Geotourism: Romania

Note:

The following was published in the newsletter of my former employer. One of the monthly features was a travel article to a place of geological interest. I wrote this piece after returning from a wonderful, two-week trip to Romania in 2015.

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Back in the good old days when vampires didn’t wear makeup or wreak havoc at the box office with terrible movies, they lived peaceful lives in quaint Transylvanian castles, terrifying peasants and scaring away nosy Ottomans. This month’s Geotour takes readers to Romania, a land of castles, unfiltered beer, and spectacular geology.

Bucharest, the most common port of entry for travelers, is interesting with the juxtaposition of the old town of the 18^th century with the traces of the communist regime of the 1980s and the party lifestyle of youth today. Two days are enough to explore Bucharest, which boasts several attractions including the Palatul Parlamentului (the world’s second largest building after the Pentagon), the famous Case cu Bere (Bucharest’s oldest pub, serving unfiltered beer on tap), and the Herastrau Park with its sailing boats and floating cafes.

Stained glass windows at Casa cu Bere

The geology starts in Sinaia, Jewel of the Carpathians, two hours away by train. A popular hill resort and former summer getaway of the Romanian monarchy, Sinaia has something to offer travelers of all tastes. The Castelul Peles, built in the early 19^th century by King Carol 1, is the first stop with handsome interiors dedicated to the Turkish, French, Italian, and Romanian cultures.

The Peles Castle in Sinaia

Hiking trails to the Bucegi Mountains National Park begin at the nearby town of Busteni. A cable car is available to ferry people to the top, with breathtaking views of limestone cliffs along the way. Bucegi is famous for its rock formations, the Sphinx and Babele, rock formations built out of glacial sediments. Glacial erratics of granite and limestone are encountered within the sandstones, and limestone caverns are a short hiking distance away. The highlight though is the trek up to the park and back, a round trip that takes close to eight hours through coniferous forests, rope bridges, and glaciers cutting through limestone.

The Sphinx, carved out of glacial till, with tiny geologist for scale.

Hiking down from Bucegi National Park

The final stop on the tour is Brasov, the centre of Dracula country. Founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 13^th century, Brasov is famous for its cobbled streets, fortifications and watch towers, and most of all, the famous Black Church. Devastated by a fire during the Turkish War between the Ottomans and Habsburgs in the 17^th century, the church’s blackened façade gave it its new name. The Bran Castle, supposedly one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (though Stoker never visited Romania himself) is nearby and makes for a good day trip. Brasov’s geology is to be marveled at as well, with the Valea Cetatii caves close at hand. A short tour conducted by speleologists from Brasov is the usual way to visit, but advance notice lets you join experienced cavers in a two hour crawl through the caverns. The Brasov Philharmonic (though stripped down to five performers) plays inside the caves once a week as well.

Romanian food is definitely great for meat-lovers (Mici, Romanian meatballs with potatoes is particularly recommended), but soups are a big part of the menu almost everywhere and can be a tasty option. Palinca, or plum liqueur, is a local favourite and is surprisingly pleasant when sipped, but at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. I was happy to add a bottle to my growing collection of unusual liquor from abroad!

  

A Geologist Writes About His Rock Collection (Part 1 of Many)

On an indeterminate day in ~ 1996, I collected my first mineral specimen. I was about 6 years old at the time, and like many of my antiquity did not know the difference between a rock and a mineral. So I called my fledgling collection a rock collection and it came to be called a rock collection.

12 years later, I had the pleasure of answering firmly in the affirmative when a couple of unlucky moving company workers asked of the (moderately heavy) boxes they carried to my new home in Bangalore: "What do you have in here, rocks?!"

10 years further on, and I'm moving house again. Unfortunately, my rock collection couldn't come along this time and I'm not certain when I'll next see it.

