Sunday, August 9: Awoke at 3:15 a.m., after hours of intestinal rumblings, and decided (as if I had a choice) to move my bowels over in the direction of the woods before the load completely exploded in my pants. I felt for my boots outside, under the small flaps on the side of my tent, where I'd left them.
No boots? Nu? No boots. Nothing but damp grass. But no time to think about that now. I grabbed a plastic bag containing some toilet paper and made my way in the dark, in my socks, over grass, gravel and wet earth. I hopped the fence which separated our campsite from the road (there was no gate; Danni had pounded a post into the earth to facilitate our jumping over). I did my business by the roadside -- the urgency of the situation didn't allow for niceties -- returned to my tent, and managed to get some sleep.
Five hours later, I was awoken by someone calling me at the tent flap. The camp was in an uproar: during the night, and evidently some time before my rude nocturnal emission, a thief or, more likely, several had invaded the campsite and made off with assorted pieces of clothing and even money. Backpacks, baggage and other equipment had been thrown in a heap in a hollow just back of the tents. Very fortunately for me, my boots were lying in this pile and I was just as relieved to put them on again as I'd been to relieve myself the night before. A central-casting band of Roma down the road was blamed for the burglary.
I'm happy I didn't meet the thieves in the night, but I did feel a bit guilty, since last night (unlike the night before), for some reason, I hadn't stored Leo's and Robby's backpacks in my tent and some of their belongings were missing. But nobody blamed me.
As if all this wasn't enough, Robby and Szilárd were talking about going home after suffering stomach upsets due to what was universally considered to be the bad "spring" water from the rapidly flowing but muddy stream.
But I don't have time to linger on this: the heart of the camp, the central experience, was coming hard upon us.
*****
Camping, like baseball, is a game of inches. It all comes down to: how do you feel? How do you feel now? Right now (11:43 a.m.) I feel OK, all right, better than yesterday; my lower intestine isn't a hundred percent, but seems to be improving.
We're off to explore the great Ceauhlau massif, extending ourselves "outward" for the farthest leg of the trip. We strike our tents and hike on the dirt road past the Vila Vultural (meaning either Eagle Cottages or Vulture Cottages) to the waiting van. An hour's drive takes us east from Lacu Rosu, on the eastern edge of Transylvania, into the Carpathian foothills in the western part of the Moldavia region (not to be confused with the independent nation of Moldova, farther east). We pass through the stunning Bicaz Gorge, where limestone cliffs over 700 feet high rise vertically on either side of the road, which snakes along with hairpin turns raising the blood pressure.
At 2:30 in the afternoon we stop at a mountain cabin, a Heidi-style Alpine fantasy with a Romanian accent. On a plateau below the jagged gray mountains and piney woods, fly-blown cows graze in the sun, chickens doze, and we wash our faces (and more) in the clean water from an outdoor faucet before setting out in earnest.
We hike into the mountains with full packs for a couple of hours and make camp in the open air on soft ground, in a clearing among some low pine bushes. Danni helps me set bivouac, with my head, in sleeping position, facing north. I can see a weather station on the top of a high peak, 4800-foot (1900-meter) Mt. Toaca, some distance away. We halt at a mountain hotel called the Cabana Dochia (pron. DO-kee-ah), at which we aren't staying but which will at least provide us with the odd meal (and I do mean odd meal). Rooms in the Dochia (est. 1988), a/k/a the No Running Water and Unspeakable Toilet but Spectacular Mountain View Lodge, go for about $3 per night; the worst coffee you'll ever drink in your lifetm is extra, but reasonably priced.
I don't want to talk about the outhouse at the Dochia. All right, just to mention one thing: It does not contain anything resembling a toilet, or even a bench. The outhouse is a badly constructed wooden cabin, and inside one finds a wooden floor with a hole in it. And many visitors to this little room have missed this hole entirely. There are no windows, and the smell is about what you'd expect, and as you'd also expect, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. (At this point in the trip, I shouldn't have been surprised, either.) The view outside, however, is stunning.
Just down from where we've set bivouac is a monastery and church -- only a few years old, built after the revolution, in 1993 -- with a young priest in residence. He shows me the interior: the walls are of raw-looking light- colored wood and covered with icons, and, incongruously enough, one of those gold-plated or bronze clocks designed to look like an oversized watch. At church services, one of the guys tells me later, the men sit on the left, and the women, and children to age 18, on the right.
I find another, red-bearded monk over at an adjoining house. Unfortunately, the language barrier proves insurmountable and after a few attempts at communicating in French I give up.
No matter. Sheep graze in a nearby meadow. A gorge is framed between peaks in a diamond-shaped view. It couldn't be any more perfect. A bit later, I walk with Danni a few hundred yards across the meadow to watch the sun set. I snap a picture of the monastery, with the mountains and clouds in the background, in the last rays of daylight; this picture now hangs above my desk.
Attila chats me up, curious about my background. "Are you PC?" he asks (meaning am I in the Peace Corps, which is active in Romania). I answer in the negative. He tells me about a man he knows who was in the Peace Corps and after his hitch, decided to remain in Romania. "He said, 'I'm not going back.'"
I picture a small cottage out in the middle of a pasture, wood smoke rising from a stone chimney, in which lives an American who's rejected American consumer culture and capitalism for good. Certainly more than I have. Romania calls. Romania holds.
It may have been around this time that Csongi informs me that Hungary (where Germans go for dental treatment) is twice as expensive as Romania when it comes to things like porcelain crowns and dentures. Romania: Europe's last dental-tourism frontier.
My legs are sore, but I can say I'm happy to be bivouacing, snug as a bug, in the open air on the Ceahlau massif in Moldavia, Romania...in a sleeping bag, wrapped in a red nylon bag, resting on a waterproof polyform mattress, the whole shrouded in a giant, heavy, clear plastic bag. We're all wrapped in plastic, like Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks; we resemble victims of a massacre, tagged, bagged 'n' tied.
Before we nod off for good, Attila rouses us to watch the moonrise.
Some time during the night, rain starts to fall; not very heavy, but enough. Droplets fall onto and run off of our bagged selves. So our plan to get up at five to watch the sunrise was out.
