The Blue Vet Diary

 

Ana wasn’t on time – she was five minutes early ….

This usually is fine by me, but not after a party with one of Belgrade’s finest rock music bands and a subsequent tour with the die-hards through Ljubljana’s limited, but still surprisingly wild nightclubs, resulting in hardly more than a couple of hours comatose sleep.

With a constant ringing from the traumatised tympanic membranes in both ears, I dragged myself down the stairs and in front of the hotel where her car was already waiting.

I knew that it hadn’t been wise to schedule our trip on the last day of the conference I was attending, but this one was special and I had been looking forward to it for as long time.

Ana Nemec, no ordinary colleague, but one of Europe’s finest veterinary dentists, was in addition to this also an ambassador of the great outdoors of her native Slovenia. If her posts did not feature the oral cavities of smaller or larger domestic carnivores, Ana was taking her large number of devoted followers to the most scenic and pristine and unspoiled locations of her Alpine home, either on her mountain bike or while hiking, usually in the company of her black Labrador.

With other words – I couldn’t have asked for a better mountain guide, and I wouldn’t let a hang over get in the way of joining her for a day.

Thankfully Ana was driving, so that I could just lay back and enjoy the scenery, while we were heading West towards the border of neighbouring Italy.

“We are driving to a slightly unusual location” said my guide “It’s a mercury mine. I have never been there, but I think that you will like it….”

“Lovely” I said and raised an eyebrow while Ana was watching the traffic ahead of us.

‘Had I misheard or had I done something wrong ?’ I thought. ‘Is she serious ?’

Mercury – one of the most lethal environmental toxins. The stuff of nightmares – stories about chronic renal failure, mad hatters, birth defects…immediately crossed my still dazed mind.

‘Where is she taking me ?…..’ I thought, and my expectation of seeing a pristine alpine autumn landscape was replaced by a sense of foreboding that we would spend the day hiking through an industrial wasteland. Had Ana, the nature lover, gone to the dark side and developed a secret passion for post apocalyptic factory ruins?

And just then it was that I noticed that her Labrador was missing too…..

After half an hour we exited the motorway and the roads became noticeably smaller as the landscape around us became more mountainous. We drove through villages that had the characteristic mix of Austrian, Italian and Yugoslav features, that is to typical for this part of Europe and that told the story of periods of variable occupations.

Eventually, we arrived in a narrow valley, in a small town that was dominated by a white church and a calvary of fourteen stations on a steep hill.  The surrounding mountain sides were a beautiful patchwork of green fields and dense forest covered in yellow, amber, red and brown leaves. From time to time the cloud cover broke and rays of the still warm October sun enhanced the display of colours and patterns.

“Here we are !” said Ana while parking the car near a bridge.

“This is Idrija, where we will start our hike!”

And sure enough, after walking just a few hundred meters, passing pedestrian crossings that were decorated with white lace ornamentations, we were standing in-front of an old factory building that once housed the World’s second largest mercury mine. This harmless looking 19^th century structure produced up to a ton of the liquid metal every year, feeding the world wide demand of gold prospectors in the Americas, thermometer manufacturers in the Rhine Valley, hat makers in Saville Row and even that of 19^th century confectioners in Europe’s capitals.

While mercury’s unique ability to contract and expand considerably depending on its ambient temperature, had helped to advance science and in particular medicine, it had left its trail of chronic illness and death not only in the work shops and the gold mines all over the world, but also in the local community of Idrija, who’s inhabitants still had some of the lowest life expectancies in Slovenia and who were still discouraged from growing vegetable in their own gardens.

A yet, once mining had stopped, nature had reclaimed the valley and the surrounding mountains and the slopes on both sides of the local Idrijca river provided some of the most striking hiking opportunities in the country.

With winter having made an early appearance with very low temperatures and snowfall on the mountain tops, Ana had wisely decided to go easy on her charge by sticking to the valley.

Setting off alongside the Rake Water Channel, a four-hundred year old aqueduct that once supplied water to the sawmills, pumps and crushing devices of the mining company and that now drove a small hydroelectric power plant, we were walking right into the rays of the low lying morning sun. This was easy hiking and with only very small packs to carry, it was no effort to have a conversation at the same time.

