A home stay in the Maramures

VADU IZEI, Romania - Seven hours by train from where we sipped Austrian tea in the university town of Targu Mures, we're sitting by the fireplace in a century-old wooden house, eating polenta cooked with sheep's cheese and smoked bacon.

This is the Maramures, a rural region of Transylvania near the Ukraine border. Families here welcome guests into their homes as part of an agritourism program aimed at preserving traditional customs and ways of life.

Romanians know the nearest town, Sighetu Maramatiei, as the border crossing into the Ukraine for tanks of half-price gas and cheap cigarettes, cigars and chocolate.

Travelers come here for a glimpse of how life has been lived for centuries in villages filled with wooden houses and 14th-17th century churches, many preserved as UNESCO sites.

Isolated by the snow-capped Carpathian mountains, the Maramures are not easy to reach. The Romans gave up. So did the invading Turks as they made their way through the Balkans to Hungary. As a result, traditions surved here that disappeared in other parts of the country.

Forty miles from where we got off the train in the industrial city of Baia Mare, it was if we had stepped back in time.

With Nicolae Prisacaru, a local guide I hired for this leg of our trip, we drove an hour and half over a mountain pass that cut through dense pine forests.

When we reached the other side, we saw women in knee-length skirts, leggings, heavy wool socks and sheep-skin vests hitch-hiking along the side of the road. Men, wearing little straw hats called "clops'' that look like upside down soup bowls, passed by in horse-drawn wagons filled with logs or animals or people.

We're spending the first few days in the village of Vadu Izei where Nicolae is married to the town doctor. He's a furniture designer by trade, and once worked for Ikea. Now, because he speaks English and has a car, he's in demand as a local guide.

Set back from the road near a river is our 7-room guesthouse, owned by Ioan and Ileana Borlean.

The Borleans - three brothers, their wives and children - live Swiss Family Robinson-style in a compound that's a mix of traditional and modern homes.

Two wooden houses, one moved here from another village and restored by the Borleans, have been converted to guest houses.

We're paying $34 each per night including meals for a cozy second-floor room with two twin beds and a modern bathroom. Heat for the registers and hot water tanks comes from a wood stove stoked morning and evening.

Several family members weave and Ioan, 49, paints religious icons on glass. Ileana, 42, is a great cook, and this has been our chance to sample traditional Romanian food.

The polenta dish, called bulz, is a regional speciality. She served it with a vegetable soup with garden herbs; homemade plum brandy; and wine.

The Borleans don't speak much English, so when Nicolae isn't around, we communicate with gestures, a little Italian and French, even sounds.

"Oink, oink'' or "moo, moo,?" we asked at dinner when a platter of sausage appeared.

"Oink, oink," Ileana laughed.

I think we'll get along just fine.