Team Ballistic - Romania '05

Romania
2005
Day 1: Saturday:

I am awake too early, like a child at Christmas.
I arrive at the rendezvous at Squire’s Café 2 hours early.
Within an hour Paul arrives and we while away the hours fastening his rocker-covers back on. His bike has been serviced by a dealer from Southport that sells Superbikes…..if you catch my drift.
Brian arrives. Paul & Brian eat. We leave for Hull and the ferry.
We board the ferry and drink beer flavoured beverages.

Day 2: Sunday:

We roll off the ferry into Europort and ….”ping!” the strap snaps on my new Sidi Couriers. Golly! How unfortunate, I think.
Today is all about miles: We have banked on getting into the Czech Republic and Brian has booked us in at the “Hotel U Hada” in Zatec [it has a website] which turns out to be some 540 miles away. The miles roll by fast, though some find it tiring: zzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzZzZzZZZZZ

…….we take a portion of cake, frites & curry-wurst and gulaschsuppe that keeps us on schedule.
We arrive in Zatec, speed-stoned: I have recorded 122 mph as my max speed.
In Zatec I ask for directions from a man who has worked for 2 years in London. We are only 100 yards from the hotel that Brian has pre-booked.
We pull up outside the Hotel U Harda, in the town square and book in.
A precedent will be set: Maybe you have noticed? If you arrive by motorcycle at a B&B or hotel, you will always get a room on the top floor. So you, clad in enough Gore-tex to save you from that un-predicted Summer hail-storm can carry 2 panniers, 1 tank-bag and a helmet up 3 flights of stairs and burn 30,000 calories and melt the T-shirt and pants you were hoping to wear tonight. I think it’s some kind of hotelier’s joke.
Nice place though – despite European insistence that 1 double and 1 single is 3 beds. We drag 1 mattress off the double bed and I sleep soundly on it after being served splendidly with beer and food.
CZ border plod didn’t even want passports…..
Today’s check-list:
The Bridge at Njimegen.
122 mph
Zschopau – The MZ bike factory.
The Sachsenring.

Day 3: Monday:

After a buffet breakfast featuring coffee that smelled like Bovril we headed north-east out of Zatec. I am navigating and impress Brian [not] by finding the only stretch of motorway in the north of CZ. We head on through Teplice, Usti, Deci and Liberec towards the Polish border.
Northern CZ and Poland seem endlessly built-up, with low speed limits and trucks belching out smoke. I wasn’t really impressed. The welcome to Poland from the “ladies with very small clothes” was very…. Erm …insistant and my impression of Poland is of a very long jumble sale/drive-thru knocking shop. Joking aside the blatant sales pitch of the “small clothes ladies” is rather sad, we all agree later.
We ride roughly parallel to the border, stopping in Kreszow for lunch.

The last hour or so ride to the hotel is greatly improved, as the villages seem to thin out.
After 1 full hotel we find the Hotel U Kance in Lipova, back on the CZ side of the border. With a name like that we wonder if the owners are Cockneys?
For supper I dine upon steak in a white wine, leek, bacon & ham sauce and chips. A very helpful waitress refills glasses of beer as they are emptied. Apparently the Czechs are the greatest consumers of beer in Europe.
285 miles today.

Day 4: Tuesday.

After a traditional buffet breakfast we are off. The riding is better again today: Lovely sweeping and swooping roads.

It occurred to me, suddenly, that we had passed from West to East, through “The Iron Curtain” and into real “foreign” without a thought.
Visa cards are still swiped in petrol stations. Coca-Cola is still on sale.
People, it would seem are basically people and are fascinated by us on our expensive toys: Kids take pictures with mobile phones. People step out of door-ways and beam radiant smiles. There are no bandits. There is a genuine, good-natured curiosity everywhere we ride through.

We pass through Bruntal to Opava and turn south to Novy Jicin where Paul & I refuel and lose Brian. Seems he passed by while we were filling the bikes. We have to assume this and ride on hoping we are not riding away from a stranded Brian.
South again and then turning east at Valaaske Meziric onto the 35, we head towards the Slovak border. The roads are smooth and winding – Great!
We cross the border without drama and are rejoined by Brian who is parked in a lay-by further down the road.
After the town of Zilina we head off the main drag and into more scenic stuff. We carry on east but this time keeping on the Slovak side of the border with Poland. Soon we are in the Tatras mountains.

It’s a glorious sunny day and the scenery is becoming more rugged, 4,000ft above sea level.

