vapors
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This post is about a 20km walk from Voivozi Monastery to Spinuș. I have breakfast in the monastery, then I walk through some light rain.
I woke up in the monks’ dormitory. It offered fourteen beds in total, and I was alone.
breakfast with kids and cats
The kids from the evening before were having dinner next to the main building. I ate with them, and again I was lucky enough to pet a cat. Then a friendly lady filled up my thermos with hot tea, the kids went to take part in the Sunday Mass, and I got going.
humidity
The sky was overcast and it was raining a bit. It was more like a drizzle. So I walked in my shirt, and I didn’t put on my windbreaker or the poncho. And still I ended up sweating like a pig whenever there was the slightest incline in the road. It was just so warm and humid, it almost felt like walking through vapors. Sometimes it reminded me of my walking days on the Caspian Sea coast in Iran.
I kept a close eye on the clouds as I was walking. Whenever they looked bad I would sit in the shelter of a bus stop for a while. But it never rained heavily. I felt grateful for my luck.
an end to the hills
The road kept rolling up and down, through villages where people were flowing in and out of churches, and past cornfields and sunflower fields. These were some of the last hills before the beginning of the Puszta, or the limitless flatness of the Great Hungarian Plains.
People had been warning me about it. There were no trees in the Puszta, they had said, evoking images of the Kazakh Steppe or the Gobi Desert.
I ate two apples in the shade of a bus stop and looked at the hills around me. I was ready for something new. No more mountains, no more hills, no more inclines, maybe a little bit less sweating.
Maybe the Puszta wouldn’t be so bad?
pictures
the walk from Voivozi Monastery to Spinuș:
I don’t know why this lady was taking part in Sunday Mass outside of the church
industrial ruin in Budoi
the Caboose on a nice road
drone view of a hairpin turn
overgrown houses
yet another cross
there were a lot of sheds dug into the hills here
a trucker’s cabin
village house near Spinuș
non-stop funerary service