Last week I started this mini-series of memories from our Christmas vacation to the Maramureș region of our country up north, a place that keeps traditions very much alive, but not the only such place in our country.
Today I continue with the second part of this mini-series, and there will likely be a 3rd and final part.
I wasn't sure in which order to add the two parts, but finally I thought I'd insert the more "modern" part of the vacation in the middle.
So... since Maramureș is a mountainous region, one would expect some facilities for the winter sports, right? And one wouldn't be wrong. The only thing missing, except on the highest tops was the... snow, which came after we left. Of course, they had snow guns running all the time, but that didn't help much. Most likely they were preparing for the snow that was about to fall soon after we left.
That didn't make much difference for me, because I never learned to ski and probably never will, but I understand why those who do it well would never get off the slopes if they could.
We stayed in Borșa, which I know is pretty popular among winter-sports lovers in my country. What I didn't know was that during WW2, a slope and trampoline was built there for the Winter Olympics of 1948. But the regime change to communism after the war and their abandonment of the project (from what I read) made it so the Winter Olympics from 1948 were relocated to St. Moritz, Switzerland.
We went up there and I saw it with my own eyes. I don't remember why I didn't take pictures of that side of the mountain with the Olympic slope. That's such a pity, because it looked spectacular!
If it is open to public (I'm not sure), it looked like only experts could get down on that kind of slope. But maybe I'm wrong since I'm not an expert, not even a novice skier.
Anyway, on the other side of the mountain there is another one. And a few others we could see from the car.
That's what you'll see in the images, as we go up with the cable.
I imagine how these images would look is it was snow down there...
Yep, still a long way up... And when I think that a few years back I had a big issue with heights and big open spaces. Those seem gone now.
That's the slope there beyond those trees...
And... we're up at the top:
We found out from a wooden inscription we were at 1633 meters above sea level. That's very high for me (may have been the highest I've ever been), but not too high for others.
Those trees do grow through rock, don't they?
And here's where the slope starts:
I'll stop here with this post. In the next and final part of the mini-series we go down from the mountain and visit around. Mostly the traditional side of the region.
Oh... I remembered one thing: our plan the day we went up the mountain (what I showed here) was different. We wanted to go see a very tall and apparently spectacular waterfall. But that day was very windy and in order to get to the waterfall we needed to take the chairlift, and we would have frozen all the way up. Plus we had kids with us and a... dog, lol. Yeah, complicated. So, we changed our minds.