Part IV of my adventures riding to the Black Sea and back on my motorbike.
We wake up and emerge successfully from Room 101, relieved to find ourselves still part way up the mountain. It’s a cool but beautiful morning. The stallholders outside are bustling in preparation, bringing life and busyness to this peaceful alpine setting with its shabby Romanian twist. The rain has passed and it is dry, with some cloud and blue patches of sky at the peaks, and low cloud and wisps of clinging mist back down in the valley we rode up yesterday.
The Transfagarasan highway turns out to be every bit as bonkers as its reputation, especially this shorter side to the north of the summit. Ceausescu, the last communist leader of Romania, was a bit of a maverick within the Eastern Bloc. Inspired by personality cults like those in North Korea and China at the time, he regularly thumbed his nose at the authority of the Soviet Union. This is a road that was built hurriedly between 1970 and 1974 by Ceausescu, either to cover himself against Soviet invasion, like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia which he had openly condemned, or as a folly to outdo the existing greatest mountain road of Romania at the time, the Transalpina. Probably a bit of both. Carving this road out of the mountain took something like 6 million kilos of dynamite and around 40 men died in construction accidents.
The Transfagarasan is not a fast road. At least not for our skill and luggage level. Where we leave the hotel halfway up the mountain, the road ascends through more pine forest on still damp tarmac. It climbs with a lot of twisting and turning, to keep a slowly but steadily ascending foothold, creeping up the steep valley sides and out of the forest into a barren glacier-ground valley. The straight line distance to the highest point of the road from the hotel is only 4km, but following the road to get there is a 13km trip while climbing another 2600 ft. It’s an awesome bit of tarmac (and holes and gravel and sheep shit). Yes the surface is pretty ropey, and yes several feet of the edge of the road is missing in many places with only the most rudimentary of warning signs, but this is a road with character. This is a road with sheep to dodge and sheepdogs to chase you (although they ignored dad’s Guzzi and chased my Tiger, maybe they didn’t like the big cat reference). This is a road that doesn’t do straight bits; doesn’t do mundane views, mundane bends, mundane anything. It is uncompromising in its sheer towering rockiness and its determination to get from A to B.
It’s bright sunshine up here by the time we reach the summit, but at close to 7000ft altitude the temperature is only a few degrees above freezing. The road only becomes passable around the end of June, just a month ago, and closes again in October. Then the snows are back and they set about building an ice hotel each year. There are a few huts hawking a selection of plastic crap that we don’t want and local delicacies that we don’t have room for. We settle for paper cups of the worst coffee I have ever tasted. There are a couple of chalets, a mountain rescue hut and the cable car station, none of which add much to the experience. Apart from the view back down the road, this place is the poster boy for the old cliché about it being about the journey, not the destination. So we get on with the journey. Which is incidentally through the longest road tunnel in Romania at 1/2 mile long. Wait, what? Call that a tunnel? I have been to Norway you know?
The other side is somehow friendlier. It starts steep and hairpin rich just like the north side but with more sun and greenery, then meandering in a less hectic manner down to the flatter stretches alongside the resevoir, lake Vidraru. On the patches of good surface the riding is a lot of fun but even on that there are many areas of sand and gravel washed into the road mid bend. The back wheel does its own thing over this a few times on the way down, but the front behaves itself and the back more or less follows eventually.
After several miles cursing when stuck behind camper vans then grinning like a loon while taking fleeting opportunities to blat past them at full throttle, the wooded road clinging to the resevoir’s edge comes to an end at an entirely predictable dam. Albeit an entirely predictable dam of huge proportions.
After the flat-ish ride along the side of the lake, the road is no longer constrained by water and resumes its plunge through valleys and gorges, very steep in places and diving across bridges over ravines. A final burst of nuttiness to remember it by.
The road delivers us to relative normality to enjoy a coffee under Poienari Castle. Of anywhere this place has the best claim to be Dracula’s Castle (despite the protestations of Bran Castle which rather fancies itself) having been Vlad the Impaler’s main fortress. Although he got about a bit and had plenty of fortresses so “main” is subject to interpretation, especially when tourist shekels are up for grabs. We look at the climb, look at the temperature (hot as balls), look at our attire, pay for our coffee and get back on the road having absorbed the impaler’s menacing influence from down here thank you very much.
The temperature climbs further as we shed altitude again and descend down through the town of Curtea De Arges, the small town that officially marks the end of the Transfagarasan. But as we leave the beating heart of Dracula country a dark, ominous thunderstorm fills the sky ahead from horizon to zenith, and the temperature crashes as cold air is sucked from altitude, spewing heavy rain and lightning into our path a few miles ahead, down the long straight road that takes us from this place. It’s powerful and fantastic and provides a wonderful, if intimidating exit from this powerful and fantastic part of the country, dripping with myth, history and legend.
