“Nature lovers, or savages?”

Theo on travelling through Romania

One disadvantage of the sleeper-train that spirited us through the night from Vienna to Bucuresti was passing through an entire country in between, yet seeing nothing.  All I can report about Hungary is that the border police who woke us loudly at 1.25am to check our passports were younger and more jittery than the Romanian border police who woke us again at 2.15am.

The latter cops were very respectful and self-assured, but I had a long momentary pause of panic when my passport failed to immediately pass through the eye of their handheld scanner. Fearing blearily that I’d maybe flagged up as a threat to Romanian national security, I was mentally scrolling back through my deleted social media when the digital overlord finally okayed me. I’d guessed there was nothing about Romania in my past, because I knew nothing about Romania.

That all changed when I woke in the morning light to see Rosa’s blissed-out face in the lower bunk opposite, staring out the carriage window in wonder at the rolling high green hills of a beautiful land.

The land rolled on forever, mountains with abundant forests in the distance and acres of Sunflowers heavy with seeds lining the track. In every village we passed there was rusting 70’s infrastructure dotted among homes with abundant vegetable gardens and poly tunnels, post-apocalyptic crumbling factories between fields of fresh haystacks and stoops. We passed slowly, without stopping, past abandoned rural platforms reclaimed by weeds and shrubs, and flag-flying station houses where stationmasters turned out dutifully, standing to attention in crisp uniforms and, to my eyes, absurdly oversized and wide peaked caps, as we trundled past.

Alongside the track, preparatory work for a 2nd parallel track proceeded slowly. But it was hardly the unfinished HS2 desecration of nature which now blights my own land. We marvelled at flamingos and, (we think), a Golden Eagle, and as he made me a sweet black tea, I complimented our carriage concierge Nicolai on Romanias remaining biodiversity of Lynx, Brown Bears, Bison, Pelicans, and Grey Wolves. His face showed conflicting emotions as he replied with a rueful smile, “Yes, but do they callus Nature Lovers, or Savages?”.

What must it be like to live at the edge of the Western world, aware of your comparative impoverishment of the “beter things” beyond your reach back up the track?   And how does it feel to know that your compatriots working abroad are held in disdain by their hosts?  – Targeted for the same prejudice and racist abuse which historically in Romania has been been aimed at the Roma gypsy minority.  

Later, strolling through the vibrant streets of Bucuresti, I’m chatting with a former communist sailor who recalls a foreign employer telling him “ You Romanians are stupid”.  “But if we are so stupid,” he replies, “why are you employing us?”.  The real stupidity is that our human family has been divided by economics. As the old red sailor told me, the popular overthrow of the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu, and the privatisation that followed as the corporations moved in, laid off thousands of public sector workers creating poverty and unemployment that drove so many to seek work abroad. Now, sadly, he blames “the Jews”, while back in Blighty some would have us blame the Romanians for our ills.

But here in Bucharest, we experience being among his people in their beautiful, shabby, quirky, colourfully decorated city home as nothing but delight. On Saturday night, families, friends and lovers promenade through streets closed to traffic, spending more time talking with each other than twitching through mobile devices, entertained every 20 yards, by high class street performers. 

Violinists of obvious quality serenade the bars with American pop themes, and you know that the people, who have such rich community connection of their own and still retain an egalitarian spirit, aspire to the symbols of high-octane consumerism which billboards and shop fronts dangle before them in a ubiquitous American/English language that is not their own.

Some kind of positive eco-modernist development may be coming, if the liberal capitalist promise of “sustainability and inclusion” promoted in glossy brochures in the hotel lobbies, alongside unabashed adverts for prostituted women on-call, are to be believed. But myself, I’m not so sure how this pans out. On the train we boarded next morning for Istanbul, passing through neighbouring Bulgaria, a truly lovely and helpful New Zealand Māori couple told us about their planned flight schedules, hither and thither, to “do the world”.  Is this high carbon lifestyle ever plausibly going to be possible for all the planets citizens, as in the spirit of fairness and inclusion it surely must?  Or will events presaged by Romania’s record summer temperatures, or the monster storm which preceded our journey through Frankfurt on Thursday with 25,289 lightning flashes in 1 hour, (double those for the whole of 2022), overtake these well-intentioned futuristic visions?

I loved Romania so much, I hope to maybe return some day as a traveller or an economic migrant,and see how they fare. I’ve a sneaking suspicion that, if things continue to go tits up, they are still close enough to the soil and to each other to land on their feet, while we, regrettably, may have further to fall.