Good Or Shit: Travelling To Transylvania

About a week ago I found myself riding the night train from Budapest to Transylvania. It's pretty much the same route that Jonathan Harker took in Bram Stoker's Dracula. A work of fiction so effective the sense of foreboding is really hard to shake at night on a near-empty sleeper carriage with a conductor who has a habit of materialising out of thin air every time you pluck  up the courage to leave the cabin.  “Are you looking for the toilet?” he asks in his oily Transylvanian accent, smiling at me the exact same way – I'm almost positive – that Gary Oldman smiled at Keanu Reeves in Francis Ford Coppola's movie.  

I sat on the bed with a notepad and pen – I don't own any fancy technology – and channelled Harker.

Dearest Mina,

I'm not gonna' lie, I'm fucking spooked. Mum's gone off to find the restaurant car and hasn't come back yet. I am alone.

I was lying here resting after two days exploring Budapest, wondering what the Hungarians might have been like before fascism and communism dilapidated their buildings and their souls, listening to the percussion-like squeaks and clanks of the train carriages, when I was startled by a hiss ... in my ear... and the softest breath on my cheek. I jumped out of my skin, breathing heavily, and when it resettled around my flesh again, I shivered.

The cabin smells like a toilet.

The conductor told us to lock the doors when we sleep – all three locks. “Why?” Mum asked him.  “Is it dangerous?”

“No.” He said. And I could see her physically relax.

He smiled. “Is not dangerous if you lock the doors.”

I've always been into vampires. I am a vamp-nerd. A proper one. I revere Anne Rice and detest Stephanie Meyer. One particular bookshelf holds my vampire literature as well as a wooden stake my mates made for me in year 10 woodwork class. Vampires incorporate two of my favourite interests: history – they live forever (I mean, to have been around when Jesus was busking on a footpath). And dark brooding men with a sense of danger who are struggling with their humanity (I like to think I could have made Fox Mulder happy... Mr Darcy too).

“But of course,” said our guide in London's Highgate Cemetery, a week before we headed into the east “vampires don't exist”.  A beautiful old cemetery, so overgrown it's as though all those graves and stone angels are growing out of a forest rather than what used to be a well kept garden growing into a forest around them. Great big tombs, crypts and catacombs leave you feeling as though you're wandering through an ancient abandoned city ... of the dead.

It also happened to be at the centre of a media sensation in the 70s when two blokes, getting their thrills wandering around the cemetery at night, both claimed, on separate occasions, to have seen a vampire. Which is obviously ridiculous because, as our guide pointed out again, “vampires don't exist.” And again, “vampires don't exist” and again “vampires don't exist”. The fourth time he felt the need to drive this stake home – this young man with a physical resemblance to Where's Wally if Wally had put on a poo-coloured tweed jacket and sucked all the cheer out of his soul with a vacuum cleaner – I became convinced that vampires do exist and this humourless prick was a modern day Renfield charged with protecting them. He probably went home that night and ate flies.

A guide in Belgrade told us that the Serbs invented Vampires in the 18th century to scare off tax collectors. She mustn't have known about the skeletons in the belly of Prague Castle – buried in the 10th century with their arms and legs bound behind their backs and weighted down with stones so that if they should try to rise from their graves, they wouldn't be able to. And then there's Dracula.

Old mate Vlad.

They say he roasted children and fed them to their mothers. Cut off the breasts of women and fed them to their husbands. That he employed all manner of horrendous tortures before having his victims impaled on spikes, lining them along roadsides and the banks of the Danube, a forest of impaled people. Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, aka The Impaler, was born in the citadel at Sighișoara in Transylvania. Built in the 12th century, one of Europe's best preserved medieval citadels sits on the top of a hill in a mountainous area thick with forests. At dawn an eerie fogs hangs heavily over towers and church steeples, shrouding everything with mystery (and cliché). As it clears, medieval houses painted in pinks and blues, greens and yellows smile cheerfully as the warm autumn sunlight sets the forests aglow in all their rich red, orange and gold glory. It's idyllic. Which has to be deceptive, right? I mean this is the birthplace of Dracula. How could the landscape, the scenery and the locals be so ... lovely?

The cheerful version of the Land of Scary Shit.

This is how Transylvania transformed from my imagination's Land of Scary Shit – a supernatural hotspot where rings of blue flame appear above buried treasures, where I had secretly hoped people would start racing indoors as the sun descended behind the mountains – into another beautiful part of the world to go for a holiday.

The house that Vlad was born in retains its medieval character. Thick timber floorboards that creak with every step, heavy wooden furniture, dimly lit rooms. This is where the monster was born. I could imagine him as a child, torturing puppies with his father's daggers before moving on to the local children. I waited with apprehension, not sure what we would find when the staff let us go up those stairs. Somewhere above us I heard loud sinister music begin to play ... loud sinister music. The man we'd just paid had gone up stairs and switched on sinister music. I began to chuckle. He reappeared and said we could go up. As we made our ascent he stood there flicking the light switch on and off. “Special effects,” he said, dryly, in his thick accent – “like Hollywood.” Quite clearly, he thought it was all a bit of a joke. And after that, I did too.

You see, the Romanians don't believe Vlad III was a sicko who enjoyed eating his lunch amongst the dying screams of his impaled victims. To them he is a folk hero, their saviour, and a bit of a Robin Hood. This guy protected them from the advancing Ottomans, stood up for them against a corrupt merchant class, in their eyes – dude did what he had to do.

We hired a local guide to take us around the countryside, from village to village, citadel to citadel, all the way to the beautiful Bran Castle outside Brasov. A lovely man and very knowledgeable, we discussed history spanning from medieval times to the more recent fall of communism. But I couldn't help myself. So, without trying to sound like a vampire-seeking-creep, I raised the topic of the supernatural. And as we made our way back to Sighișoara, driving through the night, the occasional fluorescent blue crucifix ablaze in a dark field, he told me he didn't think Transylvania was a place where vampires reigned at night. He didn't believe in vampires at all.

“But,” he paused, and I could sense his hesitation.

“What is it?”

“Well...” he said. “There are many people here who have seen UFOs.”