Sometimes you just know you’re going to love a place. It’s an unconscious certainty, formed slowly, through the passive banking of anecdotes, good movies and the occasional connection to your past lives. Iceland, Lebanon and Japan are on the list. I thought I’d love them and I did. Romania’s always been a contender. Especially Transylvania, with its wildflower meadows, pretty villages and folkloric fangs. It’s a bit of me.
So when The Slow Cyclist invited me on their inaugural bike and hike along a section of Romania’s box-fresh Via Transilvanica (VT), I felt the same sort of excitement a philatelist might on bagging a fancy stamp.
Dubbed “The Camino of the East”, the VT is a tethering of ancient trade and transhumance trails that now stretches 1,400km across the country. Beginning in northerly Bucovina, near the Ukrainian border, it scribbles at a slant over Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains, ending at a village in spitting distance of Serbia.
The first project of its kind in Eastern Europe, the VT is the brainchild of environmentalist Alin Ușeriu and his brother Tiberiu, who run Tășuleasa Social, a non-governmental organisation. Tiberiu’s redemption arc – imprisoned for armed robbery; now a celeb ultra-marathon runner – adds to the project’s colourful origin story.
Together they defied a litany of odds, shunning “corrupt” state money while getting buy-in from groups spanning local communities to logging companies. Four-and-a-half years later, a trail emerged that unites seven regions and over 100 administrative “units”, giving people like me and you an excuse to deep dive into Romania’s mesmeric arcadia.
Having been blackmailed into attending an in-law’s wedding, I was late to the adventure and caught up with my group, on day three (of five), outside a 16th-century painted monastery in Vatra Moldovitei. Crumpled nuns admonished us for… well, I’m not sure what as we ogled its immaculate murals, one of which takes you back to the Siege of Constantinople in 626 AD. Divine intervention and Christian resilience in effulgent blue and golden hues.
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