This year’s vacation – Romania, Apuseni Mountains: the short story

As you may know, in Romania we have the Carpathians mountains in 3 ranges. During this vacation we’ve visited a small part of the oldest range: The Western Carpathians – Carpatii Apuseni (a more appropriate English translation would be like “Sunset Mountains” 🙂 ).

This is a great area, loved by locals but also by tourists from all over the world. It’s a place where it is recommended to travel by car (or bus, in organized trips) for there is no public transport, like train or regular bus lines – and there’s no nearby airport either.

The sceneries are simply amazing, just as other objectives in the area are. And there are many places to visit!

We left on Friday, June 25th. It was sunny at first. We chose to travel once again through our amazing road called the Transfagarasan. But at the altitude of 1700 m it started to be foggy and rainy. At the top of the Transfagarasan there was such a fog that you could not see 5 m in front of you! But there was still A LOT of snow – of course I threw some snowballs at my husband Ave as well as at our dog, Maxie (yes, we took her with us in this vacation).

In the afternoon we reached our destination – a touristic village called Albac. In the days that followed we traveled a lot – over 1500 km – and we saw a famous and old fortification, Alba Carolina, in the city of Alba Iulia – a city established by the Romans in the second century A.D. under the name of Apulum.  We have as well visited the oldest glacier in the world at Scarisoara; we’ve visited the Bear’s Cave; we saw the Gold Mining Museum and traveled through mines, dating from Roman Empire and even before that (first century A.D). We also visited a memorial house of a famous local important historical figure – Avram Iancu; we saw a couple of wonderful waterfalls and a hill of fossilized sea snails. We’ve also visited a recently opened saline at Turda, which left us quite impressed.

We enjoyed each moment of fresh mountain air, sound of river flowing next to the pension we stayed at and all the views. And we enjoyed all the people we met.

There are many important touristic objectives and many places worth having a look at (they are already known by tourists, for we’ve seen many Germans, Hungarians and others in our travels).

As I mentioned in the title this is a short story 🙂 and will be followed by dedicated posts on each places we went to.