Hillbilly travels: Transylvania, Romania

Sat 9th – Thurs 14th Aug

Every morning I wake up with more and more bug bites, but this morning I was particularly worried when I found two bites on my neck. That whole Dracula thing is just fiction, right?

Well the neck biting and blood sucking part is myth, but I was terrified to find out that the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel was based on an actual person, hence the thousands of fans who flock to his home town and castle here in Transylvania every year.

Bevan spots his first vampire

The story goes that his real name was Vlad Tepes, but he was known

as Vlad the Impaler and Vlad Dracula. Let's just say that Vlad had a rather twisted imagination when it came to killing his prisoners. He liked to impale them on a wooden stake, making sure to miss any vital nerves so that they stayed alive for days. He then displayed them publicly to frighten his enemies and they estimate that he killed between 40,000 and 100,000 people this way. Now we know where Bram Stoker got the idea for killing vampires by driving a wooden stake through their heart.

The Dracula nickname came from Vlad's father who ruled Wallachia in Southern Romania. The Wallachian emblem was a dragon (drac in Romania), and Dracula means “son of the dragon”.

Dracula's birth place is the yellow building. Not so scary, is it?

Despite the mosquitoes who go for your neck, I've been pleasantly surprised with Transylvania. The scenery is incredible and lives up to it's folklore notoriety. Steep wooded mountains with ancient castle towers looming in the distance, all of which could easily pass as the home of a vampire. Even the tennis courts in Brasov had that eerie Transylvania architecture that conjures up images of haunted houses and werewolves. But instead of being shrouded in mist we've found nothing but vivid blue skies and sunshine.

Tennis courts in Brasov

You'd expect that visiting the towns around here would mean hundreds of tourist shops filled with Dracula and vampire memorabilia but interestingly the people of Transylvania don't seem to be hyping his notoriety as much as you might expect. You'll see more of him on the internet than you do here in his birth place, Sighisoara, but I hear they're building a Dracula Land theme park so that could all change very soon.

Camp site in Brasov

Instead, a visit to Transylvania means exploring beautiful Hapsburg style villages with colourful facades and driving past farmers in traditional Romanian dress trying to keep their sheep and goats out of the road. The place should be the setting for a fairytale rather than one of the most haunting legends.

Entrance to Sighisoara -- Birth place of Dracula

So despite the bats flying overhead as I write this, I'm fairly confident that I can sleep soundly in the van tonight. (After all we do have garlic in the cupboard.)