Again, writing after the event is often harder to put things back into context as to how you felt at that moment. I’m certain going through the border posts into Romania felt like another step into a more alien country than any before, but just having arrived in Bulgaria (hello Cyrillic alphabet, goodbye lane markers on the road) it now feels less a step into the strange than it did ten days ago!
The first place I was heading for was Arad, a town just over the border, it always seems a good idea to spend the first night in a new country not too far from the border just to make sure you can find a bank for some local currency and to generally get set before heading off deeper into it. Unfortunately I’d not noticed when you cross into Romania you move into GMT+2 timezone, so thinking I was arriving comfortably before rush hour, the amount of traffic was astonishing. There was madness in every direction particularly around the main roundabout close to which my hotel was. Could I find it though, not in a month of Sundays.
After God knows how many trips up and down a two lane road into and out of town that was crammed with three lanes of traffic most of the way, with added trams just to make things interesting, I had to stop at a petrol station to think about what was happening. It’s at times like this you feel so adrift, just a small spelling error writing the address down could have sent you fruitlessly searching in completely the wrong part of town, but with the sun beating down and no internet connections, it’s impossible to check.
Luckily a small red Chevrolet containing a chirpy lady called Alina pulled up as I was starting to look desperate and thinking about just going to first hotel I could find and just end up paying twice for the night. She knew the way and could drop me there if I followed. Heading around the insanely busy roundabout and back up the road I’d been several times before, we pulled into a small courtyard behind a pizza place with absolutely no sign whatsoever anywhere on the road or building... After the sign-o-rama experience of Poland (any spare piece of land will get a 6x10 metre hoarding up on it) this new modesty was too much to take in.
Alina popped round later on in typically friendly Eastern European way for a tour of the city arriving with guide book and pretzels. Unusually for a city so close to the border, Arad was a grand old city reflecting its position of importance in Austro-Hungarian times.
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| Arad City Hall |
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| Arad Theatre |
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| Cake to round a long day off |
Moving on with a purpose to Timisoara to meet up with a friend who’d worked in Bradford last year was a relief as the nightmare traffic of the previous days arrival in Arad was nowhere to be seen and a simple trundle through rolling countryside was simple enough.
It’s always fantastic to have a local guide, and having formally passed her dissertation in the morning, Corina took me for a long walk through university grounds and around the city taking in all the major buildings which was interesting but the heat from the sun was closing in on 40 degrees so we had to take in as much shade as possible including a visit to a huge mall which was a mall like any other but the air conditioning was a saviour. Wandering back through riverside parks, we were followed most of the way by a small dog, who earned a pasty for her persistence. With that Corina headed off to a family do and I spent the next day doing washing and generally keeping out of the heat as much as possible.
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| Leaving my hotel in Arad |
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| Awesome go faster decal on a Dacia |
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| Corina in Timisoara |
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| Timisoara Orthodox cathedral |
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| Timisoara theatre |
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| Timisoara main street |
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| Old buildings in Timisoara |
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| Timisoara rose garden |
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| Washing machine going at full speed |
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| A fine day for drying |
Though it was too hot to do much at all, Timisoara was good. Full of beautiful girls and kebabs that come with chips for a quid. Mustn’t grumble at either.
The next major event was riding the Transfagarasan Highway, Top Gear’s proclaimed best driving road in the world. To get there I took a night in Sibiu which seemed as good as a starting point as any. Staying above a small restaurant, I went for a walk around town later on though it was a confusing place with a small historic centre that’s hard to find, especially as I’d walked from one end of town to the other looking for it and almost gave up.
It’s not that Sibiu isn't a nice city it is, in the centre. It's just that after a while you get an impression that if you've seen a couple of Eastern European cites ... well, maybe you haven't seen them all, but, except for the really impressive ones, you've probably seen scaled-up or scaled-down versions elsewhere, which might lead you to the conclusion that you may actually have been travelling just a bit too much.
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| Roadside cafe on the way to Sibiu |
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| A trials event going on around Sibiu |
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| Casa Cardinal, home for one night |
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The IBIS costs a fortune compared
to my little place, benefit of being online! |
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| Street clutter in Sibiu - hard to find your way around! |
As nice as Sibiu may be, it couldn’t be anything more than a starting point for an awesome ride on Monday 18th. Thirty or so kilometres flew by before a turn off from the Sibiu – Brasov road led to the DN7c, Transfagarasan Highway. There’s apparently a fortress where Vlad the Impaler lived for a while, but you get the blinkers on as soon as a straight tree lined road starts to twist and turn. This goes on and on through more twists than a Chubby Checker convention up to just over 2,000m.
The road was built in the earlier expansive part of Ceausescu’s rule over Romania before all the foreign debts he’d taken out were called in laying the foundation to the Communist party’s collapse. All history aside, there really aren’t the adjectives to describe how much fun the ride up the north side of the pass is, it is just motorcycling perfection. The mountain road wound upwards, as all mountain roads do (unless you’re coming down them) to a small summit car park with food sellers lining the road, but with the bike riding brilliantly, I just kept going to take in the downhill section as well, to ride the road in full without a break.
