Saturday 20 September 2025 – Today’s mission was to decamp north to start with the mainstream of the week’s objectives – doing a bit of hiking in the Carpathian Mountains. Like (and a fraction more extensive than) the Alps, this is a multinational range, spanning from a little corner of Serbia via most of Slovakia, squeezing a narrow passage through Ukraine and taking up the north-western half of Romania. The rest of our time here will be spent doing what we opted for in a moment of lunacy love best – walking up and down hills in search of great views and splendid photos.

First we had to get out of Bucharest, and Jane had cunningly organised a driver to take us to a town called Bran, which, our information gave us to believe, was a two-hour drive, some 160km away. Somewhat inaccurately, as it turned out: the distance was some 190km and the journey actually took over four hours – traffic congestion and road works meant that we averaged less than 50kph for the journey. Just as well we’d visited the loo before we set out, then.

The congestion started immediately in Bucharest – completely normal, according to our driver. Still, it gave us a chance to take a couple of photos of Bucharest landmarks: a slightly better crack at the Arc de Triomf;

and a photo of an archetypal communist era slab of masonry.

This was, laughably, called the House of the Free Press, built under Communist rule and named “Casa Scînteii” (House of the Spark) after the Party newspaper edited and printed there. That is presumably free press as in you didn’t have to pay to get a copy. At least, I hope you didn’t.

After we left the Bucharest urban sprawl, the landscape changed into a much more bucolic one. Although we were on a dual carriageway, the undying spark of Romanian entrepreneurialism was unfazed. Operators small and large were there with their offers for the passing traffic, which was often at a standstill, even away from the city.

We passed Interesting Churches, and other striking buildings

as well as other mystery objects.

The terrain became mountainous, which showed that our driver was headed in the right direction,

and then caught our first sight of Bran.

Bran is famous for its castle, which everyone knows was “Dracula’s Castle”, where the legend states that local Prince Vlad the Impaler was used by Bram Stoker as the basis for his story about the vampire Count Dracula.

Trouble is, that’s bollocks.

Bram Stoker never visited Romania, so he never set eyes on Bran Castle. Vlad the Impaler only visited Bran Castle once – he was imprisoned there for two weeks before being shipped off to be imprisoned elsewhere. However, the good marketing folks of the region never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and now Bran and its castle are the centre of a flourishing tourist industry which they have milked assiduously. We willingly submitted ourselves to the marketing machine, as I hoped to get some splendid images of the great lowering presence of the castle and its grim interior. OK, they’d be just the same as everyone else’s, but they would be my images. Oh, and Jane’s, of course.

We checked into our accommodation, Casa din Bran,

and admired the view from our room for a few minutes.

We had about half an hour to spare before we had to get to the castle for an English langage guided tour. We set off to see if we could find the entrance to the castle. A short walk through Bran, which is quite picturesque,

led us to the entrance. It’s not difficult to find, as a whole host of retail opportunities have sprouted up around it.

You can see the castle above all the marketing brouhaha,

and they even have a small model of the area on display.

With 20 minutes to spare, we were able to take coffee in a garden near where we had to wait for our guide.

It turned out that we were the only two for the 4pm English tour, so we had an hour or so in the company of Darius,

who gave us a very entertaining run down on the place. Historically, the current stone fortress replaced a wooden building in the late 1300s. It had a strong strategic position, on the border between Wallachia and Transylvania.

In 1438–1442, the castle was used in defense against the Ottoman Empire, and later became a customs post, exploiting its position on the mountain pass between Transylvania and Wallachia.

The focus on myth and legend means that the real story of the castle, which is really interesting, is all but lost on most of the world. For example, not a lot of people know that Maria, the queen of Romania between 1914 and 1927, was British – born Princess Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She could have been queen of England, but didn’t marry the future George V because he was a cousin, instead becoming the wife of King Ferdinand I, who took over after the death of Carol I. Maria was multi-talented – artist, nurse, diplomat – and very popular with the Romanian people. The castle now is effectively a museum dedicated to displaying art and furniture collected by Queen Maria.

Another surprise for me was that the castle is actually (a) quite small and (b) was really lived-in;

it wasn’t in any way a ceremonial location – Maria lived there and loved it. In these respects, it reminds me of Lindisfarne Castle, in the north-east of England.  The rooms were properly heated with some wonderful heaters

and the place was properly decorated, as you can see from the beams in the picture above and the example of this door.

There is some exquisite furniture,

and the castle is laid out to take visitors along a route showing off the rooms and the furniture, supplemented by display boards with lots of information and, in our case, a guide. Being set high, it offers great views over the surrounding countryside

and, being a castle, offers some great internal scenes as well.

Of course, the marketing machine exploits the legend mercilessly, and why not? There’s a picture of the castle (I’m not sure whether this is the original or a print)

that could well be what Bram Stoker saw as he researched Transylvania’s legend and folklore from his base in Budapest and what gave him the idea for Count Dracula.  Vlad the Impaler’s dad was Vlad Dracul (Vlad the dragon in medieval Romanian) and Vlad himself was therefore Dracula, son of the dragon before he got the Impaler schtick. The fact that dracul means the devil in modern Romanian didn’t do his reputation any harm… So there are plenty of links between the story and the castle, although they’re much more tenuous than most people might think.

The Impaler thing is displayed, along with many other gruesome items, in the torture chamber, a multi-storey exhibit in one of the towers.

and the exit from the castle can be (if you pay extra) via a “Time Tunnel”, actually an elevator which descends into the bowels of the castle, so that you pass further ghoulish exhibits

as you exit from the castle into the gardens. There are various other horror-related things going on in the bazaar between the entrance and the castle itself.

The Dracula nonsense aside (and even that was a bit of fun), we had a really interesting 90 minutes in the castle, and left feeling that we had a much better grasp of the real history of the place.

After dinner back at the hotel (the bar even stocked Gunpowder gin, which shows it has class), we had merely to start to psych ourselves up for the morrow, when our real labours start with a hike over the mountains to a neighbouring village called Magura. This will involve more uphill work than downhill and I confess that I don’t feel quite ready for it, but come back tomorrow and you’ll find out if we made it OK.