Wednesday, August 12: This morning Zoli plucks a colorful, fat green-and- yellow caterpillar from the front flap of my tent, and, after some of us campers spend a minute or so admiring it, he tosses it into the embers of the fire, where it promptly roasts up. Moron.

Although we're all a bit tired from the past days' exertions, there's no letup in the action. Today we go "canyoning," if that's the proper term for this activity, which involves donning wetsuits, navigating a river upstream, wading through the center when we can, or going around it on the bank; in my case, sans eyeglasses and with bunions and a pair of flimsy Speedo SurfWalkers on my feet. The highlight of this excursion, which was invigorating and enervating in equal measure, was bathing in a waterfall en route; we splashed and laughed and felt like Nature Boyz.

Back on dry land, as we hiked home past some roadside tourist stands, Attila notices a boy selling edelweiss flowers to Hungarian tourists for a bit under 50 cents apiece. As these blossoms are a rare species and protected by Romanian law against picking, Attila takes the boy aside and, genuinely angry, gives him a good lecture and ends up confiscating the flowers. The boy argues back a bit, but he's no match for Attila, and eventually walks away, not too happy.

The landscape here is a true dreamscape, European Medieval Pastorale. From a distance, it looks like heaven. Unfortunately, up close it's not.