Visiting the Iza Valley

The Iza Valley is very special. Wood reigns supreme. Villages such as Bogdan Voda and Ieud are richly textured places that take their rhythm from the surrounding forests. There are wooden houses and wooden gateways, the latter often embellished with a wooden cross.

Wooden barns cluster in complex geometries which have as their pivot a wooden church. It is but a short step from the simple Maramures homestead to heaven. The churches, some Uniate and some Orthodox, have an almost miraculous energy, and, so we were told, are among the tallest wooden structures in the world.

Reflections of Heaven

The cosmos finds expression in Iza Valley homesteads too, with delicate symmetrical carvings on barn doors, porches and gates. Perfectly regular wooden shingles line the roofs to create powerful silhouettes against the early autumn sky. In the courtyards, cords of oak are neatly stacked, while next to one abandoned house, the unburnt winter wood of yesteryear is home to a riot of late summer clematis. If rural perfection is ever to be found in Europe, it might be in the artistic delicacy of the wooden villages of the Iza Valley.

Getting there

This region of Romania lies just south of the border with Ukraine. A daily overnight train from Bucharest takes 12 hours to reach the Iza Valley, and in our book there’s no better way to start the morning than by pulling back the curtains of a sleeping car to reveal a dewy mist over the orchards of the Iza.

About the authors: Nicky and Susanne run a Berlin-based editorial bureau that supplies text and images to media across Europe. Together they edit hidden europe magazine and write often about rail travel across Europe. You can read more of their writing in their regular e-brief and in the Notes section on their website.

The post Romania: Early fall in the Iza Valley appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Last week, in the wake of the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, first the countries of northern and western Europe closed their airports. And then country after country to the south and east followed suit. The whole thing proceeded as if by incredibly rapid viral transmission. Very quickly all sorts of relatively arcane volcano terminology began to crop up on television news programs in Europe.

The ash arrives in Romania and Moldova

For days I monitored the expanding shade of ash across the BBC’s map of Europe. Then on Saturday morning, I awoke to learn from an employee at our hotel in Gura Humorului, Romania that Romania and Moldova had closed their airports. Suddenly it seemed likely that I too would be directly affected by the air travel stoppage that had come to paralyze Europe.

The lack of regular updates by trusted sources became a source of frustration. Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, has been updating their volcanic ash cloud maps far too infrequently. And then there are many publications listing European countries with full or partial airspace closures that have been omitting Moldova from their tabulations altogether, despite the fact that the Chisinau airport has been closed for days.

Taking flight today?

Today I’m scheduled to fly from Chisinau to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. As of this moment, very early on Tuesday morning in Chisinau, my flight is scheduled to take off as planned around noon.

My mother—my traveling companion for the past week-and-a-half—is supposed to be Milan-bound on Meridiana at noon tomorrow. Her flight has been canceled outright. We’ve spent many of the last few hours sketching out contingency plans for her. Happily, she’s on vacation and can take the time to make her way south and west.

The post Flight Memo: Volcanic ash across Europe appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.