Monday, September 24, 2012
We have a little
battle with the shower again, which, although new and fancy, spews very cold
water. On the phone Marinel assures us that the warm water will come
eventually, and so it does, and we both shower satisfactorily and head down for
breakfast in the quite luxurious and large dining room. We’re the only persons
there and while we get our bearings amongst fruits, croissants, and coffee, a
courteous waiter appears. “You are vegetarian,” he says. “Yes, why?” we ask.
“We have prepared a surprise,” he says with pleasure. He returns with a dish of
pureed peppers and eggplants, very tasty and – for us – perfect with drinks.
But there’s the great country bread and I enjoy the mixture of flavors while
Oswaldo huddles defensively with his warm buttery croissant and jam. The waiter
appears again with a platter of sliced cheese. It looks like the cheese from
yesterday and I ask whether it’s cow or sheep’s cheese. This goes beyond his
English, so I ask “Moooh” or “Baaah?” He’s laughing when he says, “Not baaah,
mooh.” Oswaldo obligingly samples the cheese, which is also very nice. Then we
get ready to leave, not before meeting the dynamic manager of the hotel, who
tells us it was opened only two months ago, and who also says bears come here regularly
at night. He’s seen one with 3 cubs. Thus we confirm our suspicion that the
covered garbage cans we’d noticed the day before were indeed to keep the bears
out. We leave promising to send more Brazilians.
With Marinel
once again at the wheel we head towards the Red Lake, Lacu Rosu, also known as
the Killer Lake – legend has it that a piece of the mountain fell down and
crushed a man in a boat at some point. The lake is at the entrance of the
impressive Carpathian mountain range, not really red at all, but obviously a
popular local tourist spot, with all kinds of vendors. While we’re eating a lunch
of grilled trout and enjoying a large glass of Romanian beer we observe a lady
feed large pieces of a Hungarian sweet, which looks a little bit like a cast
for an arm, if that were made of dough. The horse doesn’t look at her as it
eats the whole thing, piece by piece. She swats it lightly on the head and
returns to her sweet-making station, where we later observe her dipping wooden
rolls in batter and roasting them over hot embers.
When they’re golden brown she drizzles them with sugar,
nougat or coconut. We buy ½ of one and tear at the hot delicious dough.
Then we approach
the hairpin roads and the forbidding rocks of the Bicaz pass and are awed by
the wildness of the place.
At some point we pass a farmer and his wife sitting
on a mound of reeds pulled by a horse. They’re straining slowly uphill and we
and other cars are looking to pass. When we later make a stop for taking
pictures we watch them going downhill and wonder how the poor horse is going to
make it. “The man has brake,” says Marinel, ‘this is very good horse.”
After the
mountains comes a huge dam, the name of which escapes us, made in the communist
era and obliterating many villages. Throughout our travels we’ve seen the
effects of the summer’s drought on the wizened fields, the wilted maize, and the
useless blackened sunflowers, but here it’s alarming to notice the low level of
the water and the many surrounding dry riverbeds.
We’re now in
Moldavia, and as we slowly circle the enormous lake we take in the difference
in architecture, the careful woodwork and the many flowers. All over we see
horses and cows grazing apparently on their own and chickens and ducks pecking
at the ground. The number of strays has diminished greatly.
Since we’re not
going to have internet at Fernando’s Hideaway, our next stop, we stop in a
small town to check in with the house and Victor, where a innocuous café façade
- with wireless internet - does
not prepare us for the red velvet chair interior with superior coffee and
tiramisu, served in a portion size that that makes it dinner for us. Twenty
minutes later Elena Klabin welcomes us at her house, set in the middle of
fields and hung with beautiful Moldavian tapestries, where we chat on her stoop
and watch a man walk his two cows home for the night, with his little matching
black and white dog taking up the rear. The half moon is bright in the sky when
we retreat to our room, tired after the long day in the car.
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