Wildcamping in the center of Arad

Romanian youth - wildcamping in a city park - 1.5€ swimming pool

Just a few minutes before the departure we managed to get into a train. It was the old-type train with no compartments. Seats were placed around a little table in groups of four and of course, we took all of them, so we could have our private space. At this moment a standard procedure was to charge electronics and think about our next destination which was a city in Romania - Arad.

After a while, we noticed four young padawans sitting next to us and surprisingly speaking in English. At least sometimes, because they were switching between English and Romanian entirely arbitrary… My friend was the first one to help them choose the right language - I mean he just asked for recommendations on our trip. And thus we were told about Hoia Forest, which is believed to be haunted and the scariest forest in the world. I was excited - it was along the road and it was a feasible destination. As we kept talking we started sharing music, learning laping crickets. We took a break on a colorful bridge and carried out a thorough search of bushes nearby. It was another energy-wasting decision, we found nothing. Then we walked along the river looking for a bit of alienated area to sleep in. We found a park in reliable the neighborhood and set our camp up, but my poor friend Arek could not untangle nodes in his hammock. However, he solved the problem pretty quickly without my help and finally, it was time to sleep.

Falling asleep here was unpleasant if not irresponsible. A lot of free-ranging urban dogs were cantering nearby our camp. There literally were gangs of such dogs, they were loud and seemed to be aggressive. Sometimes even people walked by us and they could easily rob us, so we slept with our backpacks in hammocks. To minimize the risk we decided to sleep in shifts. It was one of the longest nights of my life.

Finally, the sun began rising and greeted us with this wonderful morning.

Then we headed straight to the swimming pool we had found the day before and we actually were in place, because we had tried to enter the pool at midnight. I found that it should have been open till sunrise and it was unbelievable, but we had wanted anything except sleeping in the city. As you know, we slept in the park, so it was closed. In a few minutes we were in front of the entrance and… we could not pay by card. So I got a mission to get some cash. I went back to the city center looking for an ATM. They were so rare there that the one I found was located in a hotel. And it looked so expensive that I felt like I was robbing it by doing nothing but withdrawing some cash. I did it quickly and came back to my friend.

An entrance fee for the whole day in this swimming pool was ridiculously cheap, we paid just 1.5€ per person. However, we got fun and luxury worth at least ten times more. Just look at those pics.

Besides swimming, chilling and having fun we could not miss a chance to take a shower and… do the laundry. Showering was easy, everybody does it in such places, but doing the laundry was kinda embarrassing. We used this public shower to wash clothes, clean shoes et cetera. Moreover, we were exposed to everybody else, because the shower was between the pool, a grass beach and shops. And you can imagine two guys in the middle of that washing their socks in shower. Well, I know, I am not proud of this, but it had to be done.

After that we were ready to catch the first free ride during this trip. We got to suburbs by an ancient-looking tram, found a proper place, where people can stop and pick us up, stayed there and just after about half an hour we got a ride to Cluj-Napoca (still Romania). I did not expect such a short waiting time and such a long distance. As it turned out later, it was our longest distance travelled by hitchhiking at once.

During the ride, we found out that recommended to us haunted Hoia Forest is on the way…