I've wanted to travel through Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountains since I read Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time many moons ago. When Dave and I planned our trip through Eastern Europe, we knew we wanted to visit the ruins of Dracula's castle, too. The castle is located near a town called Arefu in Transylvania. It is known as Poenari Fortress (Cetatea Poenari) and was built by the Romanian prince named Vlad Tepes (a.k.a. "Dracula.") It overlooks the Arges River.

To read more about Dracula myth and reality, visit this site for Romania tourism:
www.romaniatourism.com/dracula.html

There is surprisingly very little information available in the U.S. or on the internet about how to get to the ruins of Poenari Fortress. Just a few weeks before we left for Europe, I was lucky to find an excellent source on the web site of Manning Leonard Krull. His knowledge of the town where we stayed overnight (Curtea de Arges) as well as his instruction on how to actually REACH the castle - was a tremendous help.

On Friday the 13th (hee hee) we got up early and started walking toward
a bus stop to catch a minibus heading toward the town of Arefu. We waited for about 10 minutes, and the correct bus showed up. I showed the driver a photo of the castle with the word "Poenari" on it, and he indicated that he'd let us know when to get off the bus to head toward the fortress.

After about 40 minutes on the bus heading north, the driver stopped the bus and told us to get off. He pointed down the road and said, "2 Kilometers."

So we started walking down the road to the castle, and several stray dogs followed us. There are stray dogs all over Romania. There was a cute little puppy that Dave stopped to pet, and he and another BIG dog followed us from the bus stop all the way up to the castle.

The only time things got a little sketchy with the dogs was when we passed this lady on the street who was holding a bag. At this point, there were nearly a dozen dogs with us. They started barking at something in a tree, and the lady got sort of freaked out and started swatting a couple of the dogs with the bag. Which freaked them out and made them bark more. Which freaked me out, because I’m thinking, “Okay, if she’s nervous, and she sees these wild dogs all the time, then I should DEFINITELY be nervous!” That whole scene made my heart race a bit, but things cooled down and we moved on. By the time we passed the hydroelectric plant near the base of the hill, it was just me, Dave, the big dog, and the cute little puppy.

So we got to the castle and trudged up the 1500 steps up the hill. As we started up the steps to the “doorway” of the castle, the ticket guy (yeah, there's a guy who lives up there in a little house and sells tickets to the castle) came down with some other people and sold us tickets. Then he told us the big dog was named “Leo”. They were acquainted.

He didn’t know the little puppy, though. I think this was the puppy’s first climb up to the castle. He kept acting like he wanted to go back down when we’d stop and rest on the steps. But he was a little trooper. When we started across the bridge, we heard this squealing and whimpering. We turned around and realized he couldn’t hop up the big step to the bridge. So Dave picked him up and CARRIED him across the bridge. He said the puppy growled at him the whole time.

The view from the castle was amazing. You can see why Vlad chose this point to defend his homeland. You can see for miles around. We stayed up there for about an hour. We dropped a Romanian coin into a little chamber with an archway. After we’d been up there for about half an hour, a military helicopter flew right over us, coming from the southwest. After a while, it came flying back in the opposite direction, and I got a video of it flying right over Dracula’s castle! I got an image in my head of a stunned Vlad Tepes standing there looking up, watching in awe as this chopper flew overhead, saying to himself, “I gotta get me one of those.”

We left the castle and walked back to the bus stop. We had to make our flight out of
Bucharest early the next morning and hadn’t booked a train ticket from Curtea de Arges yet. So we were planning to head straight back to the Posada (the hotel where we stayed), grab our backpacks and hustle on down to the train station.

So we were standing there, waiting at the bus stop for a ride back to town, and this car pulled up, heading south from the direction of the castle. It had text on the side that read something like “Transport Medicale”. And the driver rolled down the window and said something to an old lady who’s standing with us. She said something back to him, and then she looked at us and told us in Romanian, “He’s going to Curtea de Arges and will give you a ride!” At least that’s what we figured out with her gestures and everything.

So we got into the car with this guy. He’s about our age - early 30s - and speaks a
little English, but it was a little tough to communicate with him at first. By the way, he reminded me a little of Ben Cross as "Barnabas Collins" from that brief remake of “Dark Shadows” in the early 90s...Which was awesome, by the way, and I curse NBC for canceling it after only 1 season! But I digress...

We started talking to the driver, and found out his name is Daniel. As he and Dave were talking, I looked behind my seat and saw that there were several little coolers in the back...It turned out that Daniel is a former taxi driver who now works as a courier for hospitals and medical labs all over the region, carrying blood from town to town. Dave and I looked at each other and started to laugh as we realized that we were getting a lift from a guy carrying coolers of human blood, who had just come from the direction of Dracula’s castle! I am NOT making this up!

Daniel ended up taking us all the way to the Bucharest airport, about 150 kilometers away! The trip was somewhat exhausting for Dave because Daniel wanted to practice his English on Dave the WHOLE TIME.

And to make things even more exciting, he would pick up people on the way, like random gypsy hitchhikers. Two of whom smelled like the foulest B.O. I have ever
experienced in my life, and they jumped out of the car at a busy intersection in Bucharest and stiffed him on the “fare”, which ticked Daniel off, but I figured it served him right for picking up random smelly people on the highway.

So that was our last day in Europe, and we flew out of Bucharest early the next morning!

If you have any questions about Dracula's castle or any comments about my story, I'd like to hear from you! Email me at wendy@leaumont.com