Black Sea by motorbike part III

4/7/2013 Day 8 Hot and dry with showers later

We say au revoir to our French friends and head out of Budapest. It’s 9am and the digital temperature signs are already showing  31°C. The motorway to Romania is long, flat and boring. I had no idea Hungary was as flat as it is, but reflect that maybe that’s why so many horse tribes have fought over this space for much of history. It’s easy to imagine them sweeping across the table-top landscape in their thousands.

The view is predominantly farmland now; wheat, maize, and fields of sunflowers with their faces tracking the beating sun. As the heat builds, and in a scene that is to play out every day we are in this corner of the world, enormous storms start to boil up around us in the early afternoon. We are in big sky country here but the storms still obscure a quarter of the horizon and must be dozens of miles across, if not more. The scale is impossible for me to judge. The motorway happens to weave around and between them today, but takes us close enough to one to feel the temperature drop sharply by what must be five or ten degrees. We pass on through a horizon spanning wind farm, the largest I have ever seen, and on to the Romanian border.

Initially the Romanian countryside is much as before. We stop for lunch at a place that looks very nice, but apparently the feeling isn’t mutual as they ignore us until we give up and go away. The next place a few miles down the road is just as posh but couldn’t be more welcoming and helpful. After lunch we have to circumnavigate the city of Arad. It is an ancient city, no doubt with beautiful buildings and historic sites in the centre.  But we aren’t going into the centre. We’re enduring the worst of the road and rail hub that it also represents instead. Hundreds, if not thousands of trucks choke the road and thicken the already baked air with diesel fumes, as they queue for miles to negotiate numerous level crossings, all ruined by the sheer weight of traffic. An optimistic soul has tried to repair one of them, but the sheets of cardboard they used aren’t really helping much. Or surviving much for that matter.

The roads are two trucks wide plus an inch, and the trucks are bumper to bumper, so traditional motorbike traffic leapfrog is hard to come by. We jump a dozen trucks by rolling to the front of the queue at some roadworks, where the stop/go man chats with us amiably in pretty damn good English for a stop/go man. Eventually we work our way through and out of Arad’s outskirts. Smog gives way to a lighter haze, through which the Carpathian foothills are visible in the distance, bases obscured and peaks silhouetted through grey air. We follow the flat road to Lipova where it starts to climb into the forested hills. The road is still a major east-west transport route here, with a constant flow of trucks which are difficult to pass safely on the heavily rutted and winding road. We stop at one of the small run down villages for a breather and a coke, where the locals seem entirely underwhelmed by our arrival. A family of four chugs by, perched on various improvised seats on a very old, very rusty, very square tractor. I suspect the locals are even less whelmed when we leave, as I gas it hard to avoid getting stuck behind another truck, accidentally shooting gravel everywhere and leaving a black line across their car park.

I smell the rain a few miles before we actually get wet, and combined with the increasing altitude it brings a modest but welcome reduction in temperature. But fresh rain on recently dry roads used by legion diesel seeping trucks is when tarmac tends to be at its most slippery, so we go carefully for a while.

We pass alongside an old disused, communist era power station. It is very dilapidated, standing long unpainted and long since abandoned, reminiscent of a scene from a post-apocalyptic video game. A rusty, decades old CFR train rumbles slowly by to add to the effect. This won’t be the last time I’m put in mind of the game Fallout3 in Romania. As one of the poorest EU nations there are many crumbling architectural relics of the communist years not yet cleared away. Power stations, collectivised farm buildings and industrial complexes all stand dead and quiet in places, starkly contrasting with the vibrant life and striking natural beauty of the country.

As we head towards Deva I am struck by the contrast between the hills and the mountains here. Everywhere else I’ve been in the world, the two seem to gradually merge together. Here the transition is severe. Where we could see the silhouetted hills from the plains, now we are in the hills a new, more savage looking silhouette insists upon itself. It would barely be more imposing if the jagged outlined peaks of the Carpathians actually spelled the word “MOUNTAINS” with their sharp, sheer teeth of rock.

We find a cheap motel after Deva. Very cheap at £16 for the room. It’s far from being The Ritz. Nothing in the bathroom is fixed to anything else in any kind of meaningful way, but the water and room are clean, the beer is 80p a pint and we are served by a pretty girl in tight trousers, so it’s not all bad.  There are four dogs out front who enthusiastically see off every passing vehicle, which seems like a risky pastime to me on a main truck route. It certainly won’t surprise me if there are fewer of them in the morning, but I’m not overly troubled by the idea after one of them pursues me, snarling, across the car park, only to be chased and shooed away by one of the staff.

