Out for the count: Hitching a ride in Transylvania

I didn't plan on hitchhiking to Bran Castle, in Transylvania, but Romanian drivers have a habit of offering lifts to anyone waiting at a bus stop. For a small fee, of course.

Vasile coaxes me into his clapped-out car along with three shopping-laden housewives, who all seem to know him. Just as I'm congratulating myself on ditching public transport, we halt in the next village to let the women out and begin kerb-crawling in search of new passengers. Presumably petrol is expensive in these parts.

Seats full again, the car wheezes on towards the craggy Carpathian Mountains. There are pauses for personnel changes every so often but once I get used to the ebb and flow of rural commuting it's a convivial way to spend the morning.

As we drive deeper into the foothills, Vasile and I chat in schoolboy French, switching to sign language every time we encounter linguistic road blocks. "Undead" and "blood-curdling" prove particularly challenging.

Transylvania has been associated with vampires ever since Bram Stoker based his 1897 novel Dracula on a real-life nobleman with a fearsome reputation. Vlad III Dracula had a penchant for skewering his enemies on spikes and leaving the corpses to rot, which earned him the nickname Vlad the Impaler.

The serial-killing count also displayed a fondness for eye-gouging, amputation, scalping and skinning. He hammered nails into the heads of his unfortunate foes and boiled them alive.