Hello neighbours! My friend and I decided to visit Romania (first time for both of us). Since there is a lot to see, we decided to have a car trip instead of going only to București with a plane. (I pasted localized names from maps)
We are planning to visit Timișoara (one night), Cluj-Napoca (one night) and Salina Turda, then go to București (for probably 3 nights) and visit interesting things in the region, like castles, fortresses, orthodox monasteries, Transilvania region, and so on.
I tried googling a little bit for some stuff, but since we are supposed to cover over 1500km with the car, stay at 3 different cities, and have dozen of things to visit (we probably wont be able to see everything), I wanted to ask some locals for advices and suggestions on what to see/prioritize. I also wanted to ask some questions about the trip, so I decided to make a list. Now some questions might be basic, so feel free to point me to websites, other posts or things like that, if the question is already answered.
Current plan is to start the trip from Belgrade, Serbia. Go to Timișoara, stay there for the first day. Second day, go to Cluj, also stay there for a day. Now, we heard that Salina Turda is a must visit, and 2 options we have are either visit it before or after Cluj (not sure how long should we dedicate, few hours or more?). Then, after spending the first half of the third day in Cluj, go to București and stay there for few days (either 2 or 3 nights). Now, we currently have no awareness of what else we should visit, so if you have advices for locations and also where they are located regionally, so we can add it to the plan in case its in-between these 3 cities. For example, we obviously want to visit "Transilvania", however we have no idea what are good things to see, what are tourist traps/not worth the time or distance, and so on. After that, we have a long trip back to Serbia, and perhaps things to see on the way back, since we will take a different route. We planned this visit in the middle of August.
Basic plan (Imgur image)
Now, some questions I was also wondering:
- My brother told me that some border crossings are closing quite early in the day. I will double check that on the web, but perhaps more important question is there a border crossing that is preffered when going back, from București to Belgrade?
- How are the roads (highways and motorways), and are there tolls outside of getting the rovinieta?
- It seems that diesel prices are same in Serbia and Romania (1.87eur at the moment here), but are there gas stations that are prefered? In Serbia we have couple of brands that I always avoid due to quality of the gas.
- Advices on the places we should stay at? Should we look for hotels, motels, booking (or other websites). We dont plan to spend any significant time there, just have a decent place to sleep and have a shower.
- About parking services, how does it work, is it same in the 3 cities or are there differences? We also wouldnt mind getting a cheaper hotel that is not in the center of the cities, if we will also save money on the parking.
- How is public transport for București? Since we will stay for few days, we might decided to leave the car parked. We do like to walk a lot but I guess we can also use the public transport if its decent.
- When and what should we visit in Transilvania? I heard from few people that Dracula castle is a scam or something along those lines. What would you suggest us to visit, based on the quality of the location, entry fee, and time we will have to spend to get there.
- Based on the previous question, is one night in Cluj enough? We know its a students town and we are both 24y old. If we stay more in Cluj, we will stay in București one day less, so we are wondering what is better.
- Should we convert all the money to local currency or keep Euros?
Also, feel free to give route changing advices if you think we will have better time. For example skip București if you think we will see more interesting stuff in other places, and obviously save >500km of travel. But since its the capital town, we originally gave it biggest time frame for the visit.
Thanks in advice for reading through my post and answering, we heard a lot of good things about Romania and your hospitality, especially towards Serbs, so we wanted to dedicate more time and try to visit as much as possible.
I can give more info in the threads in case it can help you give clearer advices.