We stop and Brian gets some cash from a bank in Stary Smokovec, before carrying on along the same course on the 68. At Lubotin we turn south-east to Presov to find somewhere to stay.
Despite a few laps of the town we find nowhere and carry on south towards Kosice, along the smaller road that shadows the motorway. It’s getting later now and it is very hot for us Northern European types. I stop at a likely looking Pension and enact a Pythonesque routine with the staff: In German I do the “Drei personen – drei betten” routine. They respond “Drei personen – ein zimmer” and I think great, a three-bedded room. I hand over 50,000 balloons or whatever the currency was and they tell me where the room is – Top floor, of course. In the room there is one small double bed and a large leather sofa. I look in the bathroom just in case there’s a bed in there and even examine the sofa to see if it will fold out into a bed.
Back at reception I ask why the room has only one bed. They seem to think it entirely reasonable that 3 men would book a room with one double bed. Our money is returned and we press on somewhat bemused.
We negotiate Kosice without joy and are about to continue south when Paul spots a small sign on an overhead gantry, which leads us to Pension Barca:

It is a very smart place, with tennis courts, swimming pool and secure parking. Out of adversity we hit lucky again and compared to what this kind of place would cost in the UK, a bargain. And we have a bed each!
We enjoy a few beers, wine and a good feed of soup and a “Barca Steak”, before turning in. It’s still really warm and I struggle to sleep until the early hours.
335 miles today.

Day 5: Wednesday

After breakfast we hit the road. Today we hope to reach Romania. Within a few miles we are at the Hungarian border. The officials are jovial and address me in English. They ask where we’re going and when we tell them, they seem to be asking us to take one of them back there. I laugh at their hilarious joke and we are allowed to pass.
On we cruise, through Tokaj, then Nyiregyhaza and along the 49…and suddenly we are at the H/Ro border. They want passports, bike registration docs and the almighty insurance green cards. Paul is subjected to extra scrutiny: They check frame and engine numbers, probably as his home address is pretty close to Merseyside and they know what Scousers are like?
We follow the main road towards Satu Mare. Talk about culture shock: This place is genuinely foreign, straight off: Horses and carts trundle along the highway, but with grizzled farmers talking on a mobile phones, which sums Romania up in a nutshell.
The driving is alarming too. The first suicidal overtake can be dismissed as a one-off, but then it happens again and again. It’s an absolute free for all.
In Satu Mare we stop and get some currency. This is fun too. There are 2 sets of notes. One lot will be marked as say 1,000,000 Lei and the other as 100. Both have the same value, they just wipe 4 zeros off for the newer notes.
We are trying to head east out of Satu Mare, with me “navigating”, but there seem to be no road signs and every so often a street is closed for repair. We trundle around for an eternity on the horribly bumpy streets, following crawling wagons, until finally I keep going in one direction ‘til we emerge from the city to the south.
I am knackered and we stop for a drink at a brand new café. Paul suggests Satu Mare is an anagram of “Satan’s Arse” and after 2 Stellas on an empty stomach and our recent traumas I am not inclined to argue the technicalities.

After a look at the map it looks like we can rejoin our intended route by following minor roads around Satu Mare to the south. We are about to learn about Romanian roads:

That is a good one. We followed several that went for miles, deteriorating into farm tracks and then into nothing in the middle of grassy plains.

We give up and return to Satu Mare and find the road east easier to find from this direction. It’s still a bit “Death-Race 2000” and a young lad on an MZ 250, decked out with panniers, top-case and windscreen joins in the convoy, his bike with rear suspension devoid of any damping, pogo-ing along. It’s a wonder his pillion passenger wasn’t sick.
We leave the main road again, rattling along on roads varying between bad and “are you sure this is a road?”.
As Paul and I reach the outskirts of Sighetu Marmatjei Brian catches us up and stops. He’d hit a whopper pothole and his top-case had ejected!!
We ride around town, getting separated before retracing our tracks and meeting back up and booking into the Perla Sishetana Motel, a fine looking place with an outside bar/restaurant. Well spotted “Trapper Paul”.

We naturally need to test the restaurant and bar, so have a jolly good evening and discover the local Murfatlar wines.
357 bumpy miles today.

Day 6; Thursday

Despite the temptation to stay another night, we decide to move on after BMW Motorrad Romania’s rapid response team have performed a modification to Brian’s top-case:

We head ESE through Visea de Sus and Borsa where we pause for a drink at a brand-new pizzeria:

As has become the norm wherever we’ve toured, if you’re the first customers to arrive they will crank up the sound-system or switch on the TV.
In this case we were assailed with a tirade of obscenity: I’m not an expert, but I’d guess it was a band called “Niggers with Attitude” – a hard core gangster-rap outfit that belted out lyrics about “mother-funsters” and “bitches” and “putting caps in yo ass”. The staff plainly didn’t have a clue as to the translation and I do believe Romania is still quite a conservative/religious place, despite the incident.
With blushing cheeks we carried on, up and over the Prislop Pass at a height of some 1416 metres or 4,200 feet from the GPS. A few spots of rain fell on my visor.
We passed through Vatra Dorne and onto a fantastic biker’s road to Borca and on round the lake zvoru Muntelui.

