Transylvanian horseman

Clutter

The yard is cluttered with horse carts. Where there is space, objects multiply to fill it, and these carts - lying where their horses were unhitched - are no exception. The cart on the right contains sufficient 50mm (2") planks to resurface a 4m x 2.5m (13' x 8') section of barn floor. The old floor has lasted seven years, however some of the planks have deteriorated, so it is time to make repairs. We have a steady trickle of repairs to complete, especially with the older timber buildings that are around fifty years old.

It is a grey day, the wood smoke drifting from chimney blending into the overcast. Occasional snow flurries drift down. The lane outside is covered by a layer of pressed ice, and neighbours have begun to travel by sleigh. The air is hazy, and more snow seems likely. This anyway is a relief after the clear skies of the night before, when the temperature plummeted. It isn't as cold when snow falls as when the air is sharp and clear.

It is a religious holiday again today, so only the basic minimum of work is carried out. The horses are idle on the field, hay having been hauled up there yesterday. For them, it is an easy day. For me, I am busy keeping the fire burning. The rather damp wood that we brought requires frequent prodding in the fire to keep burning well. This wood may have represented a financial economy, however it draws plentifully on my labour to heat the house this way.

Religious holiday or not, business manages to intrude. I have completed a tedious conversation with a British tour operator that sends schoolchildren on hiking holidays. That sounds like a worthy enough objective. However the British firm, to whom I had provided accommodation, has proved itself interested in nothing except for the bottom line. Until now, improving the bottom line has required the feelgood-factor of "aid projects". I have struggled to produce any sort of useful project when each group has three days available, is unwilling to plan in advance, and wants to spend next to nothing, whilst poverty is thin on the ground around here. Last year ago a British school built a climbing frame in the village school playground, however the structure was so rickety that it had to be demolished within months. This year a British school wanted to paint "murals" on our village primary school, whose director reasonably declined since his school was newly renovated. (The schools in my village are all smartly decorated, centrally heated and fitted with double glazed windows. Is every British school so fortunate?) Instead the children got to make some kind of large board games that no-one in the village had asked for or really wanted. The whole attitude was so colonial, telling the "natives" what is good for them. Now finally the message has sunk in that we are not poor, we don't need our schools disfigured by badly executed "murals", in fact we are healthier than the feeble flabby visiting British children. We don't need worthless "aid projects". These people should look inside Britain when planning "aid projects", there is certainly enough needless poverty within those shores. However it isn't picturesque poverty.

The odd thing is, those flabby British children (or, rather, their parents) pay appreciably more for a week hiking and camping than I charge my guests for a week riding with hotel and guesthouse accommodation. Their trip costs are miniscule, the tour operator pays its guides badly, is even so curmudgeonly as to restrict the children's rations to save money. Someone has a very high profit margin. I expect that the children return home thinking that Romania is a "poor country" because there "isn't enough to eat". Well, I suppose that many of them would benefit from losing a few pounds.

Anyway, it's time to go downstairs to prod the fire, to coax that batch of damp wood into yielding some calories. I'm annoyed by that tour operator, and the therapy of poking at flaming timber will do me some good.

Tight spots

Cleaning the stable efficiently requires accurate backing of a horse cart into some tight spots. Here Nelu has backed Gelu and Tudor around a sharp corner and into the stable where three draught horses spend the night when they are in work. The cart body is some 5m (17') long, and it takes some care by driver and, of course, horses to reverse it around a right-angle bend and through a 2m (7') wide interior doorway.

Backing up is a very useful skill for draught horses, and one that we use daily. It enables us to get the cart in right where we need it for loading manure or unloading sawdust. A pair ought to be able to enact a precise three-point turn on level ground too. This particular pair will step forward or back a pace or two on verbal command, which makes yard work a good deal easier.

It's curious how, depending on the culture, young people are (or are not) given responsibility. An agent who sends us clients remarked recently about "kids driving the horse carts." We are talking about young men aged 18 and 19 years, who have worked 8 or 10 years with draught horses. Yet, to some people from the nanny state West, how could we let people as young as that take responsibility for a pair of horses and a cart, let alone transport tourists? Odd to think, isn't it, that in the early 1940's we sent boys of 18 years to fight our enemies, flying state-of-the-art aeroplanes or driving tanks.

