The First Hike in Transylvania

As I told you before I had heard, prior to this trip, that Transylvania had the best hiking. My expectations were therefore high. Could Transylvania really live up to them?

Already during the first hour of hiking I was amazed. The mountains, the fields, all the flowers, the small mountain huts were all SOOOOO beautiful. I couldn’t believe our luck. We had arrived to this amazing country before they had cut the fields of grass, so all the beautiful summer flowers were still around. I don’t think I have ever seen so many flowers while hiking.

In some of the hikes I have made the trails have been wide and well used. I call them hiking autobahns. Of course you cannot expect perfect narrow forrest trails on all the hikes during a whole week of hiking, but we were off to a very good start. All the trails were beautiful. We hit a little bit of roads in between, but that is normal. The major parts were really nice trails.

During our hike we ran into a couple that were up in the mountains cutting the grass. That really put things in perspective; they had walked up the mountain and were working hard all day and then walked down. That is hard for me to do and I do a lot of exercise. But then add to the picture that they were using a scythe and an old rake (In Sweden we would have used machines) and they were in their 80‘ies!!! Do you get it? How amazing isn’t that? They were smiling and looked very happy. You start to think - what is the best way to live your life? Chasing money and career in the modern world or to work hard outdoors in a surrounding that you love?

On our first day we also got to experience the hospitality of the Romanian people. Due to the risk of thunderstorm (which never came - we had nice weather the whole day) we decided to take a different route than it was planned from the start. Lucian then called some people he knew and asked if it was OK that we came by. So suddenly we found ourselves sitting in a garden being served blueberry liqueur, homemade cheese and bread and freshly made doughnuts. It was amazing. These people stopped to work on their fields just so they could serve food and drinks to a group of people they have never met before. You will not find this kind of hospitality on a lot of places around the world. Because we didn’t pay, Lucian did.

So as a summary - we started of our hiking week in the best possible way.