It was an easy decision for me not to try and drive in Romania. I am bad at driving around unfamiliar infrastructure, not to mention navigation is the Achilles heel for me. Many tourist guides also highly recommend not driving for the sake of safety, especially at night.
Relying on public transport has its limitations and nuances, and I’ll try to cover some of them here.
- In Bucharest you can pay for the subway using your credit card. Very convenient.
- Buying a bus/tram ticket. Tickets are usually sold at specific ticket booths for a popular station, or apparently at nearby stalls if there’s no official ticket booth (but I’ve never personally tested this latter case). Some cities have automatic bus ticket machines that take 50 bani coins. If you’re out of luck, you’ll have to buy a bus/tram ticket from a more popular station, or it’s outside the vendor working hours and you can’t get a ticket anywhere except by buying off other locals. I’m not sure how long tickets last, but certainly for weeks. This means you can buy multiple tickets in advance instead of trying to buy only when you need and realizing you can’t buy one due to one of the above reasons.
- There are such things as overcrowded buses. Try getting on one of the last five buses of the night from Baneasa shopping center. Watching it was hilarious for me: everyone desperately running to fit in, the whole bus being packed within a matter of seconds. And then I had to do it. It took a bit of bravery and hustling to fight for my right to an illegal bus ride :]
- You will likely encounter a situation where you neglected to buy a bus/tram ticket beforehand and you no longer have that option because oh yeah it’s the weekend… Many locals ride without paying. The driver doesn’t care, the passengers don’t care, but the ticket officer does care. Ticket officers go checking for people who don’t pay by joining random rides, but usually the popular ones and during working hours. In certain cities (but apparently not Cluj-Napoca?), the chance of getting caught is low and the fine is not that bad. If you want a “genuine” local experience, you can try riding at least once without paying. If you want insurance, what you can do is buy one ticket but don’t use it. If an officer asks you for your ticket, hand him the ticket and he’ll time-stamp it for you, which is what you’re meant to do yourself by inserting your ticket into the machine on the bus when you enter. I was approached by an officer and he was super polite but he never explained what I was meant to do so I kept buying bus tickets and wondering why I couldn’t just re-use them since I didn’t know about the stamping thing. (And yes, you can probably survive off one or two tickets for a while by never getting them stamped until approached by an officer.) Note the stamping machine for paper tickets is usually separate to the one that locals use with their swipe card.
- I read something vague like paper tickets are supposed to be in the process of being phased out (until they’re all sold out) in favor of paper cards that can be topped up. I only had to use paper cards once.
- Uber is great when it’s available because there’s no possibility of getting ripped off, you don’t have to tip, you can save your precious stash of one leu bills, and your driver can’t misinterpret your destination. Unfortunately, the only city with a major Uber network is where you’re least likely to need it: Bucharest. I did get Uber rides in Brasov and Timisoara, but you need a bit of luck and a good location.
- Taxi apps are still very useful for calling a cab without needing to speak a word of Romanian (or English, for that matter). They can also actually have better coverage than a local trying to call the single company number they’ve memorized. I used Speed Taxi in Bucharest and CleverTaxi in Cluj. If in doubt ask young locals what they use.
- Avoid getting scammed by a cab driver. Check the prices written on the taxi (on the door and inside) are fair compared to any surrounding taxis. Once you’re going, make sure the fare meter is running and reads or blinks “Ocupat” on one of the two lines. If you realized you got tricked after the fact and they ask for a fixed price you don’t want to pay, you should argue if you want a lower price. Say no. Ask for a receipt. Say you won’t pay unless you have a receipt. Or only offer half the price they stated and see if they take it, else threaten to just leave. (You’ll have to be braver if you also have luggage in the back…) The taxi itself should be legit if you didn’t just enter a random one, so you can also start jotting down their information and call the taxi line to assist you.
Note: This isn’t really about the money. You deserve to be treated fairly and not taken advantage of just because you’re a foreigner. The sentiment that you should pay more because you can afford it does not belong here. - Do not assume your taxi driver knows your destination no matter how popular it is. It’s common for taxi drivers to ask each other and people on the street where your destination is! Most don’t seem to remember names of places (in English or Romanian); they always ask for a street address and number. You will also likely have to direct them to the desired entrance (even if you don’t know yourself), otherwise you may have to walk quite a way round in some cases…
- If you’re staying at a good location and your destination is within 30 minutes of walking, then taking the bus/tram might not be faster. This often applies even if you’re already at the bus/tram stop. It is possible to look up timetables, but it’s not that convenient and you might misinterpret it.
- Most villages don’t have any taxis. A quick check is to see if you can see any from Google Maps street view at the train station for example.
- If you find yourself in a village where locals say there aren’t any taxis, you can try ringing taxi numbers listed for that village online (but you’ll need a local to talk for you, and the local won’t understand English either). The other options are to try and hitch hike or offer the taxi fare to a local with a car. I didn’t succeed with either of these options. Instead, my most used options were to walk/run the whole way (NOT recommended), look helpless and get picked up by people who drove from a city (10/10 recommend but this doesn’t happen when you expect it to, so don’t rely on it), and give up and take the return bus/train.
- Booking is rarely needed for trains or intercity buses, unless it’s a microbus—in which case it might become full, but a microbus isn’t a bus! (*Shrug*).
