It was dumb, really. My aunt Teresa had come to visit for a few days, and after spending time together in the Jiu Valley she was on her way to Sighișoara, a lovely historic city about 6 hours northeast of Lupeni, where she was intending to visit the internship program for the college where she works. We had intended to drive her to Deva, the county seat (notorious in our lives for being the city where we have to go for our visas... but that's a story for another post), and then get her on a train heading to Copşa Mică, a tiny town just outside Sighișoara, where she would be picked up by her next host. But... that didn't happen.
We got to Deva an hour early and decided to eat lunch at a restaurant relatively close to the train station. The food took quite a while to come, so eventually Teresa and I left to make sure we'd catch her train, leaving Jack behind to take the food to go. We speed-walked back to the station, rushing so as not to miss it, hoping Jack would also show up before she pulled away. There was a train waiting on line 1, but we had been told hers would be on line 4, so we sat down to wait. Just to be sure, I asked a few people on the train if they were heading towards Sighișoara. They all said no.
The train left, and another train came, this one clearly marked and not heading in our direction. Jack showed up with our sandwiches, and we sat on the platform and waited for another 45 minutes, feeding crumbs to the pigeons and chatting. Finally I went and asked the ticket lady if the train was coming soon. "It left," she said, looking at me askance. "I saw you walk by and assumed you were getting on it. It's already gone." I was a bit astonished, and said we hadn't seen a train on track 4, and the people I'd asked on the first train had said it wasn't going to Sighișoara. "It moved to track 1," she said. And then I realized that the train doesn't go on to Sighișoara anyway -- it detours around it, which is why Teresa was getting picked up in a tiny village outside the city. I felt really dumb. I thanked the lady and walked back to Teresa and Jack, who were waiting expectantly on the platform. "We missed it," I admitted.
It's another three hours by car from Deva to Copşa Mică, but we couldn't think of an alternative, so we decided to just drive there. We were a bit worried about the FNO van, which is beloved but really old and clunky, but it did fine. In fact, we arrived in Copşa Mică right on time, beating the train Teresa would have ridden, enjoying the gorgeous scenery of Transylvania along the way. But then it was 6:30, and Jack and I still had to drive home. We looked at the map and decided to change our route, taking what looked like the most direct path: west through Blaj and Alba Iulia, then straight south from Sebeş, turning west again into the Jiu Valley when we got close to Petroşani. Simple, right? Wrong.
As it turns out, the road that goes straight south from Sebeş is the Transalpina. I've wanted to drive the Transalpina since I was first in Romania three years ago -- it's a famous, beautiful, winding road through the mountains, known throughout Europe as a "must-see" scenic drive. But we didn't exactly mean to drive the Transalpina in the clunky old FNO van, at the end of what had become a 10-hour drive, in the dark. Whoops.
That said, it was gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. There's a huge lake called Oașa partway through the road, and we somehow managed to get there around sunset. It was breathtaking. There were low, misty clouds curling their way among the pine-covered mountains; the road twisted and turned below towering stone cliffs; small waterfalls tumbled down out of thickly forested hills. It was lovely -- a perfect picture of Transylvania. The road itself was less lovely -- pristine, well-maintained highway for a while, then suddenly punctuated every 800 meters with a 30-meter-long stretch of unpaved, pothole-ridden gravel. The last 25 kilometers from the Transalpina to Petroşani were a nightmare of potholes and boulders, and took us at least an hour of jolting and shifting and praying and bouncing. But we made it. We got home a bit before midnight and collapsed into bed, exhausted... and now we have some beautiful pictures to share.
Enjoy.
One of the enormous dams along the Transalpina.
Sometimes, when the mountains were lower, there would be farms perched halfway up the slope.
Lake Oașa
An accidental sunset.
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