Day 79 - Belgrade to Sibiu, Romania

The first stop of the morning was a Ford service center to get the windscreen wiper fixed, luckily that was quite painless even though the man there didn't speak any English.

With that fixed we headed to the Romanian border. The border crossing was a quiet little outpost, the officers came out to the car, took our passports and asked to look in the boot. It seemed to take a while for them to come back with our passports and then the boom gate was lifted and we were across.

We drove to Timisoara, Romania's third largest city for a lunch break and found a park close to Unirii Square. From there a 10 minute walk took us through a number of different squares in the historical centre. Unirri is a large square with beautiful old buildings in different pastel colours.

Plata Victoriel was the last square where the buildings are 270 years older and architecturally different to many others we have seen. The colours are shades of brown and some are so large and dark they almost look frightening, although still interesting. The area had manicured garden beds and finished with the Romanian Orthodox Church with a patterned roof.

So far Romania seemed really interesting, though the rain drove us back to the car earlier than we would have liked. It would also have been nice to have spent a night in Timisoara to explore it more but we were running out of time until we needed to get back so we were travelling pretty quickly. 

Driving through the Romanian countryside and villages was interesting and there were some similarities to other countries we had visited in the last month or so with the ubiquitous sunflowers and the giant stork nests on top of power poles which now have multiple offspring testing their fledgling flying skills.

However, we also saw many women and girls in traditional clothes with full length skirts and cotton head scarves. The rain continued in patches on and off with breaks of sunshine. In April and May we had unseasonably hot weather and now in July we seemed to be getting unseasonable rain.

We kept pushing on to our destination for the night, Sibiu, this was one of the biggest driving days we have done on this trip and we didn't get to Sibiu until after 7pm. Our apartment was handy to the old town and we stopped at dinner next to the Bridge of Lies, myth has it that if you tell a lie while standing on the bridge it will collapse. M of course tried this just to prove it was a myth. Many of the buildings had tiny window like attics in their A frame roofs, the windows were shaped like eyes complete with eye lids.