After a few kilometers, a suspension bridge leading to the other side of the Idrijca, had to be crossed. While walking high above the alpine stream, I became progressively concerned about the severely deteriorated state of quite a few planks and I started to take great care to only step on the points that had an additional steel support directly underneath them, so that I couldn’t break right through one of the planks. While Ana had walked ahead of me, it was of little reassurance, as she was so much lighter than me.

Reaching the end of the bridge, the final three planks were missing so that a large step was required to reach the concrete abutment. Just then we noticed a flimsy line of tape and a warning sign that was informing us, that under no circumstances one should try to use the bridge, as it was extremely dangerous….for some strange reason, a similar warning and barrier had been missing on the other side.

Hiking with Ana continued to be an adventure…..

Joining a small road for a short while and then climbing up the hillside next to the road, we reached the ‘Feldban’, a comfortable, wide hiking trail that been cut out of the rock to support a narrow gauge railway line to transport vital supplies to the nearby frontline during the 1^st World War. While the rails and the sleepers had been removed a long time ago, a small tunnel had remained to add character to this hiking route.

Our next opportunity to get killed or at least severely injured, was a ten meter steel ladder that without any additional safety features went up a straight, but at least not overhanging concrete wall.    

Before now returning to the trailhead, it was time for a picnic while taking in the peaceful autumn scenery around us. Needless to say that my mountain guide had prepared for this in form of bread rolls and Kiwi slices.

From here, the trail went mostly downhill right next to a small, meandering mountain road and then alongside the river, back to Idrija with its lace patterned pedestrian crossings.

What better way to finish then off our hike with a plate of ‘Idrija žlikrofi’, the traditional small dumplings that as Ana told me were so typical for this place as the lace making and the mercury mining.

I am already looking forward to the next hike with Ana – that time hopefully together with her black Labrador, which with hindsight for this hike of many surprises, ,wisely had stayed at home.

 

I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, when at our local church, which was a converted farmhouse with a thatched roof in the North of Germany, the villagers had been invited to an unusual spectacle:

a member of the parish had travelled to Brazil and had come back with a Super 8 footage of this journey. The flickering film included images of Brasilia, the then still very new capital of this so distant and exotic country.

The images I saw, could have featured in an episode of Star Track, so outlandish appeared the architecture of the buildings of this city in the tropics to me. In the world I grew up in, most houses had a pitched roof and were made out of red bricks or were, if they had survived the war, even timber framed. And yes, since the nearby naval port of Kiel had been mostly flattened by British and American bombing raids, most of the post-war office and retail buildings had come directly out of the textbook of the Bauhaus, as the objective had been to build fast, efficient, and ideally at low cost.

However, the buildings in Brasilia were just on a different level. Here functional architecture had been combined with impossibly light, organic structures that were supporting the over hanging roofs. Waterfalls were coming from somewhere inside the buildings and were feeding into moats filled with colourful fish and a large square leading up to these buildings was decorated with equally beautiful, abstract sculptures.

What grew inside me on that day, was the desire to – at some point in the future – visit this place and to see these unbelievable buildings with my own eyes…..

What I didn’t know at the time, was that most of these buildings came from the drawing board of one and the same man, who is widely considered the most outstanding architect of the 20^th century: Oscar Niemeyer.

Niemeyer, despite his Germanic surname, was a Brazilian native, a lifelong communist and strongly influenced by the work of Le Corbusier.  Without doubt, Dessau and the Bauhaus movement must have played its role in Niemeyer’s development, but at some point he had started to go his own way, and he despised famous peers like Walter Gropius for their all too commercial approach to architecture and for their inability to take into consideration the geographical aspects of their projects.

For Niemeyer, Bauhaus was just too far removed from organic lines.

When Juscelino Kubitschek became president of Brazil in 1956, he started immediately to implement the by then already long-established idea, to move Brazil’s capital away from the coast and into the center of the country.

The ground breaking urban plan for this project, submitted by Lúcio Costa, had the shape of a plane, a bird in flight or a bow and arrow, that were hugging the western shore of a lake on the central highland. Part of Costa’s team was Oscar Niemeyer, who had received a lot of praise for – among others – his involvement in the designs of the building of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro and of the building of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. For Brasilia, Niemeyer was tasked with the designs of all the major government buildings.

