We arrived in Cluj not too long after lunch-time. With it being mid-August I expected a wall of heat to hit me square in the face as I stepped out the plane. It was about the same as Luton. Nice, but certainly not the 40ᵒ I'd been told about. Apparently we arrived during a short cold snap. Probably a good thing. We could get used to it slowly. It's certainly hot enough now.

Cluj itself was a bit of a disappointment. The airport was empty. We got our bags off the carousel walked out a door and were on the street. I had to ask a couple of flight attendants where the bus station was. We had to make our way to the train station, presumably through the city centre. So they told us to turn right and walk 10 metres. That was a bus stop. And we just missed the bus!

No problem. We'll sit and wait for the next one and it should be easy enough to get into the town centre, so long as we're sitting on the right side of the road. We waited a good while and the taxi at the end of the bus stop was starting to look like a very good idea until we spotted a bus coming down the street. As is pretty normal in Europe everybody piled into the door at the middle of the bus to either stamp their tickets or try to get by without one. We tried to just get on the front and ask the driver if he was going our way, but he either didn't understand or was trying his bloody hardest not to. Screw it, we'll grab a taxi.

And then a dude leaned out the middle door. "Come on quickly," he said. "This is your bus." Awesome. Somebody can talk English and he wants to help. He was a young Romanian dude called Eduard, back from studying in the UK to visit his parents and he was heading for the bus station too. He'd show us the way. Unfortunately, you need to buy the bus tickets here from a kiosk and stamp them when you get in. We'd used similar systems in other countries, but unfortunately they don't always make it entirely clear for tourists. And I can only imagine how many people get caught out. Eduard told us the kiosks were all closed anyway and there probably weren't too many people on the bus who did have a ticket. We just had to hope that no inspectors came aboard.

Then some inspectors came aboard. A bit of an 'oh s***' moment occurred. We didn't have anything to show him, but we told him we were tourists in the hope that we might just get away with it. For a moment it seemed to work. He asked us where we were from and then asked for our passports. Well, he had an official I.D. so I handed them over. I guess he just wanted us to prove we weren't trying to play him. "That's OK. Be careful in future though". That's what we wanted to hear. But no. He kept hold of our passports and told us to follow him off the bus a couple stops down the way and he included our friend in that too. He thought we were all together so unfortunately for Eduard he wouldn't be getting away with it either.

I was keeping a very close eye on our passports this whole time. That was our lives right there and I wasn't about to let anybody scarper with them. I made a grab for them a couple times just to let him know and I guess he understood my worry as he made reassuring gestures at me. Once we were off the bus he wrote us out our tickets and asked for 25 RON for each of us. Well, that's almost a tenner in total. Bit of a b***** but it could be worse. I coughed up the cash and he handed our passports back. Eduard refused though. Now that caused a bit of a scene. They argued a while and a couple other people joined in, picking their sides and giving their case. It was no good though. The inspector decided to pull his phone out and get onto the police and then they just had to wait. Eduard told us to go on without him, he'd have to wait for the cops to arrive and sort things out. He seemed fairly determined, so while we hated to leave him to it and to have to find our way without him, we had to just get going. Luckily, we missed the bus. Because who should appear just 5 minutes later but Eduard himself. He decided a couple hours at a police station weren't exactly what he wanted right now so paid his fine. The price of a few beers, it's not that big a problem. Because we'd paid the guy, we basically now had tickets for another half hour travel. The next bus was fine and after a short walk we arrived at the station.

Eduard asked an info lady about our buses and we both had another hour to wait so he treated us to a drink at the café and we bantered some more. Mainly about Romania. The language, the people, gypsies. Romanians hate the gypsies. They won't have anything to do with them at all. They're treated as thieves and trouble-makers and if you pass a gang of them you keep your head down. Then the bus came and we said our goodbyes.

And we couldn't have been happier to leave. Eduard was an awesome guy and we got his number in case we had trouble or were headed in his direction. Cluj just wasn't very inspiring though. It seemed incredibly run-down. The roads were full of holes, it was dusty and falling apart. Since being there people have assured us that it's a great place to visit when there are students about. We happened to get there when all the students were out of uni and the place is a bit of a ghost town without them. I'm not in a great hurry to go back. But it is about a 9-hour drive :p