A big hello from Bucharest, Romania.
Since the last time...............
We left Budapest, a trully fine city, and headed out to a campsite 100kms away. A big first day out, and the weather was not all it could have been. On top of this, Paul had been quaffing much of the dodgy Hungarian tap water and was on route from some illness. We reached the campsite in Solznok, where the woman informed us that we couldn't camp because it was raining. When we insisted that it didn't matter, we found ourselves the soul inmates on a large and desolate campsite. Paul promptly became properly ill, and didn't leave the tent for the next 17 hours except to relieve his bowels, which turned out to be a rather frequent occurance.
During the day that Paul was being ill, I attempted to fix yet another broken item of my wonderful, hard wearing bicycle. On leaving Budapest, which took 15kms to cycle out of, a spoke broke. This harks back to a broken spoke, fixed incorrectly by the Austrian cycle repair bloke, and tweaked by the inexperienced geography teacher from Darlington, England. It would seem that the wheel became unbalanced and the various tensions caused a spoke to break. After the usual tour of all the bike stores in town, Solznok presented me with the store that finally held spokes. I bought one spoke, and soon realised that I could fit it without the correct tools. So off I go to the repair guy in town, who informs me that he is too much of a lazy, good for nothing geezer, to be bothered to fix the spoke. Well, atleast, he told me he didn't have the tools, which is quite strange, given that he was a cycle repair man. Still, with no other options, and Paul finally well enough to travel, we set out across teh Hungarian great plains, a spoke down.
Now, anyone with a car will tell you that the Great Plains are fantastic, a wonderful wildlife haven and so on and so forth. Get out of the car and experience the wind. We cycled into a seriously strong wind, moving forward through really spectacularly dull scenery at under 12kms an hour. This we did not like. Soon enough though, the plains felt like a distant memory and we encountered the wonderous delights of Romania.
$40.50 it cost us to enter Romania, though others have paid less. Upon cycling from the border crossing to the town of Oradea we became aware that something was a little different over here. We cycled past 10kms of broken down, rusting factories where every pane of glass was smashed, past endless pipelines, rusting, leaking, insulation ripping off. And passed thousands of Dacia 1310 cars - old Renault 12's, horse drawn carts and general dereliction. And Oradea was as worn out and crumbling as the factories. All of the other former Eastern block countries we'd been through are really very close to western europe. Romania is not. In a country that proved to be the most tiring and difficult that we've been though so far, we probably found the evidence of the pre 1989 that we'd been looking for.
We took a route across Romania that took us off the main roads. Rural is an unstatement. We'd had threats of 'life as it was 100 years ago' from the lonely planet guide books before, but in Romania it appears to be true. We travelled through mountain villages where horse and cart are more normal that a car, where old ladies sit outside their houses and stare at you, and where petrol stations don't carry the usual complement of mars bars and red bull. In fact if you could find a petrol station you'd be lucky. More likely we'd stop in little stores with a very odd range of products. But it was different, not really so hard, just a change from the usual. We cycled through Turda, a town that we entered through it's industrial end, a street that looked like the end of the world. Huge factories belching smoke and all sorts into the air, dust absolutely everywhere, including my lungs, and dilapidated pipes hanging out of the buildings everywhere. From Turda we headed to Sighisoara, and as we neared Buccharest slowly, civilisation improved. We even found a restaurant in Sighisoara that had a menu, as opposed to the hotel restaurant in Carpeni where you either ate dinner, or you didn't. From Sighisoara we cycled to Brasov, apparent home of Dracula, though his association here seems slightly confused. This is the heart of Transylvania, and we passed castles way up in the mountains above Rasnov.
In Sinaia we took a rickety cable car up to 1400m, and checked out the fabulous Peles castle, belonging to the Romanian monarchy. Peles Castle featured such exquisite furniture, carpets, chandeliers and mirrors, amongst many other things, that it was strange to think of it is a country so poor as Romania. That may explain the guards outside with ak47 rifles.
From Sinaia we were just two days away from Buccharest. With much relief we reached Buccharest and our city break. 850kms from Budapest, 550kms in Romania, and during the cycling in Romania two more spokes broke, with no prospect of getting them fixed anywhere in Romania expect Buccharest. Ironically enough, the first cycle store we went to fixed our bikes in no time, perfectly and professionally, and for a very small amount of money.
6000kms into the trip, with two countries to go, the end is approaching, the going getting harder. Bulgaria, with it's cyrillic road signs, is the next challenge.
This update hardly does justice to the past 14 days, but maybe you get atleast some of the picture. Oh, and the film (video) is coming along nicely, so you will all be able to view our documentary, if we ever get around to editing it.
Until Sofia, adios...
Tom Moreton (tom@fatbeehive.com)