We woke to blue skies and lovely views of the hills behind the site – it was much clearer today. The site is small and simple (although there is a small swimming pool, added this year) is would make a good base for walking, cycling and investigating the local sites. We we went to pay the bill, we were asked if we intended to go to Moldavia in the North and we said that we had already been there. They explained that there were terrible floods in the area – roads and bridges had been destroyed and many villagers had been evacuated from their homes. The Romanian news was full of it and their President had been on television expressing sympathy and promising assistance. The are worse affected was an area close to the painted churches that we had visited. Apparently Moldavia often has problems with floods and we certainly saw many bridges being repaired and small sections of roads that had been washed away but this incident was on a much larger scale. We had thunderstorms and heavy rain every day that we were in the area, so the ground must have been saturated and the rivers high before the latest storms. Another couple on the campsite had just returned from the area luckily leaving the day before the floods.
We headed north and the journey between Deva and Brad was particularly attractive with the road running through a narrow wooded valley with many small, pretty villages. At Brad, an attractive ex-mining (not sure what type) town, the valley broadened out and we headed towards the mountains in the distance. On this stretch, the villages were laid back about 1 km from the road. They were only small, but each one had a pretty church, normally with a silver, onion-domed tower standing out against the forested hills. As we started to climb, we came to 'Palinca Village' where outside every other house and on the roadside on either side of the village were stalls selling the fruit-based (most commonly apple but also almost any other fruit that you can think of) twice-distilled spirit. We were trying to find Pestera Ursilor (the Bear Cave), allegedly the finest caves in Romania. We found a sign off the main road indicating that it was 15km away. The road was in poor condition but was busy and we drove along, trying to avoid the bad potholes. And then my navigator let me down. We hit a particularly nasty pothole that I couldn't avoid and immediately passed a junction with a number of cars waiting to pull out. “Did you check that junction for signs?” I asked my navigator. “No, I was distracted by the pothole”, was the answer. However, the road was still busy and we followed cars into the next village and then up the narrow, steep valley with a very pretty, fast-running river. Even though it was a dirt track (being improved with EU money), there were many cars and pensions and even a sign to a campsite. We continued until we had gone more than the 15km from the main road and, with no sign of the caves, we turned around. The valley was obviously a very popular holiday area, particularly it seemed with Hungarians as at least half the cars that we passed were Hungarian.
You guessed it, when we got back to that junction, there was the sign to the caves, 8km up the road. When we arrived the car park, a very large area under trees it was extremely busy. It seemed that everyone wanted to visit the caves on a Sunday. The road up to the caves was lined with stalls selling all sorts of tourist tat from cuddly dolphins with 'Romania' to gemstones, the only common offering was Palinca, every stall having vast quantities of the liquid in re-used water bottles.
The caves were well worth the diversion. We had to take a Romanian guided tour but it was taken at a steady pace allowing plenty of time to admire the very large number of stalactites and stalagmites including a joined stalactite and stalagmite over 7m from a floor to ceiling. When they explored the cave, they found a huge number of Cave Bear skulls, more than anywhere else in Romania. They are at least 15,000 – 20,000 years ago as this is when the Cave Bear is thought to have become extinct.
We then drove for an hour to Baile Felix, another spa resort, and found a small pension and campsite called 'Camping Stefan' in the adjoining village of Baile 1st May. It had been a lovely sunny day and we thought that we were going to have a whole day without rain. However, as we sat outside having a cup of tea, I watched some white fluffy clouds on the horizon build into billowing cumulus clouds and then start to darken. I have never seen a thunderstorm build in this way – from white fluffy clouds to a full thunderstorm with very heavy rain in the space of no more than 20 minutes. Dinner was taken inside the van!
Photos: The Cave Bear skeleton displayed where it was found; We don't know what name was given to this formation but if it wasn't ' The Bear's Roar' or something similar, then it should have been; Twisted stalagmites in the 'Candle Gallery'.
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