A Europe without borders...

This post was supposed to be me telling you all about how I spent a fantastic Easter weekend on the beach in Bulgaria. But I am an idiot and left my passport behind so instead it'll have to be another story about Romania.

The Malteaser assured me we were going to a touristy area and we even bravely packed the camping gear and made for the Romanian coast. The plan was to stop in Vama Veche, (Once the private domain of Cluj university faculty members and associated with hippies and nudism. Apparently. ) before hopping over the border. Unfortunately, without a passport/official identity card (of which no Briton has) it was access denied. The border official was having none of my driving license and big flashing smile. I'd got so used to living in the Schengen zone, just a short car drive from 5 European countries you could just waltz into that I didn't even think about the need to account for my identity, especially as I was still in Europe.

So, we ended up in Vama Veche which seemed a long way from the packed tourist spot the Malteaser had promised. There wasn't a sole around apart from a growing motley crew of nasty dogs. The weather was sunny and bright but the evening brought the wind in and the temperature dropped. There didn't seem to be any hotels open and we struggled to even find anywhere to sell us a beer. We spent the night in the back of our car, listening to the dogs fighting. I'm sure in the height of summer that this place is heaving with people and abound with entertainment (the Lonely Planet indeed describes it thusly) but the place was deader than a dodo for Easter weekend.

Later the next day, I got to thinking... (Feel free to imagine me à la Carrie Bradshaw, in front of my shiny laptop, but perhaps minus the designer shoes and plus a couple of stone. Other than that, frankly, the physical resemblance is uncanny)...about why this place was not cashing in on the Bank Holiday weekend. Here is what I narrowed it down to;

1. Romanian people don't consider that it's hot enough to go to the beach. As someone who once got sunburned in April in Northern Ireland (but don't tell anyone), I consider anything over 20°C to be mandatory summer clothes weather. Here, with temperatures in the high teens and bright sunshine, children are still in woolly hats. All of them.
   
2. Everyone had gone to the beach in Bulgaria. There was a long line to cross the border but seemed to be almost nobody coming the other way. Apparently it is cheaper too, and a news report on Tuesday suggested the same thing; Romanians were defying the economic crisis and holidaying abroad.
   
3. It is not appropriate holiday time. In France everybody goes on holiday at the same time – skiing in February, beach in August. They even refer to the first week in September as "la rentrée" as the world and his dog returns from the coast en masse and goes back to work. In Britain we tend to take our holidays abroad but summer Bank Holidays are notoriously busy on the roads, even more so at Bluewater, and utter mayhem at the entrance to B&Q. Perhaps people just don't go away for the weekend at Easter (although this would contradict point 2).
   
4. They are all having picnics and fishing.
   

After our polite refusal at the Bulgarian border we headed back up the Black sea coast and again found ourselves in the Danube Delta. Every winding path took us past families and groups outside, barbecuing and dancing (traditional Romanian dancing where you all stand in a circle and hold hands). We stopped by the Danube where people had set up camp, presumably to fish all weekend (there not being much else to do) at the point where the "road" (and I use this term lightly) had been submerged by flooding. It was a fantastic spot but as we were rather underequipped, having barely any water and no food or beer, we left after a few hours.

The Malteaser was disappointed – where was the bar? Why had no one thought of setting up some kind of café/ice-cream stand. I thought he was wishing the full-felt might of advanced capitalism onto the place a little too soon. If you have a bar then it has to be built on land that somebody owns and be paid for. If you follow this logic it is not far down the slippery slope before people have to pay to fish here, pay to camp and that access is limited to certain routes. You would no longer be able to explore the countryside as you wanted; in short, most of the things that we appreciate about Romania, their difference from Westren Europe, would disappear.

For all the crappy things that you have to put up with in Romania there are some absolutely fantastic advantages. I hope that they are not going to papered over sanitized in the name of progress and the EU.