My first encounter with Niemeyer’s work was not in Brazil’s capital, but just outside of Rio, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Niterói. While this is a later work of Niemeyer, it didn’t disappoint with its originality.

Resembling something like a flying saucer with a long, trailing, red and white scarf, perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking Guanabara Bay and beyond that, Rio de Janeiro and Sugarloaf mountain, this building is more than just a museum, it is a design statement.

The windows on the first floor offer a 360-degree view, while the exhibition space, mostly sheltered from the daylight, is kept in the center of the construction. Standing on a single, slim column in a pool of water, which reflects the sunlight on to the underside of the building, the whole structure appears to float in mid air.  

In addition, the museum features an upmarket restaurant in its basement, where the eyes of the guests are kept just above the ground level, so that every little detail and every small reptile or bird on the lawn outside the windows can be viewed, combined with the city on the other side of the bay.

A few days later I arrived in Brasilia, and as it was already night by then, the only Niemeyer structure located near my hotel was the TV tower, which, illuminated in lavender indigo, appeared to levitate in mid-air, as the lights on the supporting columns had intentionally been turned off. Sadly, I had to leave it by this first impression, as a nocturnal stroll along the mostly deserted streets towards the government buildings had come with a serious health warning… 

Getting up early the following day, a short taxi ride delivered me to the entrance of the Metropolitan Cathedral and by this to the starting point of this so long scheduled visit.

A circular structure of colourful glass and white reinforced concrete, this building looked nothing like a church, but more like a glass bowl for sweets one might have found on a nineteen sixties urban dinner table. Even the bell tower had been kept quite a distance away from the building and faintly resembled an oversized fork or a candle holder.

The inside of the cathedral was bright, with the glass of the roof kept in white and in different shades of blue and green. Suspended from the ceiling were a couple of angels.

The only feature that could have reminded an unprepared visitor of a traditional clerical building, was an abandoned wooden cross placed a bit out of sight against the wall. There was nothing here that produced the sometimes dreary, depressing, self flagellating, dark and guilt-ridden atmosphere of a traditional church. No crucifixion, no martyrdom of saints and no graphic portrayal of the final judgement.  

Well, I thought, that is what you get, when you ask a communist to design a church….

Next to the cathedral, slightly uphill, were the National Museum and the National Library.

The first one, again a domed structure, reminded me of an Igloo with a near impossibly suspended gangway circling a fair part of the museum. Without doubt this feature must have given the structural engineers a few sleepless nights.

The nearby library looked far more like a plain office building, if there wouldn’t have been the delicate rounded supporting arches at the first-floor level, that made all the difference and that aligned this building with some of the central government buildings further down the road.

Walking now along the “monumental axis”, the central highway towards the main state buildings, one had to pass a double row of plain and functional office buildings that housed most of the individual government departments.

At the end of these columns of administrative buildings, followed the more upmarket Palacio Itamaraty, which housed the Department of Foreign Affairs and on the contralateral side of the axis, the Department of Justice. Both of these buildings were surrounded by water and were accessorised with abstract sculptures. The Palacio da Justiça featured the above mentioned waterfalls. A white circular sculpture in-front of the Foreign Office, was by Bruno Giorgi, symbolising the five continents.

These buildings were the entrance to the center of Costa’s urban plan, to the head of the arrow, to the cockpit of the plane – the Square of the Three Powers, the Praça dos Três Poderes, featuring most of the buildings that had impressed me so much, many years ago.

While dominated by the tall twin towers of the National Congress building on the west side of the square, which was facing on the other side of the square a giant flag pole (which was added later, under Niemeyer’s protest….) and a much smaller, more delicate building, that symbolised a dove and remembered a list of National heroes in a book of steel,

the real architectural stars were without doubt the Federal Court building on the southern side

and the stunning Palacio do Planalto, which housed the Presidential Offices, on the northern side.

This building in particular, with its huge marble ramp and the large overhanging roof, supported by gently curved and yet very pointed columns, was quite rightly considered one of Niemeyer’s master pieces.

      

The distance between all these buildings was covering the best part of two kilometres, and with the mid-day heat now transforming the square into a frying pan, there was some much needed shelter provided in a small café on the eastern side of the square.

