My close encounter with a brown bear
As I was writing a story this week about the Scottish woman mauled by a brown bear while on the Transfăgărășan highway in Romania, I realised this could just as easily have been me.
On a trip to the Romanian city of Brasov many years ago, my friends and I rented a room from a local man, Octaviu. During our first evening there, he asked us if we’d like to take a drive to “see the bears eating the beans”.
Intrigued, we agreed. We didn’t know bears ate beans. So we all set off in his ancient Dacia to the edge of the city, parked up next to a towering Communist-era apartment block and waited.
After just a couple of minutes, a stout, brown bear ambled out of the forest and made his way over to the back of the flats, just metres from where we were sitting.
“Where are the beans?” my friend asked. Confused, Octaviu pointed to where the bear was taking handfuls of rubbish from a large dumpster. “There!” he told us. “There, the bear is eating from the bean!”
It was funny, until it wasn’t. Just a few months later, a brown bear attacked and killed one person and mauled seven others picking mushrooms in a forest very close to the site of our adventure, before being shot dead by hunters.
Although, unlike the Scottish woman this week – who by the way, is not too badly hurt and is believed to be recovering from the injury to her hand – we did not stick our hands out of the windows and kept them firmly closed.
A spate of killings by bears in Romania four years ago turned the debate into a political issue, with some sides taking a strong stance over bear culls. Local farmers argued they had been forced to abandon their land over fears of bear attacks, while reports of the animals wandering into villages, towns and even cities have increased.
Bear attacks generally are on the rise across the world – although it is not the bears’ fault. Last year, a grizzly bear killed two people who were out walking in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. Rescuers found the couple dead and were forced to euthanise the bear.
Across Europe and North America, climate change and widespread deforestation has wiped out bears' natural habitats and forced them to look elsewhere for food.
The Transfăgărășan highway where the Scottish woman was attacked is a popular tourist spot – made more so by the fact it once featured on an episode of Top Gear. As bears increasingly seek out civilisation to forage for food, tourists will more often come face to face with the predator.
It’s just a pity it wasn’t Jeremy Clarkson who had a grizzly encounter.