Crossing the Shit Line in Romania

Forgive my language but this is exactly what I encountered in Romanian mountains. Probably the biggest shocker of my traveling life.

I love the mountains but it'd be fairer to describe me as a modern coach potato - too much internet too little action. So last summer I talked my friend into doing something more exciting than playing online games, and after some reading we opted for hiking in Dracula country.

Romania sounded wild - it's home to the greatest European population of big carnivores, including bears and wolves. Seemed like a good place to take on our primordial fears.

With peaks reaching over 2500m the Bucegi mountains also presented a great opportunity for a rapid weight loss program. Our plan was to cross from the skiing resort of Sinaia to Brasov, the site of Bran fake castle of

Vlad the Impaler Dracula

.

So a 14-hour drive, 2 pizzas and a good night's sleep in a surprisingly nice Sinaia boarding house we woke up psyched to hit the wilderness and prove to ourselves that the thick layers of blubber were only disguising two hardened mountaineers.

So we set off at 7am, left the car in the street praying it'd still be there when we get back. Being the morons we are we somehow managed to miss the lower station of the cable car that was supposed to take us to Cota 2000 via Cota1400. We could have backpedaled 200 meters to the station, but we decided it'd be a nice warm-up to our trek. So we joyfully walked through the streets along a well marked trail till we reached the forest.

And this is where shit hit the fan.

It was everywhere, literally, we were hiking through a forest of human excrement, plastic bottles, toilet tissue, and empty Lays bags, with hordes of flies in the air.

It turned out that there was a paved road leading to to Cotes and locals were parking, grilling and partying alongside it. The concept of

leaving no trace

was obviously foreign to them. I prayed they fell prey to this one:

After 6 hours of painful climbing through the toxic forest we finally reached Cota 2000. A 100 meters higher and we escaped the shit zone at last. As the terrain got steeper and road turned into paths we were finally looking down on the herds of pseudo-tourists.

I think you can meet the shit line everywhere: forests, beaches, lake sides. For me, since the Sinaia trip, the term

Shit Line

means  the boundary between real tourists and the brainless Sunday mob.

The problem was that in Sinaia, due to that damn cable car and the road, it was just really, really high. Fortunately, once you crossed it and left the cattle behind, the Bucegi mountains more than made up for everything.