This stylish place – of course also designed by Niemeyer – was a partially subterraneous structure, which kept once again the eyes of the guests, once seated, at a level with the surface of the square, a detail that was later repeated in Niterói.

While recovering with a cold drink, it became clear to me that all the other famous buildings had to be explored with the help of a taxi. The equally stunning Palacio da Alvorado, the presidential residence, which features similar columns as the Palacio do Planalto, the pyramid-shaped National Theatre building, the National Football Stadium with its exoskeleton of seemingly a thousand columns, the dome shaped giant food hall next to it or finally, at the tail end of the Axis, the  JK Memorial and the Memorial dos Povos Indigenas – all of them outstanding architectural statements and each of these buildings worthy of a chapter of their own.

At the end of the day, I was exhausted, but unexpectedly well hydrated because of the half litres of freshly squeezed strawberry juice, which cost the equivalent of 50 pence (I think I enjoyed three of them…) at the restaurant inside the JK Memorial.

Walking up the hill from the Congress building towards the Department of Justice, I noticed a man with a large cowboy hat, who had befriended a small white heron.

For some reason, this looked out of place….

Here was an interaction between an animal and a human being that hadn’t been planned, that wasn’t part of the design, that distracted from the grandeur of all the monumental, once groundbreaking structures and from the system of highways around us.

And with this, the giant floor of places like Brasilia became apparent.

Cities that have not grown, but that have been conceived in an urban planning office, based on plans that then had been dictated by an autocratic ruler or – as in this case – that had been agreed on by a committee of a few men (and often no women…) and that finally were build as a giant national project, usually fail to make the people happy, who have to live in them.

While Dubai might have an appealing warm climate and might be a great place for shopping, while Milton Keynes might offer great work opportunities and affordable housing and while Songdo might offer a Free Economic Sone, Satellite Campuses of renowned foreign universities and an excellent road infrastructure, no one is drawn to these places because of their beauty, of their appeal as a place just to live there. No one, unless forced by financial or by other constraints, would seriously choose to retire in these places.

There is a good reason why cities like Barcelona, like Istanbul or London are continuing to grow, despite the poor infrastructure, the strained health services and the social economic problems they might have. It is because they have a soul, they have a history, because they have a personality that has grown over hundreds if not thousands of years and that have stood the test of time.

Brasilia, with its astonishing, monumental buildings, which quite rightly deserves its World Heritage site status, is like a carefully arranged dish without taste, like a Burgundy wine with a deep red hue, yet without flavour, body and finish. It is like a beautiful person, but without wit, charm or character, completely devoid of personality.

There was a good reason why Niemeyer, while enjoying the time during the construction of all of these buildings in Brasilia, eventually decided to spend the final days of his long life in a flat on the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro.

Strolling back from dinner at the restaurant at the base of the TV tower, I walked straight into a gathering of tuned cars.

All lowriders on steroids, that had a ground clearance of not more than 10 centimeters, their bodies polished to a lustrous shine and the interior of all of them packed with obscene numbers of loudspeakers and LEDs, which probably required a second alternator to provide them with the necessary power.

While the TV tower made a perfect backdrop for this rally, I considered it to be a very fitting end to my stay: Brasilia, I found, is probably more a city for cars than for people and it is unlikely that I will make again a detour for a visit.

 

It had been impossible to find some sleep…

It was 4 o’clock in the morning, the power cut had started 6 hours earlier and it was 32 degrees in a room with next to no ventilation.

It was then, when a group of howler monkeys were starting with their morning concert in the wildlife camp I was staying at in the end of September. What sounded as if someone had started to deploy an industrial cleaning device in the adjacent bathroom, originated from the top of the trees above my cabin. All hope for at mere hour of sleep before sunrise was finally dashed….

Following my visit to the World Small Animal Veterinary Association Congress in Rio, I had travelled to Cuiaba, a Brazilian city not far from the border to Bolivia and Paraguay, that is a gateway to both the Amazonas region to the north and the Pantanal to the south.

The Pantanal is a godforsaken giant swamp area, that is for most of the year waterlogged with impassable roads. It is mosquito and caiman infested and altogether an undesirable place for both human settlements or for any sort of farming.

