Soon I turned up at Rasnov, with it's decaying hillside fortress clearly visible looking over the town. But what is this!? It seems Rasnov has followed in the dumb steps of it's older brother and also erected a huge "RASNOV" Hollywood sign right below. Really annoying.
The town is very typical of the area with pretty little coloured houses, small local produce shops and telegraph poles with spurious cables going in every direction. There is not much else to see though so I started to hike up the hill to the old castle fort.
When you get inside the main gate, the fortress is like a little stone village in disrepair. The old remains of the school, church and some other buildings are reduced to low walls and piles of rubble while many of the parts still standing have become little souvenir stalls. That said, it has still got a nice ambience among the forested hills and climbing to the top of the central tower gives a great view of the town and out beyond. It was worth the stop but didn't really inspire me and a couple of hours after arriving I was on the road again to Bran.
It is only a short drive to Bran but turning up in the little town is somewhat different to Rasnov. It seems that every building has been converted in to a restraunt or guesthouse while signs for each one jockey for attention on the roadside. I quickly found my nice little campsite though, Vampire Camping. Mwah hah hah!
I should explain here that Bran is effectively the epicentre of the Trasylvania/vampire connection as it is here that Bram Stoker's Dracula novel was (alledgedly) based. The Dracula character is based on Vlad Tepes (Vlad The Impaler) who actually spent most of his time in Sighisoara but the castle here attracts tourists like seagulls to a discarded sandwich.
Set up in the hills, it sure does look the part, while below the entrance is a maze of naff merchandise stalls where you can by anything you can think of with a vampire/castle on. Dracula themed bar of soap anyone?
When you reach the castle itself, it kind of loses a bit of that fairytale magic and appears quite dull and grey up close. Inside, you can visit lots of the rooms which are mostly plain and somewhat bare with white walls, dark wood beams and kooky angular staircases. It is nice, especially the central courtyard, but not as spectacular as I expected - not helped by the hoards of camera-happy Germans intent on taking a picture of every tiny detail before moving on.
On the whole, it is certainly worth seeing but one day is enough for me as I head on to pastures new in Bucharest.
Leaving Bran, I headed in the wrong direction (north west) past Fagaras to the start of the Transfagarasan Highway, famously declared by Top Gear as the best driving road in the world. Approaching the start of the road, the Fagaras Mountains and then the Carpathian Mountains loom large and the roads leading up the slopes are a series of hairpin bends where you rarely get out of third gear - in a big white van that is.
The views everytime you reach a peak though are breath-taking and you can look down at the snaking ribbon of road below as it criss-crosses over itself through the valleys. On a bright Saturday afternoon I expected hoards of sports cars but there weren't any, just normal road cars and plenty of picnickers.
The road seems to go on forever before spitting you out beside a huge blue lake in the valleys and eventually a big dam, by which point the quality of the road surface is dreadful and the journey becomes painfully slow. They didn't cover that bit on Top Gear. In the end I was glad for the dual carridgeway again and arrowed straight on to Bucharest.
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