This was supposed to be an article on why I love trains, and how liberating they are. When I left Bucharest to the blast of a whistle three weeks ago, and sped through the Hansel and Gretel landscapes of Transylvania, I was full of train enthusiasm. Romania’s trains are cheap and the railway network extensive. Thus the good old choo-choo became my modum onerariis as I traversed from East to West through the Balkans.
Chug chug chug. Life loves to lob a spanner in the locomotive of an agenda though, eh? You see, in truth, while sometimes I’ve loved these rhythmically rattling carriages, other times I’ve loathed them. In more truth, the further I distanced myself from Romania, the less I liked trains. With their intermittent air conditioning (in a heatwave), their unmannerly staff, and their toilets...oh the toilets, always lurking at the end of each carriage in varying and unpredictable states of atrocity, all in all it wasn’t quite the Orient Express experience I’d been dreaming of.
Nevertheless, trains did what they said on the tin, namely shunt me across large expanses of land while displaying glorious scenes of rurality. And they did offer a certain freedom. I could read books, chat to my fellow wayfarers, wander about, and on one occasion even sit in a buffet car and sip an Americano. Sleeper trains, double-decker trains, and sturdy intercities—I’ve cruised, crossed my legs, and duly roasted alive on them all.
From Romania with Mud
I said that I started falling out of love with trains when I left Romania. Ah Romania! When I boarded an intercity at Bucharest Nord and relaxed into my velour seat, I didn’t know what to expect. With a blare of the horn and a jolt, the platform began rolling backwards. In minutes, the concrete blocks of the city – tombstones from the communist seventies – were buried under golden fields that rolled upwards and outwards in flaxen waves. There were haystacks and huts and roofs steep enough to be alpine. All too soon, the farmland was snatched asunder by the Carpathian mountain range. Two tall banks pushed up on either side of the train like green turrets. I sat back and grinned. Thus far, trains were floating my boat.
Four and a half hours later, with the sun aggressively pushing into late afternoon, my carriage drew to a screeching halt. As soon as I stepped onto the 1960s station platform, I was met by my friend and workshop host Kamilla. And isn’t it wonderful to be met from a train? After hugs and smiles, we drove to the local market, where a mouth-watering river of fresh fruit and vegetables cascaded from the stalls.
“This side of the valley is inhabited mostly by Hungarians, and the other side is Romanian, so you see a lot of signs in two languages here,” Kamilla explained, picking up a sour cherry which was both a visine and a meggy, depending on which side of the valley you came from. We bought those cherries, and apricots too, before stopping to purchase fresh unpasteurised milk from a special machine in the market that a local farmer topped up at night. Finally, arms laden, we jumped in the neighbour’s jeep and careered back to Kamilla’s.
A Wooden House in the Mountains
It was still sunny when we arrived at the wooden house, but rain clouds were bunching over the fir-clad hilltops as evening chugged into our hilltop station. As soon as I stepped through the gate, I remembered what I love about visiting lands of Earth Lovers. It was such a spot of beauty, with wildflowers and edible herbs littering the pasture, while the great beech trees on the borders murmured a soft welcome in the breeze.
I held my breath. You see, this is what I miss in my current landless state; the guardianship, the space of ones own, the playground, and most of all that intimate friendship with the land. Each space on our planet has its own particular tone. I think it’s even more special when, as was the case here, the place has been passed down from parent to child. There’s a lineage that runs through the land like a seam of gold ore. The land remembers. It always remembers.
“I’ve seen so many incredible things here,” said Kamilla. “I’ve had my challenges, but they’ve always resolved, often in ways I couldn’t imagine. Like you in Turkey, they say you can’t live like this here as a woman alone,” Kamilla grinned. I rolled my eyes. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Little known to me, at that very moment, as if to underline the point, three British women were beating off sharks and trashing the world record for both genders in a 2800 mile rowing race across the Pacific, but hey I won’t go on about it.
Happily the Earth doesn’t care about gender or skin colour. She looks at us through different eyes. I could feel the love of the land for Kamilla, and the particular resonance of this spot of Gaia. It was a place that supported rest and wellbeing, a perfect retreat spot.