With the exception of some gold prospecting over the last few years, which had left the affected areas with giant craters, mountains of discarded soil and with a few untarmacked roads, the environment and the wildlife here had been left mostly untouched, with the result that the Pantanal had established itself as a Mecca for wildlife watching like no other place in Latin America.

This is particularly true for the Jaguar and it was not difficult to see that a whole industry had evolve around it.

This elusive, third largest wild feline predator, which in the rest of South America is considered to be extremely rare, is thriving here and occurs in large numbers. This is of no great surprise, as for a big cat that loves to swim, that can of course climb any tree and that feeds not only of deer and capybaras, but also of caimans, fish and any waterfowl it can get hold of, in the Northern Pantanal the table is always abundantly stocked.

At first daylight, I crossed the yard when I was greeted by a young Capuchin monkey that was rummaging around in one of the palm trees for its breakfast.

The monkeys, together with the resident caracaras, colourful birds of prey that were patrolling the premisses like a flog of chickens,

had already tidied away any scraps of food or faintly edible waste that might have been dropped or forgotten outside the previous night.

High up on a tree branch, a pair of rare Hyacinth Macaws were busy grooming each other and screeching from time to time in response to the activities on the ground below.

Joāo, our guide, was mortified – it would have been his job to start the emergency generator when the power had cut out, but by being more adapted to the heat, he had not noticed it and had slept right through it.

Well, a lack of sleep was nothing that a strong cup of coffee couldn’t fix….

When a short while later we turned up at the small beach of Port Jofrey, a place of not more than three brick buildings, a small cluster of house boats and a short, bumpy landing strip for brave pilots and small planes, Markus, the captain of our aluminium bottomed speed boat, was already waiting for us.

The local river and its contributories were the real transport links in this part of the world and most of the wildlife, similar to deer peacefully grazing next to a busy motorway, had adapted to the activities on the water. Little to no hunting was happening here, only with the exception of the occasional deer or capybara taken by one of the local residents, so that most animals continued with whatever they were doing, completely unaffected by any observer or passing vessel.

By pure coincidence, it turned out that the timing of my congress had coincided with the end of the dry season in the Pantanal. This meant that most of the wildlife was more concentrated on the remaining pools of water and on the river sides, which made wildlife watching so much easier.

This window of opportunity would only last for a few weeks, until the rain and huge amounts of flood water from the Brazilian Central Plateau were due to arrive.

Natale, our friendly and always helpful driver had explained that during that time the roads, that were bone dry sand tracks at the moment, would be impassable and the wildlife camp would have to shut down for several months. Using the road on a daily basis, he had been caught out a few times by unseasonably early downpours a few times and had experienced the effects the hard way.

With the help of a a powerful outboard engine, our boat had made fast progress and we soon found ourselves in a more remote part of the reserve. With me on the boat were Eva Lau and Qi Shuai, a couple from South China, that were using all of their five days annual leave on this excursion. They had arrived far more prepared with professional looking Nikons, fitted with powerful tele-lenses. Their gear enabled them to capture even the finest details of the smallest birds and reptiles over a long distance.

Luckily, they were more than happy to share a few of their images, so that I could relax with my far more inferior smart phone camera set up, sticking to larger objects and to the scenery around us.

After passing a few groups of capybaras on the river bank, we didn’t have to wait long until we spotted the undisputed rulers of this half submerged world – a couple of jaguars, in fact a female with her nearly grown up cup, which were just emerging out of the water and then disappearing into the lush vegetation near our boat. Despite a cataract in one eye, the mother was still an excellent hunter and she was seen later that day catching one of the at this time of the year numerous caimans.

The next jaguar we saw was less camera shy, sunbathing on one of the small sand beaches that could be found alongside the river, which were normally populated by groups of capybaras. The automated shutter mechanisms of the cameras next to me went wild…..

Less than an hour later, when it was starting to get progressively hot, we spotted another jaguar resting underneath a tree and shortly after that another two swimming across the river ….

That was when the Tiramisu effect hit – there can be too much of a good thing….

Like having the famous Italian dessert for breakfast, lunch, afternoon coffee and for dinner, you eventually will get tired of it. It was, what happened to us.

