Eleven days in Romania: the country everyone flies over, done by train

The airport bus takes 50 to 90 minutes into town depending on traffic. Drop your bag and go straight to the surviving old quarter, which is six streets by four and the only part of central Bucharest the 1980s left alone.

Keep the first evening short. There are 18th century church doors opening off streets otherwise given over to bars, and the contrast is the whole introduction you need to this city.

Today follows the axis Ceausescu cut through the middle of Bucharest, and it is the day that makes sense of the place. The parliament was built on a hill that had a neighbourhood on it, and the boulevard approaching it was made a metre wider than the Champs Elysees deliberately.

Book the earliest tour you can. It is cold inside even in August, you will walk for an hour and a half, and you will see a small fraction of the floor area.

The rest of the day is gentler: an 1840s park with rowing boats on it, then the square where the regime that built all this fell apart on live television.

Three of Bucharest's best museums sit within four kilometres of each other on one metro line north of the centre. Do them in order and you will barely wait for anything.

The two ethnographic collections are not duplicates. One is about objects and how they were made; the other moved the buildings themselves here, three hundred of them, and laid them out along paths by a lake.

The villa at the end of the day is the oddest thing in Bucharest: gold taps, a mosaic pool, a peacock garden, and the entirely ordinary handwriting of the family who lived in it.

Take a morning train. The line climbs the Prahova valley past Sinaia, crosses the watershed at Predeal and drops into Brasov before lunch; sit on the left going up for the better side of the valley.

Brasov's old town is a Saxon market square with a mountain immediately behind it. Give the first afternoon to the two things at its centre, and leave the day trips for tomorrow.

The evening belongs to the square. It fills up at about seven and stays busy until eleven.

Bran has a marketing problem. Bram Stoker never came to Romania, Vlad Tepes probably spent a night here at most, and the castle sells itself on Dracula regardless. Underneath that it is a genuinely good building, tight and vertical, put up in 1377 to tax traffic through the pass.

Go early. By eleven the coaches are in and the internal staircases are single file.

Rasnov on the way back is the better fortress and gets a fraction of the visitors. It was a refuge rather than a residence, which is why there are streets and a well inside the walls: the townspeople moved in with their animals when the Tatars came.

Carol I was a German prince invited to run a country he had never seen, and Peles is what he built once he decided to stay. It went up from 1873 in a valley he picked for looking like home, and it had electric light, central heating, lifts and a motorised glass roof at a time when almost nothing did.

The tour is compulsory and the queue is the cost of the day, so take the first train and be at the gate when it opens. Pelisor next door, built for the following generation, takes twenty minutes and hardly anybody bothers with it.

The monastery that gave the town its name is downhill in the trees and is where the day should finish.

The train to Sibiu takes about three hours across the Fagaras foothills, with the highest mountains in Romania on your left for most of it. Services are thinner than on the Bucharest line, so check the timetable the night before; buses cover the same route if the times are wrong.

Sibiu is two squares side by side, joined by a passage under a tower, and almost everything in the town is on one or the other. Walk the perimeter of both before going into anything.

The detail everybody remembers is the roofs. Ventilation slits above the attics are cut in the shape of heavy lidded eyes, and they follow you across both squares.

The open air museum outside Sibiu is the reason for the second night here. Hundreds of buildings were dismantled in villages across Romania and rebuilt around a lake in Dumbrava forest, with the mills and presses in working order.

Bus 13 gets you there in fifteen minutes and you can tap a contactless card on board. Take water and take three hours; the paths loop and it is easy to lose an hour going round the lake the wrong way.

Come back for the afternoon and spend it indoors, in the collection a Habsburg governor of Transylvania assembled in his own house on the main square, then climb the council tower for the last of the light.

Sibiu to Cluj is about four hours by train and a little less by bus, with hourly departures on the road if the rail timetable does not suit. Either way it is an afternoon arrival.

Cluj is the largest city in Transylvania and the one the coach tours skip, which is why it has the region's best restaurants and none of its queues. It is organised around one big square with a very large church in the middle of it.

Get your bearings tonight and eat well. This is the best dinner on the route.

Salt was cut out of the hill at Turda from Roman times until the 1930s, when the mine closed and was left alone. What was then done with it is hard to describe: the main chamber is lit like a film set, with a Ferris wheel standing on the floor of it, and a lower shaft holding a lake with rowing boats.

It is around 12 C down there all year and the descent is a long staircase or a lift, so take a layer even in August. Minibuses from the Cluj bus station take about 45 minutes.

Back in the city, spend the afternoon on the cobbled square where Cluj actually eats and drinks, and climb the citadel hill for the last hour of light.

Cluj airport is 8 km east of the centre with a frequent bus, so there is time for one building before you go.

The palace on the south side of the main square was built in the 1770s for a Hungarian noble family and now holds the national art collection. Go up the main staircase even if you skip the galleries.