The chimney sweep visited today. The new chimney has been in use for almost a year now, and badly needed sweeping. The sweep is a small man who makes a professional habit of expressing dire gloom at the state of each and every chimney. It must be "totally blocked" as a result of the owner's neglect, not having had it swept every few months. It's a wonder that any smoke has a gap to slip out through, or that the chimney hasn't caught fire. (The residue did catch fire a while back, a spectacular though not dangerous display of billowing smoke and darting flames. However I didn't give the sweep the satisfaction of hearing this admission.) Anyway, now my chimney is clean, and the fire burns that bit better. Every bit of thermal efficiency is welcome in this cold season, when temperatures fall below -10C at night beneath a clear sky dotted by bright stars.

Dylan Thomas's Transylvania

It was in school that I encountered the writings of Dylan Thomas. Probably all English language students were obliged to read Under Milk Wood. A backward seaside village with the cod-Welsh name of Llareggub (try reading it backwards!) would have caught our attention. Even though the BBC thoughtfully rendered it Llaregyb to avoid offending people like my parents.

There is something of that strange rustic backwater Wales in this place, with a slight admixture of the Kafkaesque to give it a distinct Eastern European flavour.

I went to the railway station on Friday evening, intending to buy a ticket in advance. As the lady who sells tickets wasn't at her post, I went into the signal box where a light was showing. The signalman promptly telephoned the clerk, explaining that she had gone home to put wood on the fire "but she didn't live far away so she would be back soon." Shortly the breathless lady returned and sold me the desired ticket. At this point the signalman told me that his father had a sleigh for sale "and he did not live far away either." So the signalman set his signals to clear "because a freight train was due to pass through", locked the signal box, and we set off (along with the clerk) to see the sleigh. In the darkness behind us a freight train rumbled past. The sleigh lay beneath a pile of hay, a surprisingly common way to store old horse-drawn implements. Anyway, we dragged it free and examined it, quite a good, well-made sleigh as it turned out. I'm waiting to hear a price for it now. It's easier to find a sleigh than a booking clerk. However, unlike sleighs, all the tickets have their set prices.

As I took the first photo, Vasile remarked (correctly) that it would be on the internet tonight. At least one of my staff has broadband internet at home, and so do several teenage neighbours. Strange, isn't it, that people work with horses but have broadband at home. It seems that my blog has a certain local viewship (not a readership as few of the local followers understand much English), and that they like to appear. Luckily they haven't gone back in the archive to the place where Vasile fainted on his birthday when a stallion was castrated.

We'd brought the timber by horse cart, offcuts from a sawmill. Odds and ends left over from logging are used widely, and these tops and tails of felled trees are no exception. Cut and split, they make tolerable firewood. At this time of year, the path to the woodpile is well trodden. Our boiler is a huge 120kw (about 200hp) unit, rather oversized and therefore good for heating the house even when burning poorer wood with a lower calorific value. A familiar job every morning is to clean the boiler tubes with a circular wire brush attached to a long steel rod, such is the quantity of soot and tar that remain from these rather green offcuts. Still, the boiler has a fair collection of knobs and dials, so I feel like a real engineer when I get to work on the heating system.

Now I have my computer back. I feel less than totally informationally naked. It was an uncomfortably vulnerable feeling not having that box on my desk. Perhaps I am dependent on my computer? Perhaps I will now back up all my files?

Finally, here's a photo for all of you who have to go shopping. I took this picture just after buying rock salt for the horses. It's a while since any was delivered to the general store, a shop so modern that it still has a pre-1989 "Co-op" sign above the door. So only the larger blocks remained. I bought the smallest block, a mere 55kg (120lb) of damp, slippery rock streaky greyish salt. These huge salt rocks are quite unlike the sanitised white granules that one buys in the grocers. I did remember to bend my knees when I lifted the block, and I was grateful that I had parked my car right outside. I felt clearly, lifting that huge rock, that my back was near its limit even adopting the recommended posture. Meanwhile, some neighbours shopped. They have quite a collection of drums in their cart, and we may surmise that some distilling is planned. Their horses meanwhile doze under warm blankets. Mine are greedily licking their salt by now.

Late autumn view

It is warm out, and the snow is melting from south-facing slopes. Shady north-facing slopes remain snowy. Shaded by buildings, my yard remains frozen, keeping mud and slush at bay.

At the moment I am working on my reserve computer, since my main office computer has crashed and won't restart. Tomorrow morning will see it taken to town for data recovery and repair. I wish that I could go more than  year without the office computer malfunctioning. However computer problems seem to be the norm.