 The cameras clicked less frequently, less dramatic or partially obscured shots were no longer taken and the initial excitement of a sighting was replaced by just respectful admiration.

When we ventured out for a second excursion in the afternoon, the jaguar, from having been the main attraction, had now been relegated to the ranks of an average member of the cast and we were elated by the first sightings of a group of giant otters, a toucan on a tree branch, a nesting giant owl or of the first tapirs.

Smaller birds, rare herons and feeding caimans, even Taruma trees in full bloom and individual smaller plants were now recognised and only then, real appreciation for this unique part of the Globe was allowed to emerge…

 

The early September sun is about to climb above the roof of a conference centre in the middle of Antwerp, that can claim to feature a “Room with a Zoo” as well as a meeting room guarded by the life-sized model of a Central African Okapi.

The first rays of direct sun light are starting to warm the pavement at Koningin Astridplein, the busy square in front of the venue, for another day of comings and goings, meetings and partings, arrivals and departures.

At the congress I am due to meet friends and colleagues, all likeminded veterinarians from all over Europe, who have descended on the city of diamonds to renew and to extend their knowledge and their skills to improve the treatment and care of their patients, where ever on the continent they require veterinary attention.

But yet there is time….

Time before the first lecture for a coffee and for some Belgian pastry for which there seems to be no better place than at the Mocambo Cafe, a small joint on the western fringe of the square, just a stone throw away from my apartment.

Antwerp, like Brussels, strikes me as a place of many contrasts, but I am a patient, at times surprised and at other times a somewhat puzzled observer.

While staying at probably the most central place in town, right above a row of jewellery shops packed with precious splinters of translucent carbon, that can cost the multiple of a man’s monthly or even annual salary, I have to step at night when the shutters are down and the outlets are closed, over the bodies of homeless rough sleepers, to get to my dwelling that is secured with a couple of solid steel doors.

Settling at a small table outside of the coffee shop, I am turning into a member of the audience, seated in the front row of another daily performance at the theatre of life on Koningin Astridplein.

The hissing sound of the espresso machine, the clinging of cups and saucers and the clattering of the cutlery is blended with the cacophony of conversations and the shouting in multiple languages, underlined with the sirens of an ambulance, the ringing of bicycle bells and the hooting of cars. A child is crying because it was woken up too early, a couple is arguing because they are about to miss their train, and a police whistle fails to stop a car that is driving in the wrong direction.

The smell of coffee and warm pastry is interlaced with that of an expensive perfume of a passing business women, with the faint stench of urine from the nearby doorway that had to substitute as a lavatory for a drunken dweller the previous night, with the oriental spices of the Arabic restaurant next door,  with the odour of some bags of rubbish that should have been cleared away already a couple of days ago, as well as with the smoke of a just lit cigarette on the table next to me.

The square in front of me is a rich palette of delivery drivers on colourful electrical bikes, of vailed women, next to bare bellied young girls and heavily tattooed men with professionally trimmed beards. Ray Bans on heads with dyed hair, air pads and high end headsets, bicycle helmets, gold jewellery and stainless-steel piercings are accessorised by brightly coloured scarfs, expensive handbags and urban bagpacks.

A tourist appears to be lost next to the bronze statue of a naked child sitting on the base of one of the two elaborately decorated lamp posts in the middle of the square, a couple is hugging and kissing not far from a long row of rental scooters, an old lady is walking her equally aged and clearly overfed toy dog and a delivery driver and a shop keeper are engaged into a heated argument, all under the watchful eyes of a young boy riding on a camel that is precariously balancing on a pedestal high above the roof tops.

   

 And yet, Koningin Astridplein is just the fore court, just the prelude to the main act, to the central character in this play:

A cathedral, fit for a king (and commissioned by one), but dedicated to Mercury, to Hermes, to Saint Christopher or even to Ganesh, the gods and patron saints of travel, of timetables, of restlessness and of transience. In its nave populated by creatures fed with coal, diesel or high voltage, that were once just arriving and departing here, but that are now running right through it.

There is an entrance hall that appears to have integrated the fronts of palatial houses as its walls. Crowned by a sky-scraping, domed roof that would be the envy of any clerical building, it is currently been used as a concert hall. The not ordinary, but ‘royal’ railway café, might still serve coffee but has the appearance of a 19^th century ballroom.

