“If you want to be sure you end up in heaven, you have to climb that hill on your knees,” Raluca says, gesturing over my shoulder. It’s not the tallest peak in the world, but I decide, on balance, to stick to the trail. On foot.
And there’s plenty of trail to tackle. Completed in 2022, the Via Transilvanica is Romania’s first long-distance hiking route, running 870 miles from Putna to Drobeta-Turnu Severin, with a 125-mile extension to Brasov. This spring, Intrepid Travel became the first tour operator to offer tours along the northern section, a 10-day trip in a group of up to 12 hikers.
Getting to our start point in Bucovina region involves a drive of several hours from the country’s second city, Cluj-Napoca. The road is flanked by fields and forested mountains, houses in pastel shades and carved wood, churches – some domed in the Orthodox style – and telegraph poles topped with stork nests.
“If you don’t see a stork nest in a village, it means it was affected by agriculture and the biodiversity is not very good any more,” Raluca Kocsis, our Intrepid guide, tells us. Destroying the nests is considered bad luck, she adds.
The painted church at Sucevita Monastery is incredibly well preserved (Photo: Annapurna Mellor/Intrepid Travel)
