Vama Veche is the last town on the Black Sea beach in Romania heading south, just before the border with Bulgaria. We had had our full of transylvania and made a log day of it getting here, enticed by descriptions of what used to be a retreat for the faculty of the university of Cluj.

Well. It is sort of a counterculture place. Hippies camp on the beach and with nudist families, and they all eat at the “Linea di autoservire,” a sort of Automat that seems to be popular here. At night they drink beer or booze mixed with juice. And drink. And drink. It’s ‘alternative’ in that not _all_ the beach bars play _only_ techno. Quite an innovation.

Basically, the place is a dump. A campground with a couple of restaurants, neither of which are much good, nor anywhere near as cheap as they should be. Both ends of the beach have a smell that turns you back in the other direction, and most of it - as is the rest of this country - is littered with trash. This fact alone is so depressing; one can’t help but draw a connection between litter in the streets and rivers and a littered mental landscape. How can you run a country if there is trash everywhere?

We headed south this morning and were greeted by a smiling, multilingual Bulgarian border guard. Actaully, he only seemed to be there to collect the road toll (legit), but had a glance at the passports and French car docs just for the heck of it. Things changed noticeably more or less as soon as we crossed the border… First of all, hardly any trash. The towns and villages looked better, and there were far fewer abandoned construction projects. Lots and lots of real estate development, with for sale signs in English. Stopped for lunch in Varna and found a relatively civilized small port city with leafy streets and friendly people. Drove south through Burgas, a larger, more industrial port and it was a bit gritty, but nothing like the cities in Romania. We’re now south of there at a smallish beach town, more or less at the junction for the road to Turkey, where we’ll probably head tomorrow.

Average speed on most Romanian roads appears to be about 70kph. There are some stretches of two-lane blacktop, but you’ll also find lots of potholed one-lane with tons of trucks, Dacia’s galore, and a rural cop with a radar gun in every town.

We stopped for lunch in Bran and had a quick look at the castle there, which clearly made a super-swinging pad for Queen Marie back in the 30’s, and then headed south towards Bucharest. Going was good enough until the ring road, which is congested bumpy single lane with several entirely uncontrolled intersections. A note for the EU suggestion box: a few stoplights would do wonders down here. We did some highly amusing romanian-style left-lane chicken passing moves, which only sometimes require pulling off onto the left shoulder to avoid oncoming trucks. Now we’re on the A2 (the only real highway in the country) heading to Vama Veche on the coast.

The contrast today was amazing - in the morning it was all horse carts and hand work on the fields (lots of scythes and pitchforks), and now its autobahn and mechanized agriculture, real steel for the bridges, and apparently functional infrastructure. Lovely mountain scenery up around Bran too. We opted to skip downtown Bucharest entirely, partly due to fact that this Swiss guy we spoke with described it with a single word: “chaos”.

After driving for a long time in several circles of different sizes, we found a lovely agriturismo just in time for dinner. This was after we had checked out the Hotel Lesu, at the end of the road up the “Valley of Hell”. The hotel had a light on, but it was a decrepit holdover from another time, and not the sort of place you hope to find at the end of the road on Saturday evening. As we pulled away, an older couple with Bucharest plates pulled up and started waiting in the lobby for someone to check them in. I imagine the wife wasn’t pleased about how the long-promised weekend getaway was turning out.

The place we found had a group of hungarians on a weekend bender; they set is up with shots of their local grappa straight away, direct from the plastic water bottle they were transporting it in. We had a couple of beers after dinner at the local bar, sitting outside on wooden stumps, watching the stars come out.

So far, Romania seems like the Mexico of Europe - trash in the rivers, lots of unfinished and derelict buildings, crowded bus stops, and crouched, leathery old folks, but also new supermarkets, gas stations, apartments, and cars. The most common type of store is construction materials, closely followed by tire repair.

Lunch today was at a “cabana”, sort of an all purpose hotel restaurant resort center, unfinished of course, and hosting both a local wedding and some Hungarian motorcyclists staying in the little outlying cabins. The food looked good, but when ours came, it was huge and deep-fried, with a plate of fried cheese balls on the side. The bill was double what it was supposed to be, but hey, these guys have a reputation to uphold. We negotiated I down to something fair for all parties involved, and now we’re making our way south and east from Cluj.

Update: we followed the Romanian “wine road” for a couple of hours in the hopes of find another agriturismo, but no luck. Lots of vines, but not a pensione in sight. In the meantime, we managed to drive through the “most polluted town in Romania” - a crossroads dominated by a massive coal-fired factory of some sort - en route to Sibiu, where we found a relatively well-developed small city, a small “four-star” hotel, and a charming downtown full of people out for the Sunday evening. Given its specific histroy, Sibiu may be an anomaly, or it may signal better to come. Today we head for Bracov and maybe a look at Bran Castle, and then probably to the Black Sea coast tomorrow. PS - one difference between Romania and Mexico is that Mexico is _much_ louder - Norteño music, cocks crowing, unmuffled exhausts - while Romania is much more european in that sense.