Dorian marble columns and in the main hall of the railway station, a huge freely suspended roof of glass and steel and delicate ornaments along the walls, elevate the transient traveller here to fleeting royalty and transform the food vendors, the waiters in the cafes and the ticket sellers to their willing courtiers.

Ruling this never ceasing cortege with an iron fist, are golden rimmed clocks, high up on the ceilings of all of these rooms. Without mercy the seconds on the clocks are ticking away and when the hour is struck, even the longest cup of coffee has to find its end…

 

The last bar had just closed and with the streets now deserted, I took a stroll through a world that had disappeared over a hundred years ago, in a place that was so charming and peaceful, that it provided the canvas for one of history’s most chilling narratives…..

I was in Sighisoara, one of a ring of seven fortified medieval towns in the lush hills of Transylvania, in the heart of Romania. Sighisoara and neighbouring towns like Sibiu and Braşov are unusual, because they were part of a network of German speaking settlements of Transylvanian Saxons, deep in the East of Europe, that were frequently attacked and often raided and from time to time ruled by Tartars or Ottoman invaders. As a consequence of centuries of geographic isolation, these communities developed their very own customs and traditions, which might have appeared to a visitor from the other side of the Continent as more quintessential German than Germany itself.

In addition to this, due to a combination of local autonomy and a lack of funding during the communist time, the local buildings and infrastructure enjoyed a period of fairytale sleep, where most of the historic Saxon dwellings were neglected, but remained untouched and were thankfully not replaced by the functional but characterless architecture of that time.

As a result of this, I found myself standing on a dimly lit cobblestone street in a German town, somewhere in the middle of the 19^th century….

On the street corners were German street names in Gothic script, the town was surrounded by medieval gate towers  that were assigned to individual guilds and an impressive clock tower with an elaborate pattern of roof tiles and fitted with multiple spires was next to a town square where every house was carrying a reference to a Saxon name.

This cocktail of German and Balkan trades and traditions, combined with the questionable heritage of being the birthplace of one of medieval’s most vile war lords – Vlad “The Impaler”, better known as Count Dracula – must have felt so utterly alien to an Irish novelist and to his readers living thousands of miles away on the other end of the continent at the outgoing 19^th century, that it became the opening scene of a narrative that, together with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Victor Hugo’s  “Hunchback of Notre-Dame” enjoys a seemingly never ceasing popularity – even today.

Bram Stoker never visited Sighisoara, but the medieval streets, devoid of people in the middle of the night, the deserted covered staircase leading up to a gloomy church on a hill and to a graveyard filled with ancient Saxon tombstones, overgrown with moss and neglected for decades, with an evasive cat as the only living being in sight, would indeed have been an unsettling destination for a lonely visitor from London, not familiar with the language or with the local customs.

Stoker’s novel struck so many points of unease and preconception about this part of the world: languages no one understood or really couldn’t be bothered to learn, the mentalities of the Balkan that were so different from that of a privately educated Anglo-Irish university graduate of that time,  communities of people who lived isolated in a mountainous location, surrounded by forests that were the home of bears and wolfs, animals extinct on the British Isles for centuries and in addition to this the hidden threat of something unknown und unspeakable, that had the ability to strike a chord with the paranoia of the British soul like an epidemic of rabies.

For me, the flighty cat on the church yard remained my only encounter with a creature with prolonged canines that night, and returning to my car the next day, it became clear that these descendants of the infamous Count were even able to enjoy their well deserved rest in broad day light without vanishing into a cloud of smoke….

 

I realised that it had been a mistake to pass the last petrol station on the fertile plain near Sibiu, before starting the long ascend along the Transfăgărşan Road, which is crossing the Transylvanian mountain range from the North to the South. The forecasted 150 km of reach, the fuel gauge had indicated, had melted down to just 45 km, with the nearest petrol station on the other side of the pass still over 60 km away….

