pulled right up over his belly. He looked extremely surprised to see a stranger on his doorstep.

  This was Charley (‘Don’t call me Carol, it’s a girl’s name’) Nemes, who turned out to be not from the mountains at all, but an Anglophile university professor from Cluj, the city that was my end destination for this part of my walk. In very good English, he explained that he was known locally as ‘the engineer’ because he worked in the university’s faculty of electronic engineering. During the long summer holidays he and his wife Monicka retreated to his cabin in the woods and made a little money out of renting the rooms to whoever could afford them. And although tourism in the Apuseni mountains was increasing, I was the first foreign walker who had arrived independently at his doorstep. ‘So you can see, when I see you at my gate I was surprise.’

  The interior of Charley’s house was a bit like a chalet in the Alps. Everything was wood-lined, organized and insulated. Every little bit of wood had been fiddled, turned and twiddled in a lathe by a carpenter with too much spare time, and looked like a house built out of ornamental chair legs. Sitting down over a cup of tea and a biscuit in true British style, he explained that it had been built with the help of an English friend who came out every summer. And while most of the houses around were effectively illegal – built without planning permission – his at least was completely above board. Of that he was very proud.

  ‘The main business of these mountains is forestry. It’s not legal. But what if you took it away? The community would be dead, completely dead. The foresters need houses, so they built houses.’

  I said I’d been surprised to see so many, so high up, and Charley explained that it was traditional for families who were short of land in the valleys to move up into the hills in summer to make hay and to graze their animals. ‘So you get more houses, it’s not legal, but it is traditional.’

  It was an annual upwards migration that used to happen in the Alps and the Pyrenees too, a migration that no longer takes place.

  ‘So are there holiday houses as well? Other than yours, I mean?’ I told him how, elsewhere, tourism had taken the place of tradition.

  ‘Certainly there are,’ said Charley. He said something to Monicka, who disappeared off up the track, returning fifteen minutes later with half a dozen middle-aged Romanians, all also from Cluj, all of whom spoke some English and who were curious to see the foreigner who’d appeared out of the hills. And so we had a little English-speaking tea party in the Apuseni mountains, complete with McVitie’s finest biscuits, which Charley had been keeping for special occasions.

  That evening I retired to bed with a slim volume by Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet of the 1880s. It turned out he’d been pretty outspoken when it came to the treatment of passing foreigners:

  If any shall cherish the stranger

  May the dogs eat his heart

  May the weeds destroy his house

  And may his kin perish in shame.

  A hostile sentiment that only the dogs seemed to have remembered, thank God.

  The next day’s route was largely cross-country, along forest paths that I’d discussed at length with Charley, who was touchingly concerned I would get lost and end up wandering around the Apuseni for days on end. When I’d told him about my encounters with dogs, he’d not been surprised. Everyone kept dogs in the hills, he said, principally as protection against bears, which was why they let them be aggressive. But there weren’t many bears in the Apuseni, so I didn’t need to worry on that account. Which was why, when I heard something ahead of me on the track that morning, my first thought wasn’t to run and hide.

  It was a belly-aching, rumbling sound, clearly an animal, and probably one with a stomachache or a sore head. I didn’t pay it too much attention as I rounded the corner, but as I did so I found myself making direct and sudden eye-contact with a bull. A large, free-range, leery-eyed, dribbling one, complete with horns. The real McCoy, right down to the hanging testicles. I stopped. The bull did the same, as we debated who was the more surprised. And then it started pawing the ground, as all good bulls are meant to do.

  We were probably a good 50 yards apart when it first lunged forward, and happily I had the uphill advantage. Casting around me, I thanked my lucky stars that this stretch of path led through young, thick woodland. Thinking it was always a good idea to keep the height advantage I darted upwards into the pines, scrambling steeply into dim, mossy undergrowth, blood pounding in my ears.

  The bull quickly reached the point where I’d disappeared. Pressing myself flat into the moss, I watched it as it stopped, turned and took a couple of paces upwards to stick its head into the gloom of the forest. I knew that British bulls had poor eyesight, so I relied on staying still as much as on being hidden. Any child playing hide-and-seek would have spotted me easily, but the bull was flummoxed, or perhaps it was so crosseyed with testosterone that it could no longer think straight. It stood there, swaying its head and belly-aching to itself, contemplating whether it was worth the effort of trying to force its way upwards, while I lay there motionless, listening to my heartbeat, and praying that it didn’t. Out of the corner of my eye I was sizing up the climbability of the nearest trees.

  In the end it didn’t come to that. The longer the bull hesitated on the threshold of the forest, the better my chances were of its losing interest, so as the seconds ticked away I felt increasingly calm. Down below me, the animal took a step backwards on to the path to check whether or not I had sneaked back down again, and once he’d reversed back out into the daylight he seemed to forget where I’d gone. He paced up and down, bellowing a challenge, and for a split second I was tempted to bellow back, to see if he really meant it. But when I didn’t emerge to fight he eventually gave me up as a complete waste of effort and continued his rumbling progress up the path.

  As soon as he
was out of sight I dropped down and took off in the opposite direction as quickly as I could. In the distance I would still hear him, grumbling, and I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a stomachache or sore head making him complain like that. He was a red-blooded male with a full set of balls and he was looking for a girlfriend to do a whole hill of panting.

  Some hours out of Charley and Monicka’s, after some difficult choices between diverging paths, I finally descended into a hamlet called Dobrus, at the meeting point of two valleys. That day Dobrus’s population had been swollen dramatically by an encampment of gypsies, who’d constructed box-like shelters along the banks of the river junction and made them watertight with big sheets of plastic. There were perhaps a hundred of them, mainly women and children, all sleeping, playing, cooking, feeding and excreting in the same area. It was a harvester’s camp for the forest fruit and mushrooms, and a couple of clapped-out vans down by a ford in the river were being washed down by the gangmaster, who nodded gruffly when I asked whether I was on the route for Maguri. Apart from him, however, the whole community of gypsies didn’t take the slightest bit of notice of me walking through, even though I knew a foreigner with a rucksack was a very rare sight in these mountains. And even though I’d been told repeatedly that gypsies would prey on easy targets like me.

  But that wasn’t the last I saw of gypsies that day. In Maguri I was joined by an olive-skinned young man with a wisp of a beard and wearing a Chicago Bulls tracksuit, who caught me up, fell into step and seemed inclined to communicate in any way we could. By that time it was mid-afternoon, baking hot, and I was feeling pretty tired, having already covered something approaching 20 miles that day, so I wasn’t feeling tremendously talkative, and besides, the limited Romanian I had learned was only about eating, sleeping and travelling, and it was soon exhausted.