If that last line sounded to you like it was dunked in a deliciously warm mug of emotion, you're right. People become geologists for all kinds of reasons. Among my geologist acquaintances are those who embarked down that rocky road because of the allure of the oil industry, those whose first career choice in medicine or engineering failed, and even a few who took it up simply because it was "something different" in an engineering obsessed country. The driving force behind my decision to study geology was an almost irrational fascination about the Earth and its products, a desire itself rooted in the beautiful mineral and rock specimens that occupied my home for so long.

I thought I'd write a little about my collection of rocks, far away as it is now, as a means of reliving the moments when I collected them. My rock collection is more than a few quartz, zeolite, fossil, ore, and rock specimens. My collection of rocks is a collection of memories.

Blue Chalcedony

Chalcedony is a kind of quartz. Made up of  crystals, tiny and numerous, chalcedony is given the quaint yet now modern sounding descriptor "cryptocrystalline". Called agate or onyx when banded, or carnelian, chrysophrase, or sardonyx when coloured, chalcedony represents the triumph of nucleation over growth, the two processes that compete to create crystals. On a blazing summers day in 1998 Nashik, I trekked up Ramshej Fort to see Long-Billed Vultures nest. Somewhere along the way a glint of blue caught my eye, and I wiped away the mud on a boulder to reveal a vein of bright blue chalcedony. My poor father, who happened to be with me at the time, soon found himself on his knees, chipping away at the vein with a piece of basalt I had helpfully commandeered for him. This would not be the first time he did something like this. Some time later, I held the specimen up to the light and marvelled at its colour. The colour of minerals is what attracted me to them in the first place, led me to collect and study them as an amateur, and ultimately write my master's thesis on them.

Colourless Apophyllite

There is no dearth of dirty jokes in the geological sciences given our colourful technical vocabulary. One of my favourite geological terms is cleavage, the property of certain minerals to split along preferred crystallographic planes due to weak bonding. Apophyllite is a silicate mineral in the tetragonal crystal system that displays stunning basal (or pinacoidal if you like even fancier terms) cleavage, meaning that its crystals tends to break, quite easily, in directions parallel to their bases. Before I knew what cleavage was (mineralogical, or well, the other kind), I was fascinated by the razor thin reflective surfaces I saw in apophyllite crystals. My great uncle, a retired GSI geologist and one of my inspirations to take up geology, bequeathed unto me a pocket lens that I used to gaze deep into my apophyllite crystals. On one such occasion, carelessness led to the crystal slipping from my grasp and falling to the floor, splitting in two along the surface my eye was so keen to study. In my first ever mineralogy class as an undergrad, I learned what that surface was, why the crystal broke along it, and that one of the signs of a seasoned geologist is the ability to resist chuckling when someone says "cleavage" in class.

Pelitic Granulite

In 2011, I visited the South Delhi Fold Belt for three weeks of geological fieldwork. The fact that we were in Gujarat, a famously "dry" state, meant that we actually had to work instead of indulging in bottled pleasure every evening the way most respectable geologists do. On one of our traverses, we came across a massive outcrop of pelitic granulite, remnants of shale that had been buried deep in the Earth's crust, metamorphosed, and finally exhumed in a shiny, banded avatar. The granulite, with its pink leucosome bands and black melanosome bands, would look perfect in my display cabinet and so I set out to collect a sample with my trusty Estwing E320. Now, as someone accustomed to working in basaltic terrain with only minor exposure to metamorphic rocks, I hadn't a clue about how hard these rocks really were: something I was soon to discover at the expense of my hands which were bloodied and bruised by the time I had collected a reasonably sized sample. On this occasion, the term "hand-specimen" as used by many a geologist, could apply just as easily to the granulite I had laboriously extricated from the rock mass as it could to my own appendages that were red, swollen, and covered in all manners of cuts and bruises.

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To be continued... 

See you later, Snout.

Zorro, my lovely black Labrador, died yesterday at the ripe old age of 13. He was a simple dog who valued his privacy and despite having touched the lives of many people through the years preferred a quiet funeral. I decided nevertheless that a eulogy of sorts was warranted and thought I'd publish it here.