The storm moves along just quickly enough that we only catch the back end of it, but it is still angry enough that I am grateful to have stopped to put on waterproofs and to have missed the ferocious looking central tumult. We head on down to the motorway that will take us to Bucharest to tick off another capital. The motorway passes Pitesti and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grimmer looking city. From here it appears to be made entirely of the most depressing grey concrete tower blocks imaginable. Across the other side of the motorway, abandoned collectivised farm complexes crumble slowly year by year. The stench of dead dogs with no road sense, rotting in the heat, assails from time to time as it has on more than one occasion here. No wonder they put Ceausescu up against a wall and shot him.
The land has very quickly become flat plain again after leaving the mountains and the ride to Bucharest is punctuated once more by the storms that boil up. The temperature falls and rises as we skirt them but we catch a good one on the way. My gore-tex jacket works well. The overtrousers not so much, having been stowed at the last petrol stop.
We hit Bucharest. It is a very odd city. There are more grim tower blocks on the long wide road entering the city, but one in five is modern, brightly painted and double glazed. The whole city is a mixture of delapidated, almost French colonial looking architecture, crumbling and mixed up in unplanned cul-de-sacs, and gleaming glass and concrete edifices befitting any modern capital. Most imposing by far is Ceausescu’s greatest folly of all, the Palace of the Parliament. It is the world’s largest civilian building with an administrative function, most expensive administrative building and heaviest building. No matter that both chambers of the Romanian parliament only take up 30% of it.
Construction on the grandiose project began in the early 1980s, when food rationing and power cuts were common. Some 9,000 homes were demolished, residents were given just days to vacate their homes, churches and synagogues were razed or moved, and two mountains of marble were hacked down for the 84-meter (275-foot) high palace to be built.
Ceausescu designed the palace to house the government and Parliament after the devastating earthquake of 1977 where swaths of buildings crumbled in the capital and more than 1,500 people died. A semi-literate son of a peasant, Ceausescu was nothing if not ambitious: He wanted the new building to withstand any earthquake and last 500 years. Huffington post
No wonder they put him up against a wall and shot him. Mind you, I bet it laughs in the face of earthquakes.
The strangest thing about this place though, this capital city, is that there aren’t enough people. Not nearly enough people. It has a 28 days later feel about it, or triffids if you are old enough. The wide boulevards and well kept parks are almost entirely empty. Even the main shopping areas only have enough people milling about for a small town on a wet Thursday afternoon in the UK, yet this is a European capital on a blazing Saturday lunchtime. We stop for a cold drink and to stretch our legs, then get out of Dodge. It’s just too weird.
Out of the city and back into big sky territory. Huge swathes of sunflower fields and giant storms slide by to the left and right of the motorway before we get absolutely clobbered by a downpour. The brutal deluge is on us so fast that there is no point stopping for overtrousers. I hit that can’t-get-any-wetter stage in about three seconds. Visibility is awful so we slow down and finally head off the motorway towards Calarasi, as an overnight stop off on the way to the coast.
This road takes us through some proper rural Romanian villages. Dogs wander, cows, goats and chickens graze and scratch just feet from the road. Horse drawn carts loaded high with straw are guided slowly down the road by wrinkled old men made of tan leather perched on top. People watch us curiously as we pass, travellers from another world off the beaten track like this. We travel through a village called Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) but it is indistinguishable from any other despite its grand name.
Just outside Calarasi the road is flanked by the biggest abandoned industrial complex yet. It’s another post apocalyptic scene without an apocalypse. I daresay it used to do something terribly important once, but any prior purpose is lost to me now. I wonder if picking Calarasi off the map as an overnight stop may have been a mistake. Whether it’s some broken down remnant of a town that used to serve this monstrous whatever it was, and is now like some kind of wild west ghost town.
My misgivings are happily, misplaced. Calarasi turns out to be a very pleasant, fairly busy town on the banks of the Danube, with a relaxed holiday feel to it and a pleasant temperature and atmosphere. We get a good room in a well appointed hotel for what have come to regard as a bit pricy – £32 including breakfast. But the air-con and shower are bliss after a long day on the very hot road.
We take a stroll up the main drag, practise our Romanian (pointing) in a general store to replace the shaving stuff and smellies I left in Deva, then grab beer and very good pizza down by the river. Dinner is pretty much a calorie neutral affair though as bastard mosquitoes take enough blood to offset anything we eat and drink.
Tomorrow – Black Sea baby!
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