My body started to relax as soon as I sat on the wooden balcony, my muscles unpicking themselves from each other like gently folded knitwear. As I stared out at the sweeping emerald mountains beyond, and sipped on the fresh sparkling spring water we’d collected on the way, I realised I was very glad to be here. But I wasn’t really here to relax. I had a mission, after all...Or at least, I thought I did. Would my mud building workshop ultimately turn out to be the reason I was here? Or did life have other plans?
Rail-less Travel?
As you know, in this current episode of my life I have ditched the shackles of the off-grid mud builder to taste the freedom of the wanderer. As someone who likes to let the road itself do the guiding, it might seem I’m opposed to a journey with a mission. I’m not. Because freedom without direction leads absolutely nowhere.
There is an idea drifting rudderless through the nebula of alternative mindsets that we don’t need to go anywhere, and that all aims and missions are futile egoic vanities. We should just flop about, or sit cross-legged, and go with the floooow. But true freedom has solid rails. It has a purpose. This is the beautiful and endless interplay between freedom and a goal. It’s this alchemy that makes shit happen on this planet. Thus, we hop on our mission trains with a powerful idea, and while it’s true life laughs at our plans and fiddles endlessly with the junction switches, in the end both our purpose and the surrounding chaos are woven together until a meaningful journey is formed. Yes, it’s true there’s a time to surrender and accept life’s incessant messing with our itinery. But what many of us are doing when we claim to be going with the flow, is simply not getting on the train.
A Mission in Transylvania
As far as I could see, I was well and truly on my mud train here in Romania, but was my mission going to be derailed? Would life shunt me onto a different track? I wondered all this as I stayed alone on Kamilla’s land, testing her clay and creating plaster batches. After that, I railed it south to meet friends and enjoy the cultural pleasures of the ancient city of Brasov. Finally I returned for the “mission” itself: the clay plaster and cob workshop.
“We have adobe bricks in our house in Bulgaria,” said one of the participants, Helen, on the first day. “Can we use this?” She pointed at the slobbering pile of clay plaster she was knee deep in.
“For sure! You can use it as a mortar or a render. It’s exactly the right thing for the job,” I replied. “We’ll make an adobe brick too, so you can see how versatile this mix is. And we’ll also create a bottle wall here,” I pointed at a space at the side of the barn.
“A bottle wall there?” Said Kamilla. “Oh, wow! I love that idea.”
Four days passed. After much mud stomping and throwing, after sculpting and building, after showing how to forage for clay and how to turn it into a completely free and highly durable building material, after watching all the participants growing and developing and the lights going on one by one…Boom! Boom! Boom! As each person realised just what they could do with this stuff, I felt such a deep sense of fulfilment. I grew. They grew. We all advanced each other.
For many years I’ve been a one-woman show creating mud worlds. That was powerful and good. But this month it felt nourishing to the core to contribute to someone else’s place—the right person, too—and to leave my muddy mark, to fuel other mud beginnings, to feel the seeds of mud wisdom moving outwards. It was a culmination of thirteen years’ hard-won experience.
Further along the rails
Romania is a long way back now. Today, in the wake of some fairly gruelling train rides (Budapest to Zagreb, I’m looking at you), I’m finally sitting on a balcony in Croatia. Frankly, it feels like I’ve earned every square centimetre of it! As I stare out at the Adriatic feeling like Jan Morris in Trieste, I begin typing and piecing it all together.
And I see it, somewhat to my surprise: The purpose of this voyage really was mud! I hadn’t been at all sure about it when I stepped onto my first train in Bucharest, and I began to wonder whether it was about railways and travel and history instead. Yet when I look back over the gleaming hot rails of this past month, it’s the mud building workshop that I’m hugging to my heart. It transpired to be the most meaningful and fulfilling part of my entire Balkan voyage.
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Next Live Workshops
My next live mud building workshops are in Adelaide, Australia. We’ll be building an earthbag dome in one, and learning all about cob, adobe and clay plaster in another. You can learn more about them, and sign up for them here.