He looks pretty harmless now, but like Chinggis Khan, Vlad the Impaler's savagery lingers on in the folk memory many centuries after his time I'm not exactly sure what possessed me to see Transylvania. Maybe it it was all those people, especially. in the U.S.A. who asked, "Isn't that where Dracula came from?" when I said I was from Tasmania. It was certainly a place shrouded in mystery and dark legends which no one could tell me much about. I knew I was entering a different world when the train took ten hours to reach it, even though it wasn't a lot further than the journeys I had taken to Vienna and Budapest and there was only one train a day, whereas to the other places there was one at least every hour. The first surprise when I arrived late at night in Sibiu, was that the grapes had a perfume - a deep rich velvety smell that filled the whole night air, like some exotic night blooming flower. I'll blame the Romans for that. After the original pop...
Practising Geographer - nature culture places people