November 4, 2021 Page 7
Travel from front page
Poenari, Romania: Dracula really did sleep here in the remote Transylvanian mountains. Honest!
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Dolapite, Bulgaria: Why is he out there on the platform, taking my picture? Can’t he hear the whistle?
The mystery of the Orient—the Golden Horn from Galata.
Budapest-Keleti Station in the daytime. So much more reassuring.
Gara de Nord, Bucharest: Joe Stalin wants to know, just how
impressed are you?
was coming. The Russians were gone and had
taken their ideology with them, but we had
no way of knowing what kind of hangover
they’d left behind.
Which came to mind when we alit in Budapest
on a cold, moonless night to find a
gravel path instead of a platform and no street
lights anywhere. It was a black-and-gray scene
straight out of Schindler’s List, with silent,
exhausted crowds trudging into the station and
out to the street. One of the few times in our
travels when we were genuinely intimidated.
The trains ranged from the Germans and
Austrians (ugly, but efficient) to the Romanians
and Turks (ornate, friendly, and falling
apart). The farther east we travelled, the more
the Communist past came to life, in massive,
decrepit, concrete stations filled with loiterers
who never seemed to climb onto a train. But
the cities were clearly making up for lost time,
with vibrant art scenes, wonderful hotels and
spas, boisterous night lives, and hordes of
high-performance German cars.
The food was another matter. After Viennese
Schnitzels and Sachertorten, the cuisine steadily
deteriorated until an abrupt reversal in Istanbul.
The Ottomans have invaded—or been invaded
by—nearly every country on the planet. Their
former capital is truly the Culinary Crossroads
of the World.
We have an ironclad rule about never eating
at a restaurant with an English or tourist
menu, and the Turkish script in the docks
and alleyways where we ventured proved
impenetrable. But the Turks are a friendly lot,
and we generally drew a good-natured laugh
by discreetly pointing at another diner’s meal
and signaling for the same. Some of the best,
most exotic seafood in the world.
Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient
Express in Suite 411 of the Pera Palace Hotel,
across the fabled Golden Horn and up a steep
funicular from downtown Istanbul. Naturally,
we wanted her room, but it was booked months
in advance. So was Kemal Ataturk’s suite, so
the staff offered us Greta Garbo’s former digs
on the top floor. We were supposed to stay
three nights, but a week raced by before we
managed to tear ourselves away.
To the airport, thank goodness!
A note on Railroads: Never board a train
anywhere in the world without googling
and thoroughly consulting The Man in Seat
Sixty-One. The Man, Mark Smith, is a rail
travel genius.
A note on Times: Railroads all over the
world run on 24-hour clocks (they even used
to call it Railroad and Telegraph Time). So, if
you show up precisely twelve hours late, like
we did in Bucharest, expect an embarrassing
discussion and an overnight extension in the
exotic locale of your non-choice. Ever since,
we’ve set all of our digital clocks and watches
to 24-hour time. Just in case.
And while we’re on the subject of Vlad the
Impaler: Anyone familiar with the George-Washington
Slept-Here trope from Revolutionary
America will recognize its parallel in 15th
century Romania. The countryside is full of
forts and castles that claim Vlad Dracula, the
Volvode of Wallachia, as a former occupant.
merge him with the Hungarian serial killer
Elizabeth Báthory into everyone’s favorite
B-movie ghoul.
Next up: In Defense of Spontaneity—A
Winter Ramble Around Northern Italy.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
As classy as many of them are, the drab, melancholy
Poenari Castle, in the remote Arges
pass in the Transylvanian mountains, seemed
to have best suited the moody, paranoid Count.
And as to Vlad’s nickname and his adoption
by Bram Stoker: The key to understanding
much of European history lies in the constant,
centuries-old threat of Ottoman invasion. So
how do you convince a thoroughly brutal and
aggressive empire to take its foreign religion
and insatiable tax collectors and invade elsewhere?
Vlad’s solution in 1462 was to line the
road from Constantinople with 18,000 impaled
Turkish allies. By the time the dumbfounded
Sultan Mehmet II and his troops left Targoviste,
they’d lost all interest in acquiring any more
Wallachian subjects.
Vlad’s reputation never recovered, naturally,
and set the stage for Bram Stoker to