Our guide, Robert, stopped in his tracks and spun his head to the side, staring intently into the thick forest. With one hand, he wordlessly gestured for us to follow suit. His other hand reached, almost in slow motion, for the bear spray holstered to his rucksack. We fell silent. What were we about to encounter on this deserted trail?
Barely ten minutes before, we had been stood at the shores of Lake Saint Anna, a circular body of water nestled in the crater of an ancient volcano. It sits nearly a thousand meters above the plains of Transylvania, surrounded in every direction by vast coniferous forest which clings to the steep slopes rising from the shore.
The beauty of this natural amphitheatre entices thousands of visitors during the summer months. Nevertheless, it was hard to imagine such crowds on this particular day. An oppressive, icy fog had blanketed the whole landscape, hiding the full majesty of the crater from view. Everyone had stayed away. Everyone, that is, except for us.
The misty atmosphere at Lake Saint Anna
We watched – very much alone – as swirling mist danced around us, playing to a silent tune whose melody was lost in the cauldron of trees. A line of empty rowing boats bobbed in timid unison, tethered unconvincingly to a splintered jetty whose slimy brown planks reached out into the murky water.
We paused next to the boats and basked in the solitude. Lucy and I huddled together as waves of wind crashed into us. Our teeth had just begun to chatter when Robert suggested we start our hike around the lake.
The muddy route took us straight into the forest. At first, only our heavy breathing and squelching footsteps broke the silence. Before too long, however, the first drops of rain began to tap pointedly on our faces. It was sensory overload in the truest sense. The trees shuddered and hissed angrily as biting gusts raced down from the crater rim and rushed through their branches.
It was here, just when we were acclimatising to the eerie atmosphere of the forest, that Robert gestured for us to halt. We froze, and the silence which had enveloped us at the shores of the lake returned once more.
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Watching out for the bears in the woods around Lake Saint Anna
After a few painfully long seconds, Robert crouched down and inspected something on the ground.
“Look at this,” he whispered urgently. We turned our gaze to the path beneath Robert’s feet. You didn’t need to be an expert to know what we were looking at – a bear print, almost cartoon-like in its perfect shape. The only question was…
“Yes, it’s fresh. Very fresh,” confirmed Robert, as if reading our minds.
He stood back up and stepped forward, delicately avoiding the print. We continued tentatively along the trail, but the silence of the forest and our previously blissful isolation had taken on a new dimension. Every shadow and shape we spotted through the trees warranted a paranoid inspection. Every falling branch and snapped twig elicited a nervous turn of the head.
No other country in Europe is home to as many brown bears as Romania. Over 6,000 of these mighty giants roam the country’s forests and mountains, and visitors frequently spot them on the shores of the lake. Robert had assured us that close encounters are rare – and attacks rarer still – but these facts did little to reduce our racing heartbeats. Stumbling across a 350kg carnivore in a quiet forest was not top of our to-do list.
Mercifully, we pressed on without further incident. Eventually, with just a few hundred metres to go, a delicate ray of sunlight burst through the clouds. The mist appeared, finally, to be lifting. We could even catch glimpses of the full splendour of the forest on the opposite shore. The marvellous patchwork of colour was a welcome contrast to the monotonous haze which had dominated our day thus far.
The sky became brighter with every step we took. Birdsong began to reverberate around us, heralding the long-awaited shift in the weather. Finally, we found ourselves standing one more next to the boats. The lake had transformed. The heavy fog which had smothered our senses had all but disappeared. We could now see the entire crater stretched above us, with glimpses of blue sky daring to creep into view.
Our Lake Saint Anna hike comes to an end
The change in mood was palpable. On the short walk to our parking spot, I even allowed myself to relax a little. Reaching the car, we breathed a collective sigh of relief and listened to the sound of the forest one last time. We began reflecting on the day’s events when a loud crack from beyond the treeline caused us all – in perfect unison – to bundle hastily into the vehicle. We could do the rest of our debrief on the road.