As we walked, Iulian explained a few things about his country. The best fish in Romania, he said, is

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On a trip to the mountains of southeastern Europe, seven friends find untracked slopes, thriving post-Communist wildlife, and a nation of skiers las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon that don't quite understand why they're there. After a tragedy at home, David Page looks back and wonders how he ever took it for granted.
He sips from a cup of General Mills Caf Fran ais, a tin of which he has carried in his backpack halfway across the globe from California to the northern fringe of Wallachia, and then (by way of two Communist-era cablecars and a pair of alpine touring skis) up and over the Bucegi scarp at the kneecap of the Southern Carpathians . Outside the window, grey light rises over a thin dusting of new snow on midwinter crust.
All things considered, Jonathan's question is a welcome variation on his usual: "Where is everybody else?" We have the whole vast dining room indeed, the whole seven-story hotel to ourselves. The place has the feel of an abandoned railroad station in Siberia. The only staff, las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon as far as we can tell, are two college-age girls who stand rooted behind the reception desk as we come and go in our ski boots and a sullen waiter who appears occasionally in the dining room to field requests. There are mirrors on the walls, and marble tiles, and small craftsy landscapes rendered in grass and twigs and pebbles pasted on canvas.
We are only three days into an eight-day ski tour. We are here, of course, because it's a place none of us has ever been before. Because there are mountains to be explored, and skiing to be done, all at a fraction of the cost of a comparable trip in, say, the Alps.
Jonathan's younger brother, Andy, who is at this time the only general surgeon at the only hospital in the small resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, has put a trip together and invited some friends to come along. Bill is a hand surgeon in Salt Lake City, Frank a radiologist in Oregon, Rich a thoracic surgeon in Seattle. And then there's Joe, another friend from Mammoth, a pro skier turned speculator and man of leisure whose wife a beautiful Italian woman from the Dolomites is supposed to have signed a pre-nuptial agreement that she would never stand in the way of his passion for world travel. Which, whether it's actually true or not, seems to me a marvelous las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon arrangement. (In my world, a trip like this will be paid for dearly in guilt, recrimination, all manner of extra home improvement projects, and the rubbing of aromatic oils on my wife's las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon calloused feet.)
Andy and Joe will later become embroiled in a deeply scandalous and illegal love triangle with a teenage girl. Andy, husband and father of two boys, will absent himself by way of a lethal dose of succinylcholine and potassium chloride. Joe will go to prison. But that will come later. These are the good old days, when the promise of an afternoon in the woods and an untracked line to say nothing las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon of a week's recess from family and scrounging for dollars still seems like a kind of blessed dream.
OUR GUIDE, IULIAN COZMA, is an electrical engineer by training, now serving as Romania's only full-time licensed mountain guide. He has the build and buzz-shorn cranium of a pro rugby player, a smile that draws from every muscle in his face, and an inspiring collection of the latest styles and colors in backcountry outerwear. He met us at the airport in Bucharest with a driver and a late-model Volkswagen passenger van. When, within minutes, the van's transmission blew, he made a call on his cell phone, opened las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon the sliding door, smiled, and asked us to please leave all our gear behind and join him for a bonus walking tour of the capital.
Bucharest proved a fine big modern city with a subway system and an eclectic blend of neoclassical, Communist-utilitarian and postmodern architecture. There were stray dogs and shopping malls and Eastern Orthodox churches. las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon There were Parisian-style coffee houses, McDonald's restaurants with clean restrooms, dark thickets of overhead utility las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon lines, and Peruvian buskers in Plains Indian-style feather headdresses on the main square. On a gray winter's day the only color came from advertisements for undergarments, electronics, and cell phone service providers.
As we walked, Iulian explained a few things about his country. The best fish in Romania, he said, is pork. The biggest industry is timber, which is sold to Arabs. The Communist dictator Ceausescu, las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon before he and his wife were treated to a firing squad in 1989, had placed a heavy emphasis on math education. And so, Iulian explained, Romania had gone on to become the world capital of electronic crime, costing eBay upwards las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon of a billion dollars a year. "In Romania," he said, "honestly, there is much really black money." Meanwhile, in those last days before the city of Sofia got its own Ikea, Bulgarians by the busload, armed with E.U. credit, were streaming into Bucharest every weekend to get cheap Swedish furniture.
