I’m in me Dacia, I’m comin’ at ya.
Welcome back.
Current Ramble date: 21st July 2018.
Current Ramble Location: Craiova, Romania
Meh.
I decide I need to visit the pharmacy. My tooth is giving me a bit of pain and I’ve got a mouth full of poxy ulcers. There are miscellaneous red blotches from various encounters from bees, wasps and general flying things.
Wear and tear to be expected I suppose five and a bit thousand miles in
So despite the comfy bed, with some disrupted sleep I was up early and had a bit of a currency audit this morning. So I pop out to the pharmacy for tooth and general other stuff, which I find courtesy of a very helpful pharmacist who finds me fairly amusing.
Centre of town. Lot of concrete. Sort of like Basildon.
I’ve also gone out chemist hunting equipped with my Bulgarian Lev, Georgian stuff and a twenty pound note I found stuffed in my passport holder I didn’t know I had. I present this to a woman at an exchange place. The Bulgarian Lev and the Pounds are happily exchanged. When I show her the Georgian stuff, she just laughs at it. Ah. That’ll be a no then for that.
Back to the hotel for a great breakfast. Genuinely so. Actual bacon. Yes, actual bacon, and crispy bacon at that, not that weird stuff. And nice coffee. Very enjoyable. Being spoiled.
[Edit from the future: A couple of months ago, I was in a café in the Barking Road, and was chatting to the charming Romanian girl behind the counter. It transpired that her sister was a receptionist at that hotel, and as far as I could recall, she did look like the receptionist as I remembered, unless my beer-faddled mind is playing tricks on me. Entirely possible, but small world nevertheless]
Back to the plot. Our bikes have spent the night wedged in against a wall, on a road by a church, but entirely unmolested in deepest darkest Romania. But isn’t it a den of thieves? Maybe not eh.
That said, I did see a JCB working with a UK number plate on it during the day which seemed a bit, erm, unusual.
Anyway I’m rambling.
We leave the comfortable base of Craiova and hit the road. Quite a nice day now. Stop to adjust tyre pressures where a helpful petrol station chap helps out.
Out into the country highways so I drift away a little bit and ride along. This is abruptly disrupted when I’m almost totalled when going to do a steady overtake coming towards a town. As I’m getting ready to get on, some crappy Opel Zafira comes hurtling past, barely controlled by a little old man in what is sort of like a pork pie hat, with a car piled full of people. By my reckoning it was doing 80mph comfortably and barely slowed down in the town. Not dead, so you have to sort of laugh. A really important reminder that you need to keep your eyes behind you.
After we pass through the town, and head into some twisty stuff I breeze past the same Zafira which is now at an entirely different pace. Generally, Romanian drivers don’t seem to have worked out that you can operate the accelerator and use the steering wheel at the same time and thus in a straight line the country is basically a drag race at Santa Pod, but when you come to something vaguely curved at all – there be dragons – and its all emergency stop territory and tootling round like Mr freakin’ Magoo. And to make life a little simpler, it doesn’t seem to matter what sort of car it is, from MOT failure Lada, to modern common or garden Dacia, through to pointy shiny Audi with pretend/bona fide* gansgster (*delete as applicable) at the wheel.
All a bit comical as it happens, well, as long as you survive to laugh about it anyway.
The day is basically 250 odd miles of back roads and a mountain pass, punctuated with tractors, odd contraptions and pork pie hat wearing lunatics.
Coffee stop.
All important. We almost had to go and rugby tackle the waitress to get it, but it was worth it.
We decided ride the Transalpina today, originally the plan was to take in again the Transfagarasan and the Transalpina, but we thought that would be a bit too much.
Searching for a sticker.
Found a sticker. I think it’s getting to the stage where the stickers are holding the bike together.
We headed South to North on the Transalpina and I really enjoyed it, probably more than the Transfagarasan back in 2012. However, the weather was kinder on this side.
But it was really very very enjoyable.
A great picture of me, up on the Transalpina, with somebody else’s bike.
A great picture of Brian, up on the Transalpina, leaning on someone else’s bike.
That’s quality photo bombing there ballistic…
You know, Romania really has a bizarre assortment of roads from the great to the awful.
When heading out and past a reservoir, we climb up one of the most pot holed, knackered and nasty pieces of road we’ve come across. The road is truly humped. And, lo and behold, a few kilometres on we come across a group of road workers marking a white line down the middle of it. Incredible!
But then, thirty kilometres down the road we’re treated to some of the most excellent roads we’ve come across on the trip- awesome tarmac. Just plain bloody weird.
The evening is spent in Sighisoara. A nice place to stop and interesting place to visit.
Oh.
We find a decent dinner and have a wander about before heading back to the hotel for a nightcap.
Blood bank? Arf arf (I can hear the groans from here..)
The lows and highs of an interesting day