The post-tour started on Sunday morning. There was a little hassle, as the bus company, or the driver, who shall say, seemed to have “forgotten” about the Tims organisation. But in Romania act as the Romanians: don’t worry, stay calm, and why not talk for a little more time amongst ourselves, or to the parting symposium participants that will not be on this after-symposium-experience. The so called post-tour, that would take us, at least for one more week, visiting mills, again. Finally some bus arrived. Florin managed at least to get hold of a bus for one day. Tonight the driver would return to Sibiu, and the next morning a new coach and a new driver would be present. So as Florin said: “problerm solved.”
We drove towards the north this time to reach beautiful valleys and hillsides with mills. For the first time we arrived at mills with vertical waterwheels, and a lot of little palinka distilleries.
The Transilvanian part of the country that we were driving through looked somewhat different, than the Danube valleys in the Banat region of the pre-tour.
We spent the first two nights in the little mountaintown of Rimetea, and obviously of course there was also a mill in the village. We were divided in several smaller groups to stay in private homes, or small surroundings that were more or less intended as pensions for tourists. Probably for the typical wintertourist when temperature around here goes down to minus twenty, and snow appears on the mountains. The setting looked a little bit Welsh to me. Nights were very quiet and starlit around here. No lightpollution in these parts of the world. Black is still beautiful.
During the week, we had more of these stays in private homes. Not forgetting the night we spent at the Four Seasons Hotel in a sky resort high up in the mountains. The owners recently completed building a large disco next to the hotel. They were very eager to show us this new venue. I suppose we now have to act as ambassadors and tell the world, our western world, about the possibilities for skying in Northern Romania. We had the disco for ourselves, and luckily there was one USB stick with good seventies discomusic on it.
We managed to keep the dancefloor crowded, which was fine.
More days touring with the bus, more villages, more watermills, more small millfactorys. On the way to Hungary we drove close to the Ukranian borders. About 10 km, or 6 miles, southeast of these borders. Gabor and Florin, together with a littlke help from the Dutch did a great job in fionding all these old mills. Of course Gabor took the lead once we entered Hangary. A horsemill, like we had never seen, apart from the one in the Astra Museum, was very intersting. 384 teeth on the spurwheel. Also the watermill with it’s big three wooden waterwheels, and some machinery inside was of great interest for us. At every place we had more than enough time to take pictures, inside, outside, sometimes climbing over gates or fences, where we weren’t supposed to do that. One Hungarian miller was amazed that we neglected the sign on the gate. Well it was of course in Hangarian, and as none of us spoke…. you know. We have the nice pictures, and the miller, afterwards, showed us his mill…. The still quiet young maire, welcomed us warmly with a nice meal and afterwards blessed us with some bottles of palinka. Time to get back on the road.
Incidently we did drive some 1500 kilometers through Romania and Hungaria. The bus had to stop a few times to find a new breath, I suppose, but certainly too cool down the motor of the old iron horse. By the way, we never once stopped at one gasstation… I will not go into this, but it is a great story how they pulled that one of….
On Saturdayevening we arrived back again in Sibiu at the museum: http://www.mcpt.muzeulastra.ro for one more farewell dinner. Every beautiful stories has an ending…. we will meet again in two years for a Midterm excursion in Britain, that has already been decided, and of course Gerald has now the presidential hammer in his possesion for the comming four years. We will meet him in Berlin….