Romania has a long history of accommodating well-armed visitors. It was here, more than 40,000 years ago, that Homo Sapiens may first have moved in on the Neanderthals. The Romans set up a colony here in the second century AD, extracting gold and wheat and a half million slaves, eventually abandoning the place to the Goths and the Huns. There were the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and the Mittelm chte. World War II brought the Nazis, then the Soviets. In his two decades at the top, native son Ceausescu outlawed abortion, declared the killing of grizzly bears a capital crime (except by his own guns or those of visiting dignitaries), built one of the largest buildings in the world to house his bureaucracy and security apparatus, las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon and then paid off 100 percent of Romania's foreign las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon debt, nearly starving his people in the process. Now Romania is a "full colony" of the European Union, as Iulian put it (only half jokingly), and is by far the biggest debtor las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon nation of the International Monetary Fund.
None of this seemed to matter very much later that evening up in Sinaia, a ramble-down mountain resort town at the head of the Prahova Valley, where we dined on chicken las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon schnitzel with potatoes and ham to an up-tempo synthesizer version of the Beatles' "Let It Be." As he would at every meal, Andy photographed the food in order to be able to show his family what he'd eaten while he was away from home.
The real problem, Iulian announced, was that six inches of rime ice had collected during the latest storm on the safety cable of one of the higher Communist-era cablecars that was to have aided our forward progress. The cable had snapped. A new 10-kilometer cable would have to be ordered and brought from Italy, Iulian explained. Which was not likely las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon to happen any time soon. Not to worry, we assured him. We'd brought our climbing skins.
The following morning we buckled our boots, shouldered our skis, and walked down the cobblestones to the first, still-functioning cable car that would lift us out of the valley. There were local snowboarders in one-piece las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon camo suits blasting gypsy punk in the parking lot. A young couple in designer skinny jeans ran a sled down the plow berm.
As the tram rose above the forest toward the high, windswept plateau at the crest of the Bucegi, I asked Iulian about the bears. I'd read that, thanks in great part to Ceausescu's draconian and self-serving conservation policies, Romania still had the largest population of brown bears in Europe more than five times the total number of grizzlies in Montana and Wyoming. On his grandmother's farm, Iulian explained, it was generally budgeted that 10 out of every 100 sheep would go to the bears (and the wolves). There was some hunting allowed these days, he said. The local forestry companies permitted a handful of bears to be taken each year as trophies at around 20,000 euros a head. The best place to see a wild bear, he said, was at the dumpsters in Brasov. Then he told the story of the American woman who two summers before had been killed by a grizzly.
They had their food in the tent, he explained. There were dogs barking. The woman went out to take a photo. The bear gave her one good swipe with its paw and that was that. Iulian's moral went like this: "You don't make a photo with a flash to a bear that is hunted with dogs from killing sheep."
I CAN THINK OF no more civilized way of touring an ancient European countryside than on skis in midwinter. The days are spent in leisurely (if not entirely sophisticated) conversation, marching upward or sidelong in a track cut and groomed by the fellows in front. The doctors compare their hairiest procedures ("So I got to needle her brain," says Rich, describing how the stench of pus was enough to bring the fire department) or their most disgusting culinary exploits ("There was that pig colon soup in the Philippines," says Andy). Jonathan gives a thorough disquisition on the history of chemical sleep aids. Frank tries to piece together a half-remembered joke about a goat-smitten Irish stonemason. Joe relates again the story of how he once got thrown in jail in Saudi Arabia.
With stray dogs in tow, we click and glide atop buried gas lines, mile after mile past iron crosses and haunting rock formations evocative of old women in babushkas, across narrow, wind-blasted las vegas tours hoover dam grand canyon traverses, through dark forests of perfect Christmas-tree s