I met Zorro in August 2005, a month before my 15th birthday. My mother picked me up from school one day and we went to meet Zorro at his old home. His owners didn't want him any longer and asked his vet if he knew anyone who was interested in adopting an 8-month old black Lab. The vet had visited us a few days earlier to administer an injection to our crotchety old Cocker Spaniel, Bandit, and told my mother about Blacky, as Zorro was then known.

I caught a glimpse of Zorro, black as night with a bright pink tongue, as I opened the gate to his owners' home. In the time I took to walk up to him, he planned his attack and sprung at me, knocking me over with a well aimed jump to my chest. He proceeded to lick, nip, and slobber all over me, making it clear that he approved and was ready to adopt us. He clearly knew what he was doing.

We packed him up into our car and drove home. Uncertain of whether or not he'd wreck my room at night, I tied his leash to the leg of my bed. I awoke the next morning to find him snuggled up comfortably next to me and the leash in tatters on the floor.

I like to think Zorro was simply meant to be our dog. My house was full of books, and Zorro quickly took to reading many of them. He devoured the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and was a regular consumer of the journalistic efforts of the Economic Times and The Times of India. He sometimes suffered from indigestion, and I have little doubt which of these publications was the cause. He patiently worked his way through Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea but seemed to lose interest in reading after that. Having read the book myself, I can attest to the fact that Zorro must have found it hard to swallow.

He tried very hard to make friends with Bandit who was himself well into retirement when Zorro joined our family. Zorro lay down in front of Bandit with his tail wagging, but received only low-pitched growls in return. I like to think that Bandit and Zorro would fit perfectly into Ogden Nash's Two Dogs Have I. When Bandit suffered with gastroenteritis, Zorro sat by his side for days, gently prodding his stomach from time to time as if to check on him. When Bandit finally died, Zorro sulked for days at the loss of his mentor. He bravely took up Bandit's duties of demanding walks, being greedy, and generally behaving like an ass all the time. He excelled at the last of these, prompting us to call him Ass just as much as we called him Zorro, Black Blockhead, Snout, or any other of a number of names.

Zorro loved travelling in the car. He and my mother would drop me to the bus stop every morning before school, and Zorro would eagerly await the arrival of the bus so that he could occupy my seat in the front. This practice was so intriguing to passers by that I was asked about my dog by fellow students, the bus driver, and the bus conductor. Up to the very last day of his life, where he struggled to even stand up because of his weakness, Zorro's reaction to the jingling of the car keys was quite the spectacle: he'd almost jump off his mattress and bound to the door, grunting and hopping with excitement. Dogs can teach people a lot, but the most valuable lesson I've had from Zorro is to love life and use every opportunity to the maximum.

His love for travelling took him to Goa, Wayanad, Kolar, Ranganthittu Bird Sanctuary, and more. He blubbered at the sight of deer and elephants in Nagarhole National Park, swam to save his own life in Mobor Beach in Goa, and snouted at crocodiles in a Coracle in Ranganthittu. When we moved to Bangalore and settled into our new flat, we once took Zorro down to the swimming pool. When my sister and I jumped into the water, Zorro started to panic and jumped in to save us. Shortly after, a sign appeared asking swimmers to leave their pets at home. Hardly a week into his new home and Zorro had already made an unforgettable impression.

Not one to confine himself to a single set of interests, Zorro dabbled in dance and show business. His talents were soon noticed and he was invited to star in his own dance video where he performed Michael Jackson's Moonwalk to perfection. His humble and gentle nature however led him to eschew fame in favour of a life spent sleeping on his fat mattress, supervising my mother in the kitchen, and playing with toys that we brought him from as far away as The Netherlands and the USA.

We'll miss you, Zorro! Take care wherever you are and don't stop snouting, Moonwalking, and behaving like an ass!