5/7/2013 Day 9 Hot, mixed wet and dry

Sure enough, by morning one of the dogs lays still and lifeless in the early sun, half on the grass verge, half on the tarmac just inches from the thundering truck wheels. It’s a bit sad, but hardly surprising given the risks they were taking. We pack up, make ready to leave and have breakfast. As we go, the dead dog wakes up, stretches, and chases us away.

We head south, on a well surfaced, wide curving road blessedly free from trucks, to a place called Petrosani, where we turn left and climb up through a narrow twisting gorge to the mid point of the Transalpina, past clutches of brightly painted beehives and their associated beeherds selling honey. The gorge is mostly packed gravel; what tarmac is there is just there to join the potholes together, although some of the very large holes are filled with crushed bricks to make navigation slightly less fraught, but not much. It’s hardly the surface either of our bikes are designed for but they get us up through the increasingly sheer and dramatic mountain views without complaint.

The gravel flattens out onto fresh new tarmac as we near the top. Lumber cut down all around us and sawdust coating the road. At the same time we are shrouded in fine rain, borne of warm damp air being forced to altitude by the mountains. The scent of pine resin and fresh rain; something synthetic scent impregnated air fresheners can only aspire to via chemistry experiment. As we turn onto the Transalpina road, the surface deteriorates into the worst we have seen so far. Gravel and dirt with long, water carved holes that the bikes would fit in. It doesn’t stay like this past the first bend though, and it turns out that much of the Transalpina has already been resurfaced, or is in the process of being resurfaced. The finished parts are a hoot, even in the wet, as they sweep and twist their way along the ridge. The road starts to descend in a combination of loops and esses, alongside lakes and rich woodland. It’s impossible to go at the road like a pig at a tater though because it throws up swathes of missing tarmac and washed sand slicks ready to snatch a wheel without a second’s notice, but that’s all part of the fun. Balancing what’s-around-the-corner paranoia with wheeee-this-is-fun, well, fun. Before we know it we are on rough old tarmac again, but it is drying again as we shed the altitude we so recently gained.

After about 50 miles of exactly the sort of twisty, scenic mountain roads we had hoped for, the road descends back onto the main truck route. We turn right and follow it for about 60 miles through Sibiu, past a sign pointing out the road to a place called Cunta which was crying out for a photo opportunity but had no safe place to stop, and on to the north end of the Transfagarasan highway. The weather has been dry and very hot again since we were halfway down the Transalpina, but as the day creeps on and we near the right turn to head south back across the mountains, rain and mist closes in once more.

The first five miles of the Transfagarasan are fairly flat as it approaches the base of the mountains, but it is made extra interesting today by a curious Romanian method of pothole repair. Every bit of poor road surface has been chopped out into a nice square hole, about a foot wide, several inches deep and with vertical sides. There must have been a lot of poor road surface because these bloody holes are everywhere. Presumably the idea is that at some point soon they will come and fill them all in one efficient sweep, but for now we are in a situation reminiscent of another video game. Something further back in gaming this time. It’s like a ZX Spectrum offering from the 80s, dodging left and right to avoid the regular baddies which might only wreck a tyre and rim, with end of level bosses being the occasional car looming through the rain streaked visor, half on the wrong side of the road, dodging his own potholes, and which might wreck an entire bike and rider.

Thankfully this game peters out by the time we start the climb up through the first twisty section of this most sinuous of roads. We give it another five miles through increasingly heavy rain, but take the pragmatic view at the last hotel this side of the peak, that having come all this way, largely to ride this particular road, it would be a shame to slog on through these foul conditions. We decide to stop and hope for better weather tomorrow to do the bulk of the 50 mile mountain road.

The hotel Balea Cascada, despite the sickly foyer lighting giving a morgue like first impression, is rather good. It has a bar and restaurant, clean en-suite rooms, and is set in stunning mountain scenery. Nestling in a steep sided, pine covered valley with views up to the waterfall above. Just below the entrance we explore an array of stalls selling assorted tourist tat, and another selling delicious home smoked meats and cheeses, and more importantly, palinca. Palinca is Romanian moonshine that we have already seen for sale in plastic bottles, along with home grown fruit and veg at many an improvised roadside stall. We decide that it would be remiss of us to not sample the culture properly while here, so we invest in a bottle. We test it before dinner and I have to say, out of all the drinks I have met, this is the only one that has made my toenails vibrate.

Since this place doesn’t take credit cards and there isn’t an ATM for miles we are almost out of hard cash after paying for the room. So we have the cheapest thing on the menu and settle for a couple of beers and an early night. I discover that somehow I’ve left my wash bag at the last place and have a go at brushing my teeth with my finger, which frankly, doesn’t go well. It occurs to me now that we were in room 101 both at the last place and tonight! Maybe I did bring the wash bag but something Orwellian happened to it while I wasn’t looking.

If we make it out of room 101 again in the morning, tomorrow we shall ride the road that Top Gear dubbed the world’s greatest.