Zalău is the kind of county town that most visitors drive straight through, which is a pity, because it has more history than its blocks of communist-era flats suggest. It is the capital of Sălaj, a county that long went by the Latin-flavoured name Silvania, the land of forests, and it sits in a green basin below the Meseș Mountains with a population of about sixty-three thousand. The hill called Dealul Celor Șase Cai, the Hill of the Six Horses, lies a few kilometres outside the centre, and what exactly the horses were nobody on the map will tell you.
The town's cultural weight comes from the Reformed college founded here in the seventeenth century, named after the Wesselényi family who patronised it, and from the teenager who went to school in its classrooms: the Hungarian poet Endre Ady, who studied at the college in the late 1880s and early 1890s and is remembered with a statue. The county museum in town looks after finds from Porolissum, the Roman frontier city on the heights to the north, and it is a good place to start if you want to know what the Romans were doing in these hills.
For the rider, Zalău is the useful end of the day. It has every kind of fuel station, supermarkets, tyre shops and a few hotels, and the roads that leave it climb quickly into the hills in several directions, with bends, short steep rises and views over orchards and pasture. Those back roads are narrow and a little rough in patches, and in many villages the road surface gives way to gravel at the edges. Traffic on the main roads includes lorries, so overtaking needs care, and speed limits drop sharply in the villages.
Eat plainly and well. A lunch menu in a town restaurant will usually offer a clear soup, a pork or chicken main with potatoes or polenta, and a pancake with jam, for what an English traveller would think a startlingly modest sum. The coffee is strong and served with a small glass of water.
If you have time, the Roman ruins at Moigrad are a short run north, and the wooded ridge behind them gives a feel for how remote this frontier once was.