We just had a nice weekend in the Bucegi mountains with Inna. The Bucegi national park is only about a two-hour drive from Bucharest and offers a nice change with fresh air and solitude. To be able to enjoy that solitude you have to make it out of the parking lot though!
There's a small pack of apparently very hungry dogs roaming around the parking lot that is closest to the famous Babele and Sphinx rocks. The dogs approach anyone and everyone who arrives at the parking lot, get a bit too close for comfort and grab any food or remains of food they can find. This time Inna wasn't being cautious enough and a big male dog grabbed a trash bag off her hand, ripped it open and ate the egg shells that were in it! They surely are hungry!
Inna heading towards the unknown.
We hiked in the park for two days and spent one relatively chilly night in our tent next to a steep cliff on the west side of the range at an altitude of about 2000m. The temperature dropped down to -2 degrees Celcius in the early hours of Sunday, but thanks to our good mattresses and sleeping bags we didn't feel too uncomfortable :).
I expected the mountains to be fairly free of snow but that really wasn't the case. In some places we ended up breaking the trail in knee deep snow and sometimes fell even deeper. My record was the time when my backpack stopped me from falling any deeper :). Luckily most of the trails still were free of snow, yet the comparatively short snowy sections made the days a lot longer than we had anticipated.
Sometimes crawling was the fastest option :).
Unfortunately we didn't see much wild life, but the great weather and lack of other people made up for it. Lately I've been trying to trim down the weight of my backpack while hiking, but this time I trimmed perhaps a bit too much by leaving the map at home. Thankfully the routes in Bucegi are very easy to follow and getting lost isn't really an option :).
We finished hiking well in time on Sunday and thought that it would be a nice idea to visit a cave that is only 17 km away. Little did we know that the road would be in absolutely abysmal condition. Driving those 17 kilometers took us almost 40 stressful minutes during which we were either worried that we'll break the car in one of the numerous pot holes or slide off one of the cliffs because of the extremely slippery mud roads.
We made it to the Ialomicioara cave in one piece and were surprised to find quite a few people in the valley where the cave is. Most of the people didn't seem to care about the cave as much as about having a barbecue party in the nice weather. There's nothing strange about having a barbecue party in such a beautiful place but I found it very odd that they would go through the trouble of driving the horrendous mud road all the way to have a glorified picnic :L. It's not like there aren't other amazing locations in Romania which are easier to access.
The cave was a bit tainted in my opinion with a monastery built in front of the big entrance. There was some nice art in the monastery though and the interior of the cave was very nice it might have been worth the drive, maybe.
The brown grass and white snow contrasted each other nicely.
Just before setting up our camp we had to negotiate this mess.
Sunset as seen from the relative warmth of our tent
One of the two summits we climbed
Inna wanted to take a shortcut and forced us to scramble a bit!
A small waterfall in the Ialomicioara cave
Beelzebub riding a dragon(?) and roasting some Christians. Sweet!
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