Visiting Romania: Bran - Babele

Last week-end we went to Bran and spent two wonderful days at a b&b called MIS, very close to Bran Castle (marketed as Dracula's Castle, though it has nothing to do with Dracula) and very nice and comfortable. The landlady is a retired teacher from Brasov and the place was build using EU Sapard funding and is one of the most clean and elegant places to stay in the area. A little hard to reach, true, but on the other hand it's a good thing to be farther from the main road if you want a quiet holiday.

On Saturday we took the cable car from Busteni to Babele. It was a 15-minutes trip uphill, in a spectacular landscape (going down is even more spactacular, like a huge roller coaster, though at a lower speed) and we ended up on the Babele highland, a weird place that looked like the moon to me.

Of course I knew Babele ("the Old Ladies") was a plateau at 2200 m, where you could see, apart from the renowned Old Ladies (two large rocks looking like mushrooms to me), another huge nature-made sculpture called the Sphynx (2216 m). But actually seeing them was very very impressive and I can't wait for the summer, when we will go back to take the 1-hour trip to the Caraiman Cross, which we couldn't see this time due to the snow and late hour (we would've missed the last cable car going down, if we went).

I really liked the feeling of being on top of the world; it was a nice sunny day and the sky was bluer than ever, there were quite a few people up there, taking photographs and having a good time, and the only bad thing of the trip was the fact that the toilet at Babele Chalet was broken. But this will hopefully be fixed by the next time we go.