The storm was over. I woke up soaking wet but suprisingly warm. The tent/sleeping bag combination somehow worked to get me through the night. I dropped off the bunk, slid back into my wet hiking clothes and soggily stuffed my sleeping bag and tent back in my pack. My breakfast of instant oatmeal and instant coffee was about ready at this point. I stood in the middle of the sopping wet shelter, still thoroughly unimpressed, watching as the other inhabitants slowly made ready for the day. With a sigh I drained the last of my coffee packed in the mess kit and stepped out the door into blazing sunshine, blue skies, and the view I had traveled half way across the world to see.

The weather only got better throughout the day. Luckly the weather was not rainy and terrible like the day before, the trail grew much more challenging. The walk started easy enough with some gentle up and downs but eventually the decent from Scara and ascent to Serbota got very serious very fast.

The trail was very steep here. Luckly chains and cables had been afixed to the cliff faces to assist with the climb. These sections were fun at first but the difficulty of navigating the route with heavy pack soon began to outweigh the fun.

Up up up the face of Serbota to the peak at a height of 2.331m. I looked across a dip in the ridge to Varful Negoiu just a bit higher than Serbota at 2.535m and about 3 km away. Onward and upward I moved to Negoiu, the second highest peak in Romania. Eventually reaching the tippy top.

Negoiu

View near Negoiu

At the peak I met two Romanians and chatted about the hike I was doing. They gave me some friendly advice on how to proceed with my plan inorder to finish in the timeframe I had planned. They recommended I stay in Refugiul Salvamont for the evening. Then the next day try for Refugiul Podrago. They also told me about a rock slide that had occured on the decent from Negoiu marked with a red stripe and told me to go the yellow route. After snapping a few photos I bid farewell to my new friends and continued down the mountain to lake Caltun and the Refugiul there.

Peak of Negoiu

The Refugiul at Caltun lake is located on a cliff overlooking a valley and Varaful Laitel on one side and an alpine lake on the other. It has ample bunk space and a large table. It was the nicest, cleanest, and coziest Refugiul that I stayed in for the entire hike.

Eventually the two Romanians I met on top of Negoiu passed by as I was drying out some gear. We had a quick snack and one of them gave me a couple of pouches of an energy concoction for the mountain climb first thing in the morning, and the rest of their bread. They both wished me the best of luck and told me to enjoy the rest of my stay in Romania. Then they set off to complete their hike.

After drying gear and watching the scenery for a while I sat down, made dinner, and began reviewing the route for the next few days. Outside there was a ruckus followed by the door bursting open and a family of Romanians on a hiking vacation came flooding in. For a few moments the hut was a whirl as packs, sleeping bags, boots, and food were arranged by my 5 new guests. Then down they plopped at the table and began making dinner and talking to me. In of course Romanian. We went through the usual line of questioning. Names, where we are from, what we were doing here in the middle of the mountains, where our next stop in the middle of the mountains was. So on and so forth.

The group was Victor, Vasily, their wives, and Catalina. Some how we were communicating quite well with the combination of my English, their Romanian, everyone’s hand gestures and the occasional translation from Catalina the daughter of Vasily. It turns out they went for family outings like this a few times a year. This was nice, I was able to ask them about different areas of Romania, with the help of my guide books and maps I was able to glean quite a bit of information about the different regions of Romania. Vasily recommended the Retezat mountains where he had seen bears, and the Danube Delta where the family was from.

Soon they began dinner and were passing me, unsolicited, pepper, salami, and cheese sandwiches and pouring me homemade liquor and wine. The liquor was made of cherries and I believe walnuts. This would probably make it some form of visinata. I enjoyed it emensly. The homemade wine was a nice, slightly carbonated, sweet white wine which complimented the sandwich quite well.

Eventually Victor decided he was going to teach me Romanian regardless of if I cared to learn it. We started with the most important words. Pepper=Piper, meat=carne, bread=paine, all the while the wives laughing rolling their eyes and telling Victor what I assume was along the lines of “forget trying to teach this stupid American”. my favorite word was onion=ceapa. I told Victor through Catalina, and mimes that my nickname was ceapa. I then sniffed my armpits and made a reaching noise which the laughing group seemed to approved of. I meant the comment in jest but my new nickname stuck, perhaps there was too much truth in it.

Eventually the night grew late and we made ready to drift off to sleep. Once we were all settled Vasily made the announcement that he snored. I told him that was fine. I also had a penchant to snore. Vascily laughed and told me then he will snore in Romanian and I will snore in English and Catalina will have to snore in both. Poor Catalina who was sandwiched between us sighed and didn’t seem to excited by this prospect but stated she would try her best.

This day was unbelievable! I met good people in odd places and had an unbelievable amount of fun! It goes to show that being kind and open to folks will usually result in them reciprocating and hopefully everyone will have a memorable experience!