By now we were looking for a place to stop, but the town of Bicaz seemed industrial rather than leisure orientated, so we turned SW up the 12C signed for “Lacu Rosu”.
The road started off running through villages and past mining works and quarries with yet more crawling wagons, but suddenly turned into the most beautiful gorge:

(I got up early and went back and took these pictures the following day – Hence: No luggage)

Eventually finding the “Pension Floare de Colte” – photo by R.T.Fahtee:

Nice one Bri!

Paul & Brian went to sort out our digs and turned up trumps: They had no free rooms but we could use an apartment behind the Pension. It was superb: 2 bedrooms, 1 with a double, which I, given the choice eagerly accepted and another smaller room (sorry guys) with 2 single beds.
207 miles.
After a quick shower and change we trooped round to the “Restaurant Grumpy”: Food, beer and wine were splendid, particularly Brian’s mixed grill for 3, but the waitresses had definitely graduated from snooty school with honours and would not smile ‘til we paid our bill of almost £25 and left a 10% tip.
A Dutch fella and his missus came over: He professed to be a biker and he and his wife were living and working in Constanza on the Black Sea coast. I was still clinging to the “paddle in the Black Sea” plan, but Dutch bloke insisted this was not reason enough to go and that there was “nothing to see”. He grasped the concept of “ticking-off” the Black Sea plodge and still said it wasn’t worth it….Shame!
As an aside: It was quite embarrassing that his eldest child of almost 5 or so could speak a little English……Are you the English bikerz?
Great night’s sleep in my double bed, in my own room.

Day 7: Friday:

Rejuvinated by a good kip I take a quick run back down the gorge for snaps, before perambulating across the road for a breakfast coke. The Restaurant Grumpy doesn’t open ‘til 9 and damnit, we’re mileage men and there’s ridin’ to be done!
We saddle-up and trundle out of town. Lacu Rosu isn’t a pink lake, but looks a bit Evergladey with tree stumps poking through the misty, flat-calm surface.

{I’ve realised I should put in a note here: All Romanian roads are crap, but I’m already starting to forget. Think of the worst road you know near you and imagine if it would be a relief to get back onto that. Imagine what riding on very, very bumpy roads for 200+ miles a day does to your bike and you. Concentration losses result in cataclysmic crashing and clonking of suspension and the breath being knocked out of you.
Okay. That’ll do for now.}

We head SW to Gheorghen and on south to Miercurea Ciuc. Skinny’s fuel light comes on after 261 miles, so I, leading stop and put in 17.75 litres at a brand-spangly new petrol station. “Kesh!” demands the woman when I offer my Visa card. I ponder that there must be a subsidy for opening a petrol station/mini-mart, as Romania seems to have more petrol stations that England.
Skinny gets 66.75mpg.
We keep on south through Sfantu Gheorghe (This Gheorge bloke must’ve had a bicycle?) and finally into Brasov. We’ve been recommended to stop here by “gavinbell” and “MrIfan” of the GSer site. Unless I’ve got my wires crossed Gavin’s missus (or missus to be) has something to do with Pension Steijings in Brasov.
We stop beside the town’s Suzuki/Ducati dealer “Motto – Asphalt Aggression” and dine at “Val’s Fast Food”.

Being adventurous types we select cheeseburgers and frites. The cheeseburgers contain both the obvious ingredients and chips. And we get a portion of chips each too. We do not complain….and the beer was nice.
After lunch Brian consults at the bike shop next door and they know Gavin and Mr.Ifan. They ring the Pension Steijings and give us directions there.
We get there. It is on a hillside road out of town and unfortunately fully-booked. It is the weekend, you see? We didn’t.
We are pointed a ways down the road to Pension Warthe, It looks brand-new. It is expensive: It cost 2,000,000 Lei (£40) for a twin for 2 nights, but it’s worth it.
We book in relatively early for us – It isn’t dark.

Brian performs emergency surgery on his hugger which sounds like a jack-hammer at tick-over and I grab some beauty sleep.
Brian returns from his travails and tells me my beauty sleep hasn’t worked.
Suitably refreshed we wander back up the lane to Pension Steijings for supper.
We take a seat on the terrace. (The white building in the background is our hotel)

Relaxing........