I had driven the whole day from a mountain camp in the North of the country near the border to Ukraine. The gathering  had been organised by Alex Bogdan Vitalaru and an enthusiastic group of Romanian veterinarians. For a whole weekend I had thoroughly enjoyed their company and particularly Alex’ guitar playing while sitting around a campfire. I was still humming to myself the melody of the song of Andrii Popa, Romania’s own version of Robin Hood, when suddenly a dark shadow appeared from the side of the road, trying to cross right in front of my car – a bear !

Not huge, but still probably 150 kg of fur and muscles, I certainly didn’t want to hit….

Thankfully, I had closed all the windows, and I considered myself lucky for not sitting on a motorbike or – even worse – on a bicycle.

The mountains of Transylvania have some of the highest density of brown bears and wolfs in the whole of Europe. Direct encounters with these large predators are becoming now more common and reports of even fatal attacks feature more frequently in the news.

After deciding that I, surrounded by a reassuringly thick layer of steel and glass, would be  “too much work” for a decent dinner, the bear crossed the road and disappeared back into the forest.

Only 40km of fuel left…..  

The road continued to climb and eventually I passed the tree-line. The vegetation was reduced to frost and wind resistant low growing shrubs and sharpe edged battle hardened grass, which only the toughest of ruminants were able to digest.

The temperature had dropped significantly and as the last daylight was fading, light rain was starting to fall.

Eventually I reached a poorly lit tunnel, just below the central ridge of the mountain, that was connecting the Northern to the Southern side of the massif.

Emerging from the other end of the tunnel, I finally parked the car and from here it was now just a short hike in total darkness to reach the small refuge.

Passing then the closer inspection of a guard dog, that was not much smaller than the bear I had just seen, I entered the battered cabin and found out that I was in luck after all: there was not only a spare bed for me in one of the dormitories,

there was even a cold beer and a hot soup waiting for me, before turning in for the night.

When I woke up the next morning, the clouds were hanging low over the mountains and it was still raining. While the hospitality at the hut had been great the previous night, it seemed to have run out of steam in the presence of early daylight. The fair this morning was some dry bread, an egg without salt and some plain cheese that had the texture of rubber, all washed down with some lukewarm instant coffee without milk. When I asked to get my thermos flask filled with some hot water and the manageress just took it to the kitchen sink turning on the warm water tap, I realised that it was time to leave….

Passing the now chained guard dog, which in day light looked much smaller than previous night, I ventured into the misty tundra landscape and found myself alone on a small path, while below me the road, filled with cars and motorbikes, meandered its way up the southern slope, with only individual rays of sunlight breaking through the thick cloud cover.

Being less than a mile away from the tunnel and the road, I was in complete peace and there was not a single sound around me. Next to the path I noticed beautiful blue aconites, that were frequented by industrious bees and more clumsily operating bumble bees.

I was just starting to enjoy the sensation of freedom and tranquillity, only the high mountains or the open Sea can give, when I noticed a movement next to a rock in front of me.

Rearing its head, completely covered in a thick coat of brown fur, moving the next moment at considerable speed straight towards me and coming to a halt just a few meters away, displaying a fine set of long and yellow front teeth…….was a…marmot…. that had clearly not been prepared for a visitor at this early hour…..

An earsplitting, high-pitched screech was to follow, before the large rodent disappeared into its nearby burrow.

Once I had rounded the side of the mountain, the path descended slightly into a small green valley, with a small stream running right through the middle of it. On the other side of the valley I first heard, then saw a large flog of sheep. The bleating of the livestock was occasionally augmented by the barking of a dog and I instantly knew that I had to give this seemingly peaceful setting a very wide berth.

The valley was eventually crossed without getting mauled, and then another mountainside had to be rounded before the final ascend was right ahead of me.

Now the path zick-zacked its way relentlessly up towards the ridge and to the only slightly higher summits of the Transylvanian mountain massif.

Finally I was standing next to a small lake – the sad remainder of another long disappeared glacier – and just a few meters away from it, was the destination of this solitary hike – the probably ugliest mountain shelters you will ever come across….

Something that resembled a crude hybrid of an oversized turquoise plastic dustpan and an illegally parked combine harvester with a large handle on it’s roof, had taken center stage on a small plateau.

One could only assume that numerous distinguished design prizes must have been won with this extraterrestrial looking object. 

Yet, the structure had an unlocked door and offered a place to rest after an eventful hike in Transylvania.