I'll be off line anyway for a couple of days, as I have the misfortune to be obliged to visit the capital city, Bucuresti. It's a twelve hour journey each way by overnight train. More ramifications of incompetent former accountants' mistakes have come to light, and need to be resolved through meetings. I doubt whether they will be pleasant meetings.

I am now employing my sixth accountant in eight years. The first could not turn in accounts on time to save her life. The second worked for a city firm, charged too much, and submitted data on discs that few seemed able to open. Not long after the third had emigrated, I found that she consistently had mis-filed my VAT accounts over a couple of years. Fortunately the state had signed off the accounts, meaning that I could not be prosecuted. I had police charges filed against my fourth accountant after discovering signs of embezzlement. It turned out also that she too had mis-filed the VAT. By this time I had been for medical tests, suspecting that I had suffered a minor heart attack. Fortunately it proved only to be severe anxiety-related symptoms. In those days I was working on my own, without the expertise and sanity that Danielle was to bring. The fifth and last to be fired presented me with a string of misleading financial data, made mistakes that increased my tax liability, and drove suppliers nearly crazy through refusing to pay bills over technicalities. That one man managed to raise my stress level higher than it had been even when I had a demanding job in London. All of this is a lesson to anyone who might consider investing in Romania. The low calibre and not-infrequent dishonesty of accountants is one of the biggest problems faced by foreign investors.

There are moments when I feel as if I were, as J R R Tolkein put it, fighting the long defeat. Fortunately these moments pass.

An important lesson has been to deny my new accountant the right to deposit any papers without my signature, and ensure that she has no access to the company finances, even though Danielle or I have to drive two hours to town at least once a week as a result. Now Danielle is doing our own management accounting in parallel. I have developed sophisticated financial planning tools that enable me to calculate income, expenditure and taxes in a variety of scenarios. We have been extremely busy cementing our control of our company's financial transactions and ensuring that we understand how our business is evolving.

All this work and stress is in addition to managing the horses, marketing, operating the trails, or any of the many other tasks involved in running a riding centre. I mention that just in case any of you contemplate changing sky and shire (as A E Housman put it) to run a riding centre as an easy alternative to office work.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hill,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I do think of those far-off days when this was all about going out and riding, about a simpler life freer from concerns and worries. Those times seem like the distant past now. Days on the chalk downlands of England, days on the bald ridges here. Days on high vantage points, the surrounding land splendidly arrayed to the far horizon. I wish that I knew how to recapture freedom. I am sure that many wonder how.

Transylvania

This photograph expresses the beauty and tranquility of life in the mountains of northern Transylvania. It captures the hard work and isolation of those who live and work in the remoter settlements.

Autumn's last golden leaves hang tenaciously on the beech trees. Snow dusts the distant ridges and fills dips in the rolling meadows. A cool breeze competes with a watery sun shining from a pale, limpid sky. On a lonely upland road, a farmer leads his horse dragging a log to cut and split for firewood.

Thus it has been for centuries: a tough, outdoor life where nature provides for the needs of the peasants. This is a rich, fertile land that yields good crops and plentiful timber.

These scenes show not poverty but hardworking man living in harmony with a generous earth.

Saturday morning scene

This isn't a scene that readers are likely to have encountered this morning, or indeed any time recently. I was visiting the logging railway at Viseu de Sus. The train was returning to the depot, and stopped where the line runs down the side of a dirt road so that the crew could visit a convenient shop. There is no fixed timetable, so casual stops for shopping and photography are possible. Whilst we were stopped, two local people led their horses past the train. The horses looked at the escaping steam with some curiosity, however they passed calmly.

Not for the fainthearted

Life can be rough here if one is a pig! Here Cornel (my Chief Horseman) and his father singe the bristles off a freshly slaughtered pig using a homemade flamethrower. (I cannot readily think of a better name for this impressive device, which burns wood and is powered by an electric fan.) The singed bristles are easily scraped off with a knife, leaving a smooth pig carcase.

A little later, everyone was gathered around the pig eating the skin, which pulls off readily like latex. It is considered quite a delicacy, and a variety of relatives appeared at the right moment to claim their share.

