Welcome to Romania

Romania is a country that rewards curiosity. Beyond the familiar legends of Dracula lies a wonderfully layered world of medieval towns, forested mountains, Saxon villages, wooden churches and rural traditions that have disappeared from much of Europe. 

Michael Gebicki will be your guide and tour host throughout this journey. As a travel writer, Michael has spent decades seeking out the people, places and experiences that reveal what makes a destination tick. This is very much his style of travel: small-scale, personal and unhurried, with time for conversations, unexpected discoveries and the occasional detour when something interesting presents itself.

Over 17 days we’ll travel from the grand boulevards and backstreets of Bucharest into Maramureș, where wooden churches, horse-drawn carts and traditional village life endure, before continuing through the Saxon heartland of Transylvania and into the Carpathian Mountains. 

Along the way we’ll explore Maramureș with a remarkable local guide, sleep in restored traditional houses, wander the medieval streets of Sighișoara and Brașov, meet a Roma coppersmith, visit shepherds in the Carpathian high pastures and watch for brown bears at dusk in a Transylvanian forest. 

There’ll also be plenty of good food, from our opening food adventure through Bucharest to village cooking, fresh local produce and a final celebratory dinner at one of the capital’s great historic restaurants. 

This isn’t a tour about ticking off Romania’s sights. It’s about travelling through the country with Michael, meeting the people who bring it to life and experiencing a Romania that most visitors never get to see.