TRAVELOGUE: Walking the Carpathians: Vatra Dornei to Mercureau Ciuc

By Stefan Korshak Jun 17, 2010, 12:24 GMT

Mercureau Ciuc, Romania - Life on the road has become normal. I spent the week in transition, walking from Romania's remote northern provinces into the gentle Olt River valley, a place heavily settled by Hungarians, the historical region Szekely Land, where I passed through one of Europe's best efforts at solving inter-ethnic tensions.

The first days of the week took me into the Caliman Mountains and a national park of the same name, a pristine place with clean water, fir forests and green rolling lowlands, topped by a rocky ridge still patched with snow. But to get into the park, I had to climb past one of the ugliest Socialist industrial efforts I have ever seen, an abandoned sulfur mine still polluting the water table, almost two decades after it was shut down.

I camped above the tree line and in the early morning hours saw deer and fox. Once again I had an entire mountain almost entirely to myself, although I did encounter two men picking mushrooms. But besides that, in Romanians northern highlands at this time of the years, it's a place only for rare hikers, and wildlife.

The weather turned and the rains ended, to be replaced with a heat wave that, like the rains that preceded it, had the Romanians telling me they hadn't seen such weather in years.

Needing to increase my daily kilometres, I took to the roads, and by mid-morning was already beaten down by the sun. Now sunburned and with chapping lips, I relearned the old marching lessons: get up early, plenty of fluids, dry socks and whatever you need to do finish before the heat of the afternoon.

I climbed into a new mountain range, the Haghrita, a place supposedly infested by bears and wolves. I met no large carnivores, but there were deer and rabbit, and a bat flew into an abandoned hut I was staying in. The bat left after letting me take its picture.

Every day, people went out of their way to help this lone hiker, sometimes with water, sometimes with shade, sometimes with directions, and twice with badly-needed lifts.

I reached the town Toplita and turned due south, into Romania's Haghrita province, a region heavily settled by ethnic Hungarians, and two days later the only language I was hearing was Hungarian - for practical purposes the villages I was passing through were just as Hungarian as those on the outskirts of Budapest.

It was fascinating to walk through this quite large island of Hungarians in the middle of Latin Romania. I was impressed how the two groups, in a not particularly wealthy European country, had seemingly resolved the problem of living together in the same country, and with very little fuss.

It was clear I was still in Romania, the Hungarians have all their signs in both languages, and, every Hungarian I tried to speak with seemed perfectly comfortable with Romanian.

Romania's Hungarians showed remarkable patience with a foreigner not speaking Hungarian, communicating with me in a mishmash of languages, and always with great humor.

In the streets and the stores and cafes, people spoke amongst themselves only in Hungarian. When we did find a common language, they told me they generally were happy enough to live in Romania. Since 2007, the international border had almost completely disappeared. From time to time I came across visitors from Hungary touring Szekly Land.

In the village of Siculeni, I found a monument to 200 Hungarians executed by the Austo-Hungarian empire for insurrection. Two tourists from the Hungarians city Gyor were chatting with a Siculeni woman whose house abutted the monument. Yes they were from two different countries, but both she and they were equally Hungarian, one of the tourists told me.

Ownership of Transylvania, with its difficult terrain and ethnic groups overlapping shifting international borders, has long been a flashpoint for conflict, and I found both Hungarians and Romanians a bit sensitive when explaining to a nosy foreigner whether the place should properly be run from Budapest or Bucharest.

But as I passed through the heartland of ethnic Hungarian settlement in Romania, I was struck repeatedly by how modern times had smoothed over an ancient conflict. Sometimes, people do in fact get along.