Sighetu Marmației sits where the Iza meets the Tisa, and across the Tisa is Ukraine, so the whole town has the slightly watchful air of a border place that has changed hands more than once. It was Hungarian for centuries, Czechoslovak for a short while, then Romanian, and in the early twentieth century it had one of the largest Jewish communities in the region. Elie Wiesel was born here in 1928, and his childhood home is now a small museum. The town is the biggest in Maramureș, with about forty thousand people, and it has every service you could want, including plenty of fuel.
Two places in town are worth the time. The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance occupies a former prison where, in the early 1950s, the communist regime locked up political figures, academics, priests and others who had stood in its way, and many died in the cells. It is a stark, serious museum, and few visitors leave it unmoved. Outside the town, the open-air village museum has gathered old houses, barns and churches from around the region, which gives a good summary of the carpentry traditions you will see in the villages that follow.
For the rider, Sighet is a hub. Roads lead east along the Iza valley toward the wooden churches at Bârsana, Ieud and Șurdești, north to the border at the Tisa, and west to Săpânța, where the Merry Cemetery, with its painted wooden crosses carrying jokes and portraits of the dead, is the single most famous sight in the region. The surfaces on the main roads are patchy but passable, and truck traffic is heavy on the national road. Keep your speed down in villages, where children, dogs and horse carts share the tarmac.
Eat well here. Markets in the town sell cheese, smoked meats, honey and pickles, and the local restaurants serve cabbage rolls, grilled sausage, and soup in bread. Pălincă, the plum brandy, is offered with every meal, and refusing it too often is thought slightly rude. Come in September if you can, when the hay is in, the plums are ripe and the light over the hills has an autumn softness, and the wood smoke from village chimneys drifts across the valley.