Have you been to Romania? I can recommend it. I speak as someone who has spent five days in the country. We stayed in Bucharest and Brașov: the two cities that nearly everyone on a short break visits because they are relatively close together.

On arrival at Bucharest Airport you will immediately see that you are in a modern European city, and why would it be otherwise? You enter town via a busy and well-maintained motorway that could easily be in France or Spain, with new and expensive cars racing past you: BMW, VW, Mercedes, Renault, Toyota as well as, of course, locally-built Dacias. On the left and right of the main road are IKEA, Decathlon, Auchan, Starbucks, McDonald’s (but no British brands – not even Tesco).

Communism is a distant memory

I wasn’t expecting Bucharest to be so easy on the eye. I had read that it used to be known as “Little Paris” but had been wrecked by poor-quality, bad-taste construction from the years of the late, unlamented Commie lunatic Nicolae Ceaușescu. But the greater part of the 19th-century city, with wide, tree-lined boulevards, public parks and smart villas, remains unspoilt. There are many Art Nouveau buildings, though some are in a poor state of repair. Nothing that money couldn’t put right.

There are lots of riverside cocktail bars full of stylish young people, who look just like Spaniards or Italians. There are bike lanes and bikes for hire. The buses are brand new. The metro is clean, well ventilated and easy to use.

We had read that there were 25,000 stray dogs roaming the streets but I didn’t spot any. And I saw very few beggars. People were unfailingly polite and helpful. Drivers stopped to let you cross the road. There were plenty of places to eat and drink, including many serving local cuisine and wine, and all seemed to take credit cards as well as cash. In short, we were impressed. It didn’t hurt that it was warm and sunny for most of our short visit.

Romania is almost the size of Great Britain but with only a third of the population, so the countryside is never far away. We took a long forest walk that brought us out into meadows higher above sea level than anywhere in England or Wales.

Going bear watching

There are about 6,000 brown bears in Romania, and if you want to see them in their natural habitat this is the best Europe can offer. You can book a trip to watch them from a hide, as food is put out twice a week to stop them wandering into the towns. So seeing one is pretty much guaranteed. It does make you wonder if there are any truly wild large carnivores anywhere in Europe…

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I was expecting to be nibbled at by the Dracula industry, and there is indeed quite a bit of that. Bran Castle in Transylvania is often marketed as “Dracula’s Castle” but it is nothing of the sort. But all the tourist tat is kept at arm’s length from the castle itself, which has an upmarket little restaurant (casa de ceai).

What else?

Within one of the capitals’s attractive parks is an museum of traditional village houses, transported and re-erected from all over the cpuntry. It offers a glimpse at a largely lost world of wooden churches, unmechanised farming and home-spun textiles; where small communities, such as visited only recently by author William Blacker, are almost entirely self-supporting – as referred to in my blog on the rise of veganism.

I haven’t even touched on the language, which is fascinating to those who have studied French, Spanish, Italian, etc. So familiar, and yet so complex (do you remember the dative and vocative cases from Latin?).

Oh, and did I forget to mention that the beer is cheap? At £1.30 a pint you can’t complain.