- The CFR website allows you to buy train tickets online, which you need to print out. You automatically get a 10% discount or something for buying online (in advance). The confusing thing is that the website always allows you to buy next-day tickets, but the option to buy same-day tickets online disappears at some unknown and variable time before the train leaves, ranging from a few hours to the whole day.
- Google Maps will show its many cracks. I noticed so many problems with Google Maps while in Romania. Which side of the street am I on? Apparently pedestrians also have to abide by one-way streets. Closing times are wrong. Nearby restaurants stated as 700m and 750m away don’t count as being within 800m filter. This restaurant is permanently closed. That’s the wrong location for this well-known bus station. Don’t tell me to walk across a private road. Why am I being shown inconsistent distances to my destination across three interfaces? Bus routes sometimes appear and sometimes don’t. That’s not the location of the volcano… How fast do you think I can walk across uneven ground? Why can’t you parse the address format lots of Romanian websites use? This road doesn’t have a footpath. I’m not gonna cross a whole neighborhood of aggressive dogs, even if they’re behind fences…
The two most important pieces of advice I can give are: double check place names with their addresses, because Maps doesn’t always know the right place or name; and carefully research the actual locations for a nature scene/hike, because Maps can give you a misleading starting place—use an offline map app like Maps.Me because you could be stuck somewhere with very slow roaming (or none at all). - All the best hiking locations (waterfalls are the dream) are difficult to visit without a car, carpool, or an organized tour. (Note: I’m talking about the best pure nature scenes, certainly not anywhere you need an entry ticket for. I was determined but I still never managed to see a waterfall and I overstayed in Romania. I probably would have had better luck if I had tried to go when I was still in Bucharest, but I wasn’t intending to go back even though I could have.) To reach the destination where the hike starts, there are usually a couple of obstacles such as:
- The bus/train only runs one, two, or three times daily, and usually rather early or late for hiking.
- The ride at the specific time of day you want only runs a few days a week.
- It is usually not possible to take a return trip on the same day, and the timetables are made to suit people staying at the village that need to spend a work day in the main city, not the other way round. Therefore, a hike would usually need prior planning multiple days in advanced and a night’s stay at the village.
- You may need to take a train to an adjacent city before being able to take an intercity bus to your destination at all.
- The village may not be close to the starting point for the hike. Good luck if there aren’t any taxis either…
- If you get stranded your emergency contact (if any) has to be willing to drive typically three hours to pick you up and go all the way back.
- Not that rare: the bus website does not indicate pricing, has out-of-date information, doesn’t state the locations of the stations, and phone support will hang up on English speakers. (This happened to me, except multiple sources had the wrong rendezvous for the intercity bus. Once I realized, none of the villagers knew where the real stop… if they even knew what I was trying to say… I was this close to getting to see Valul Miresei from Cluj to Răchiţele via Huedin.)
- Don’t overdo it with walking. I used to associate walking with being ‘free’. It’s not free. It costs time and energy that you could spend elsewhere by catching a bus or taxi. Trying to walk to most places for a month took a noticeable toll on my body. I might have been able to manage the same amount of walking at home, but footpaths in Romania can get rather unfriendly, to say the least. (It wasn’t until I got a sports massage that I realized just how many different muscles in my legs were under stress. The massage was painful at times and hurt the day after as well, but I feel that compresses a week of passive recovery to a few days, which is worth it for me. And despite being painful initially I would say it overall eases my pain.)
- It would really suck to miss an infrequent bus or train or minibus because of vague or incorrect information. Some say you can only get 100% reliable information from the ticket office by visiting in person or phoning. This is true in many cases. Unfortunately, word of mouth also sometimes completely replaces the use of online information. Even worse if the online information is not updated. The only source I’ve found to be reliably consistent is the CFR website, which is actually the one thing many locals specifically label as being too convoluted. (I guess walking to the station just to ask in person is considered easier?)
- Don’t blindly trust local advice if you have a better option. Twice I planned to arrive just 10 minutes on time for a bus, only to have locals prevent me from making it because they had never heard of the bus company and didn’t believe there was a stop where the website indicated. In one case they (a cab driver) took me to a better transport service, but in the other I decreased my chances of catching the bus to zero by listening to them. The electronic billboard mislabeled my train and the young locals said to just wait. Instead of missing the train like that I just checked the manual billboard 😀
- I only tried to hitchhike once from Salina Turda (a very crowded destination) and did not succeed (and in fact received rude gestures twice from the same guy), but I did get unexpectedly invited/adopted into a family road trip (when I was running to catch the last train) and to Easter Sunday lunch, both of which were priceless experiences. My very limited theory is that people in touristy locations are far less welcoming because it makes complete sense that you would have planned your own return trip. They’re also more likely to be trying to impress their SOs or in a defensive mood because tourists are somewhat competing with each other in terms of queues and getting the best photos, right?
- Walking on the highways—reconsider. It’s better to do things the easier way. Some parts of the way there is a footpath, but a lot of the time you have to walk on the road with cars zooming by. If you’re “lucky” you can walk in a V-shaped street gutter instead. Feels safer but you may get injured from the awkwardness. Don’t do things the hard way for the sake of the challenge. Pick a better challenge instead.
INTP things 