Meeting a shepherd

OCNA SUGATAG, Romania - One way to explore the rural Maramures is to rent a car and drive from village to village, but hiring a local guide with a car is an affordable luxury compared to what it would cost in France or Italy.

Our guide, Nicolae Prisacaru, charges the equivalent of $34 a day, plus mileage. Distances between villages are short, so the cost for two days came to about $110, a bargain considering rental cars start at around $65 per day plus insurance and gas.

Nicolae not only speaks English, he seems to know everyone, and he got it when I told him we were more interested in learning about village life than seeing churches and museums.

At the weekly animal market in the one-time salt-mining center of Ocna, we mingled with the locals who came with horse, sheep and boxes of pigs to sell.

With the warmer weather coming, some of the women have begun to replace the leggings worn under their skirts with fish-net stockings. Many of the men wore "clops," little straw hats shaped like upsidedown soup bowls, tied behind one ear with a string.

Ocna lies in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. People walk between villages along paths cut through meadows dotted with bales of hay shaped like giant mushrooms.

Nicolae took us to where shepherd Gheorge Rednic is spending the summer, tending a flock of 300 sheep that belong to various owners.

Rednic, 57, has been tending sheep since he was 12. This time of year, he and his helpers milk the sheep three times a day, and then make cheese - about 88 pounds per day - boiling the milk on wood fires.

A few miles away in the village of Sarbi, Gheorghe Opris owns a wooden watermill where villagers come to do their laundry, and Opris grinds corn, thrashes oats and distills plum brandy. Business isn't as good as it once ways, he says, and villagers sometimes pay by giving him 10 percent of their corn or oats instead of cash.

More people have electric washing machines, and grains are being imported from China.

Opris supplements his income by making little ladders out of plum wood and inserting them, like model ships, into bottles of his homemade plum brandy which he sells to tourists.

His wife spins wool for handmade vests and blankets. On her porch is tree branch hung with colorful pots and pans. The "pottery tree'' was once a sign that there was a girl in the house available for marriage. Now it's just for decoration.

The Opris have two sons who live and work in Spain and the United States, so chances are the watermill will close once Gheorghe retires.

Business was once so brisk, "this used to be like a second America," he told us over glasses of brandy and homemade apricot cake.

But like everywhere, things are changing, even here in the Maramures.