The south side is great, but not as perfect as the north (rule of thumb, the north is always better than the south!), though near the lower section the road cuts up awfully to the point its not possible to ride and every vehicle just zigzags wildly across the road to avoid the worst. It’s a real shame to end such a perfect ride with such an awful stretch, but you can never have it all I guess. Regardless of the road, I was taking it easy as I’d just eeked out 50kms with the low fuel warning light on. Having never done more than 20kms with it on, I was sweating a bit by the time a petrol station in Curtea de Arges came into view.
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| Parked up at Transfagarasan Dam |
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| Urgh |
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| A monument to hydro-electric power |
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| Just rode the best driving road in the world |
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| The Transfagarasan Highway |
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| The Transfagarasan Highway |
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| The Transfagarasan Highway |
No sooner filled with petrol than I had to turn round and ride back up. Passing a huge dam on the way, I had to stop for a look even though I have an unexplainable phobia of them! It was awful as the huge concrete wall tapered back as you look down, giving you the feeling of overhanging the valley below, urgh.
There was a mountain hut on the south side that would be a good starting point for a walk to Moldoveanu, the highest mountain in Romania. Checked in for two nights as it was quite pricey, and in no way worth it with miserable staff to a person and a very basic room, it was too cold to camp at this altitude sadly, and also on-off raining later on. My book suggested a minimum of 12 hours walking to get to the peak which meant a 6am start. Unfortunately, I’d underestimated how far below the start point of the walk the hut was and lost an hour just getting there.
At about 2 in the afternoon I was still some way from Moldoveanu and decided to call it quits as the risk of getting stuck on some very sharp and sheer peaks as night fell was increasing all the time. I always walk more slowly than the suggested times in the Cicerone book and should really have planned to stay in the only refuge on the trail, but you never know how these things will work out before you set off. The walk itself was in beautiful scenery, varied and interesting with several ridges and lots of ups and downs on the way, though unfortunately this was the first “tried and failed” of all the peaks, which makes me twice as determined to do the Bulgarian one in a couple of weeks!
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| Leaving the mountain hut at 6am |
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| Walking in the Fagaras mountians |
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| Walking in the Fagaras mountians |
Packing up and getting set to ride back down the north side of the Transfagarasan on Wednesday 20th clouds were hovering over the mountains which kept the heat off for a while making perfect riding conditions. A short ride to Brasov followed with many Romanian overtakes, a clever manoeuvre where a car driver will overtake you aggressively in a 50km/h zone doing 75 or so, then holds that pace once you’re out on the open 90km/h roads creating a traffic jam behind.
I was going to stay the night in Brasov, but the heat and awkward one way system was frustrating, so I took a ride to Bran, where the famous Dracula castle is. Maybe I was just impatient, or it was just too hot, but Bran is far less mountainous than I’d imagined and a total tourist honey-pot with endless trinket stalls, pizza places and bus parks. With all the hassle and the whole thing falling a bit short of expectations, I decided to keep going as Bucharest was only 170 kms away and it was only just after lunchtime so there was plenty of time to make some good progress towards Bulgaria.
Bucharest arrived after some awful roads crammed with traffic and few decent overtaking chances, so nothing to do but just roll with it. Following signs for the city centre, I’d passed a number of very expensive looking hotels before passing a McDonalds. Knowing that means free wifi, I took a coffee and quickly found two or three options for cheap places to stay.
In no time I was unpacking at Das Presidente, opposite a train station for three nights of catching up after the mountain days. The days flew bye with loads of options for food (good salads for the first time in ages, phew), and a petrol station right outside selling chilled drinks all hours.
One thing I’d not been doing very well was taking time off from the constant moving, packing, unpacking and living from a bag get tiring after a while, so watching the full first day’s play of the England v India test with stockpiles of food, drink and a sleep in the next day was luxury beyond imagining!
Taking an easy stroll around Bucharest the next day, I was keen to see the Palace of Parliament, the second largest building in the world by interior size after the Pentagon. Not being so incredibly high, it’s harder to find that you’d first think, but once you do, it’s incredibly impressive.
Built to dominate and physically express power by the organisation over the individual, the Palace and associated boulevard consumed about a fifth of the Bucharest’s traditional city centre. The walls were up and rooms formed in five years. Unfortunately, this was just as Ceausescu was ousted from power in December 1989 so he never saw it fully completed, and ironically, never got to use the underground bunkers (the building goes 90 metres underground too) installed in case of revolution.
Externally it’s all neo-classical style in locally mined stone though despite being adopted to house the Romanian Parliament and Presidency, it’s still not finished with many rooms internally mothballed and the grounds aren’t even started. It’s odd walking round such a finely detailed building surrounded by battered containers and mounds of rock and earth. It’s a building that over serves its purpose and crumbling sections of concrete here and there give a hint as to how much of a maintenance liability it must be.
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| The heat brings a thunderstorm over Bucharest |
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| Rain cover on and tied to a convenient tree... |
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| Palace of Parliament from the side |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Busy traffic in front of the palace |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament,entrance to 90m deep underground tunnels |
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| Bucharest university |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Palace of Parliament, Bucharest |
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| Sun setting over Bucharest |
Rested up, it’s time to pack again and head for Bulgaria, country number fourteen and the first to use the Cyrillic alphabet to make life more interesting!
