Hiking and Bear-watching

In the end, everything turned out fine. We went hiking on Tuesday as planned, and were blessed with somewhat warmer and a lot dryer weather. The hike, following a yellow-striped trail, was steep to start with, but when we reached the high meadows the reward was some stunning scenery enlightened with a few sunrays and made magic by low clouds sweeping pass.

The forest sparkled with bright autumn colours in all hues, like somebody gave a tripped artist a carte blanche, as long as he only used variations of gold, rust, red and yellow, with a base of green. Fantastic.

We lunched sitting in a now summer-warm slope, then reached a cabin, 700 meter higher than our starting point, where a cute cat and two tremendous dogs craved attention and petting. That they received, and then we were off again, now heading downwards on a blue-striped trail. The end of it took us through a narrow and very deep gorge, sheer cliffs towering around us. Beautiful.

After five and a half hours of hiking, we had a well deserved if short siesta and some sandwiches before heading out for the bear-watching. Yes indeed, they managed to arrange something anyway. A rather silent guy from the park administration picked us up in a land rover and drove us to a hide just outside the national park-border. “We put some corn and chocolate here so that the animals are attracted, and we are not allowed to do that inside the park”, he told us. Which was pretty much everything he said, not much information about the bears, their habits etc.

So there we sat, in a little wooden hut on a hill, watching some corn spread out in a clearing maybe 100 meters away and a bit lower. Dusk came and no animals, except some birds. Then, the guide whispered excitedly and pointed. And yes, a bear! It was almost dark, and it quickly disappeared into the forest, never coming near the corn, just passing by along a creek.

Actually, me and Anders only saw its rear end before it vanished. But a bear butt is a bear as well :-). This we celebrated at a local bar afterwards, drinking Ursus beer – what else?

Brasov and Zarnesti

Brasov didn’t give much of an impression, which might be accounted to the awful weather with rain and a paltry 5°C. So we continued to a little village called Zarnesti, close to the Praia Craiului national park. Here, the plan was to go on bear-watching on Monday evening and then do some hiking on Tuesday.

Romania being Romania, our well in advance-made booking of the bear-watching experience was unheard of, so the closest thing we came to a bear on Monday was the Ursus beer (Ursus means bear in Romanian) we had to the dinner. Mind you, the dinner was excellent, freshly caught and grilled trout (at least that is what we think the fish is called in English, the chef only knew the Romanian name).

Before that, we took a short stroll through the village and it's surroundings. I like villages. You come closer to the people, and there are animals everywhere.