The way to Poenari Castle (Dracula’s REAL castle for the uninitiated) is more than 2,860 feet up . . . as the bat flies. At the halfway point of the trail, I almost wished a blood-sucking Chiroptera would alight to transform me. Climbing 1,482 steep stone steps to the ruins of Poenari Fortress is not for the faint of heart, or the physically undead, er, unfit.
However, these steps are the ONLY way to reach the top; there are no tourist-bus-friendly roads. So if you want to visit the castle that Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, aka Vlad Drăculea, actually called home, you have to walk. Few people do. My guide told me that only ten percent of his clients bother to make the climb. The few other tourists I passed on the trail were Romanian, some of them in flip-flops, one fellow in bare feet.
Panting my way up the serpentine stairs as they crisscrossed the 800-meter cliff, part of the Făgăraș mountains (of the better-known Carpathian range) of central Romania, I could understand why most foreigners opt to visit Bran Castle instead. The latter is a restored castle, a national monument, historically significant (at least to Romanians) and half an hour by road from the charming medieval city of Brașov. It draws more than half a million visitors a year, making the site the most visited attraction in all of Romania. Sixty percent are Romanian, who come…
