Dead men walking - fangtastic Transylvania

If one was to say 'Romania', most people would think 'Dracula'.

I was no different.

But there's a lot more to Romania than Dracula. In fact, there's a lot more to Transylvania, where the fictional Dracula's castle is located, than Dracula.

But it is what it is. We went, we saw, we took pictures. Here they are. And for completeness, I didn't find any real vamps, certainly none that looked like Alexander Skarsgård aka Eric from Trueblood, but if they do exist then I would totally be a fangbanger.

Dracula's 'real castle' in southern Wallachia where Vlad Tepes, the inspiration for the character Dracula, used to eat steak while watching his enemies being impaled, or so the legend goes.These days, Poienari isn't so much a castle as the ruins of a fortress at the top of a mountain, but it has spectacular views and you can pretty much do what you want up there as there's no security. I brought these vamp teeth all the way from 'Shtraya and glad I am too, no-one was selling this stuff at the site. If only I had known, I could have made a killing on the day. Everybody wanted a pair.

Do ya think we're sexy vamps, huh, do ya?

What about now, with our mingin' thong tans?!? This is us sitting on the fortress walls, or what remains of them. They built walls good in the 15th century, evidenced by the fact that I'm here to tell the tale.

This here is the fake Dracula's castle in Bran. Its 'fake' because there is no evidence Bram Stoker ever came here. It is one of the biggest tourist traps I have ever visited and obscenely expensive in an otherwise cheap country, and hence a complete let-down. This is the only photograph I could be bothered posting.

This is Peleş Castle, one of the most famous in Transylvania. It was the first palace in Europe to have central heating, hot water, an elevator and a central vacuum system. It was inhabited by the Romanian royal family until the Communists seized power in the late 40s, but unlike so many beautiful old buildings in Romania, it somehow escaped the Soviet treatment, thank-God.

No trip to Transylvania is complete without a stop in Sighișoara, an extremely well-preserved and beautiful medieval city where you can have a meal in a restaurant where Vlad Tepeș aka Vlad the Impaler used to live, while surfing the interweb via free wifi. Get the white bean and smoked ham soup in a bread loaf - its amaaaaaaazing.

We got a bit lucky and arrived in town just as the annual medieval festival was revving up. Its pretty self-explanatory, everyone indulges their inner Braveheart/Maid Marion fantasies for a few days. Oddly, it seems to attract all the goths in Europe too. Some of them even look kind-of hot, in this their pretend natural environment.

View of the countryside close to Sighișoara from the citadel at Biertan. A nice little day trip with a beautiful Saxon church.