I have been thinking about my post from a couple of days ago, regarding departure of a guide. It wasn't a matter of laziness so much as a lack of the toughness to survive in what visitors still describe as pioneer territory. Most problems stemmed from her lacking the assertiveness to hold her own in the rough and ready peasant society of a mountain village. I think that most of my regular female readers will understand my point: tough gun-carrying truck drivers, outback cowgirls, horse trainers or outdoor youngsters with cast-iron livers that many of you are. (Though I am sure that comments will appear.) This kind of place, and this kind of job, just aren't right for what some people call "girly-girls". This is a place where a certain degree of toughness is called for. It's a place where one can enjoy the raw reality of life, make friends, eat healthy food, experience living history. But it's not for the fainthearted.

This isn't a place where anyone can live. If it were, it would be boring, sanitised, and pork would come from the supermarket. And it wouldn't taste as good as home killed pork either.

Wildflowers of Transylvania

A guest post from Danielle.

One of the most amazing aspects of Transylvania is the abundance and variety of wildflowers. Because the land has never been sprayed with chemicals to "improve" its quality, they flourish everywhere. Farmers take no notice of them in their hay meadows, simply harvesting it all--creating a particularly fragrant hay. (We've been told you can sew a wildflower field just by spreading the dust the falls to the floor of your hay barn across the ground.)

The local people also have different ideas about gardening. While in the west every weed is pulled lest it choke off the plant, unless they prove to be a problem, most Romanians just leave these plants to grow alongside their vegetables and planted flowers. While we have strict rows and "landscaping," the average Romanian garden is a chaotic jumble of life.

This past season, for the first time, we offered wildflower tours as an option to interested guests. We worked with a young, enthusiastic ecologist named Elena from the nearby Caliman National Park, who reviewed some of the hay meadows along our trail itinerary to prepare for the guests. I accompanied the first tour, which launched my obsession with photographing and identifying the various wildflowers. You can see this "work in progress" by visiting my photo gallery.

Many of these photos were taken right in our front yard and alongside our stables and barns--a testament to just how fertile the land here is. Of course the ample supply of horse manure doesn't hurt either! While our staff and neighbors think I'm a bit nutty when they see me on my hands and knees examining what they think of as a weed, I can live with that because it's been such a pleasure to learn more about these flowers and use my photographs to help decorate our guesthouse.

I hope you all enjoy the photos.

Sign of a satisfied customer

The managing director of Heineken's sizeable Romanian operation and his family were our guests recently. Romanians are great beer drinkers, and Heineken sells a variety of popular local brands in addition to their own brand. Our visitors enjoyed their stay greatly (and were a pleasure to host.) Today I was surprised and delighted when a delivery truck stopped and offloaded a splendid gift: five crates of Ciuc Winter Beer, a special 7% brew of the well-known local Ciuc brand. Oddly enough, they appeared in a competitor's branded plastic crates: however, this is Romania. I have tried the first bottle, and pronounce it excellent and quite warming in this cold winter weather. When it is -10C outside, winter ale is especially welcome. I am sure that my staff will help me drink this good and warming brew.

Luke says hi!

When one has such a pretty, friendly foal around, how can one resist posting photos?

It is proving to be a busy and frustrating week. An agent supposed to be "representing" us turns out to have gone back on his word. The phrase "I do..." doesn't mean much in marriages anymore, nor does "I will..." mean a whole lot in business relationships either. Trust is a rare commodity nowadays, and perhaps through all time.

I am presiding over a change of staff as well as a change of agent. I'm not one to hire and fire wantonly, prefering continuity and harmony. However I have just fired a guide. Guiding is a responsible job, an honourable job too. It carries numerous and serious responsibilities: safety of riders and horses; making the ride interesting; proper feeding and watering; correct tacking and untacking; dealing with incidents. None of these are optional. Running the ride at a snail's pace generates complaints. I am not an especially fast rider, however feedback tells that rides I led included appreciably more trotting and cantering. Perhaps because I don't need frequent cigarette breaks. Not taking proper care of feeding and watering over the course or a week-long ride is inexcusable. Making sure that the horses get hard feed and water is absolutely fundamental, so why wasn't it done properly? It's not as if we are riding through a desert. I trusted, and that trust was breached. That guide had to go. These failures grieve me after eight years, when I thought that things really were going right. They show that even more management is called for, even more quality control, indeed an appreciably more disciplined regime for staff with higher expectations advertised.

One needs a thick skin in this job, and plenty of determination. Luck, too. As Napoleon said, I want generals who are lucky.

Having pretty horses is good for motivation too.