July 5-9 Baile Herculane to Bucharest

We have arrived in Bucharest! We cycled into the city yesterday in a convoy, with military precision, boxed in by our support vehicles, accompanied by a motorcycle policeman who enforced our passage through the many intersections in the teeth of excitable and aggressive drivers determined to break our formation. In contrast, pedestrians welcomed us with waves and cheers.

We are staying in a modern hotel opposite the presidential palace -- the second-largest building in the world after the Pentagon. Ceaucescu demolished a whole district of Bucharest and replaced it with huge Orwellian edifices, appropriately constructed in 1984. Some of us took a guided tour of the palace and its marble-clad staterooms this morning. The same people who had ooh-ed and ah-ed over the great European cathedrals tut-tutted over this extravagent monument to Romanian Communism... (also RC)... hmmm...

We left Baile Herculane on Saturday morning, continuing up the narrow Tolkien valley of the River Cerna, then a long steep climb out over a mountain pass, and once again into an open landscape of dried-up grasslands ringed by mountains. We spent that night in an old-fashioned hotel in Targu Jiu, a small provincial town. Even the small towns have pedestrian areas, and the citizens were out for a Saturday-evening stroll, as one might expect in Spain or Italy. They are well-dressed, the children on mountain bikes and roller blades (invariably, boys on bikes, girls on roller-blades).

Sunday's ride from Targu Jiu to Ramnicu Valcea was about 130km, with about half that distance on a loop through the countryside to the north of the main road, reaching deep into the Carpathian foothills. It was our greatest combination of distance and elevation to date (roughly equivalent to riding to the cottage with two Champlain lookouts on the way). Even the downhills were taxing, requiring contant braking to avoid potholes, dogs, pedestrians, horses & carts and farm animals. The experience was wonderful though, not just visually but with the sounds and smells of a lifestyle that has all but disappeared in the rest of Europe. The road through the villages blended into the farmyards, with cows, goats, donkeys and chickens wandering at random, and the ubiquitous stray dogs lurking under the trees. We had been warned about the cycle-chasing, ankle-biting feral dogs of Romania, but most are wretched creatures who retreat if you give them a good shout. (The stray dogs are another legacy of the Communist era, when dog ownership was banned). That night we camped on the grounds of a holiday hotel by a lake at Ramnicu Valcea, the approach swarming with the local population fighting for parking spaces and a swim on a hot Sunday evening.

We headed out innocently enough on Monday morning, expecting a hilly but straightforward ride along the main road leading toward Bucharest. It turned out to be the most terrifying day of the trip, with a steady stream of heavy truck traffic often passing within a few inches of our handlebars, and a shoulder consisting of a deep drainage ditch. We arrived at the lunch break in a traffic jam just before Pitesti with knees knocking, nerves jangled, pale beneath the tan. It turned out that the tour planners had miscalculated -- that particular stretch of road was covered on a Sunday last year. The section after Pitesti wasn't quite as bad, with some of the heavy traffic siphoned off onto another major highway, but the road was full of potholes and all the other obstacles we have come to expect -- horses & carts, dogs, pedestrians, etc. We camped at a motel in Dragodana near Gaesti. It was a truck stop, and the noise of heavy traffic and barking dogs resonated in our ears throughout the night.

Tuesday's ride to the outskirts of Bucharest was short and quite uneventful in comparison. The fields and the roadside were busy with the potato harvest and the sale of its produce. We had lunch at our gathering-point, and waited in the heat for the police escort to arrive.