A New Zealander's travels in Romania: The surprises, the transformations, and the places to return to

His love of travel brought New Zealander Peter de Graaf to Romania several times since the early 1990s. He explored places in Transylvania, Maramures, Bucovina, and Banat, and saw many sites and landmarks at a time when they were not getting the tourist attention they receive today. He got the picture of a varied country where he would like to return to discover new places.

Journalist, travel writer, and photographer Peter de Graaf traveled to Romania several times, starting with the early 1990s. Currently based in Kerikeri, a small town in New Zealand's Far North, he also lived in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, at the time when it was still Czechoslovakia, teaching in České Budějovice, in the southern part of the country. While there, he explored various countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including Albania and Romania, the Middle East (Syria and Iran), Laos, and Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. His travels took him around the world, and he returned to Europe in 2016, when he also revisited Romania and went to Moldova, which had just introduced visa-free travel for New Zealanders.