Die, die, die, I will kill you all you little bastards, and when I stand over the smoking ruin of your civilisation you will know that I am your doom, and if that doesn't work then pretty please leave me alone?

One of the many things I learned while walking the Camino de Santiago was that I am to bed bugs as Cindy Crawford is to teenage boys (or was to teenage boys 15 years ago, I’m sure they’re into someone else now). It’s flattering at first, but it gets old real fast.

Getting rid of bed bugs is hard. You have to follow strict radioactive decontamination protocol: establish a clean room and move all your personal possessions through into the clean room one by one, boiling them in a pot if they are made of cloth, vacuuming them otherwise. Finally, go through a shower, step out of the shower into a set of new clothes, sprinkle salt over the old clothes in the pattern of a hexagram and set fire to them. Now cross your fingers, go to bed, sleep tight, and hope that you don’t wake up with fresh bites. Good times.

Well, “times”.

Of course step one – establish a clean room – is hard if you’re staying in the hostel that ranks number 4 in a google search for bed bugs in Romania.

Jude’s fine in all this by the way. I’m covered in red blotches the size of coins (I’ll spare you the photos of my own affliction, but based on an image search for “bed bug bites” it seems pretty typical.)

The other kind of blood sucker

We’re in Transylvania right now and took a tour to “Dracula’s castle” in Bran. Actually it’s got no real connection either to Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Vlad the Impaler upon whom Dracula was (very) loosely based, but it looks the part:

The castle looks all romantic from a distance, but at the gates are a good 20 or so tat shops and restaurants offering all kinds of vampire-related fare, from Dracula-themed wine (which we bought) to a dish on a menu described only as “vampire manhood” (which we did not).