This was a bit of a transition day to be honest. Lots of grinding out kilometres in the baking hot heat but I was
happy to
get it done.
The day ended here:
Country number five.
There was a lot of riding to do before I got there though.
Since we’ve done archeology and geology, it’s time for a little bit of literature.
I like to read up about the history of the places I’m riding through before I set off. It gives you
context I guess. The history of the Balkans is…outstandingly complex. From the pre-Roman times to the recent
past, it’s a story of hordes of people with incomprehensible names and unclear motives rampaging up and down
the Danube killing lots of people on the way. I’d read three or four books and really was none the wiser.
However, my friend JJ suggested Misha Glenny’s book The
Balkans 1804-2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers. It is very much better
than anything else I’ve read and it’s my bedtime reading on this trip. Get it if you’d like to understand
this strange and messed up part of Europe.
The other book that I highly recommend is Paul Kenyon’s book Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania. Romania’s
story is pretty much a non-stop tragedy from the times of Vlad the Impaler to the current day and is
filled with characters of quite unparalleled badness. This is an astonishing book which I will be using
as the source material for a lot of comments about Romania as I cycle through it. Buy this book. You
won’t regret it even if you’re not planning to cycle through Romania — and, let’s face it, if you’re
following this blog and have all this pre-warning of difficulties, you’d be absolutely bonkers to
attempt to cycle through Romania.
I slept like a log in the Hotel Clipa. The room was quiet, the air conditioning was superb and, for the first
time on this trip, my alarm woke me up. Even my kit had dried despite the lack of a heated towel rail.
The breakfast was three double espressos and a couple of cheese rolls. I knew I had a lot to get done today so I
really wanted to get on my way.
Rolling back down to the river in the cool early morning was lovely.
Cloudy and cool. This would not last.
Unfortunately, the first part of the route was on the RN56/E70. Yes, this is the main route along the Danube on
the Romanian side. Single lane on either side and a lot of lorries.
Not ideal.
The first 5 km were pretty terrifying but soon the RN56 split into the RN56 and the RN56A. Weird. But it turned
out that the RN65A was little bit quieter although it didn’t have as wide a “bike path” next to the road.
You start to learn the aerodynamics of big lorries. As they start to pass you there’s a region of low pressure
which sucks you towards them — eek!! — then a region of high pressure which blows you towards the crash barrier
and finally a region of low pressure behind the lorry which gives you a little boost of speed. However, if the
lorry is carrying sand, that final low pressure region is like being in a sand blaster. A thorough exfoliation
for free!
Although the sun was getting up, I was in good spirits and the occasional huge lorry thundering past didn’t
intrude too much. The villages got sparser and sparser and one of them was called Simian and I have tried for 7
hours on the bike to come up with a good blog joke about that and failed. I’m sure there’s something
involving
Hartlepool but I
just can’t get it to work.
After about 20 km, there was another junction. The RN56A split into the RN56A and the RN56B. My route
followed the RN65B and, extrapolating from two data points, I guessed that the RN56B would be quieter still.
Difficult choices…
A sign just beyond this one said that it was 85k to Calafat on the RN56A — effectively my end
point — but according to my Garmin, my “quieter” route still had 120k to go. Hmmm. I could shave nearly 35k off
the route by staying on the busy and more dangerous road. The heartfelt pleas of family and friends (“
Can I
have your jeep if you die?”, “Is the life insurance policy up to date?”) convinced me that I should
do the sensible thing.
The RN56B was indeed very quiet. It wound its way up some bluffs onto the plains above the Danube — or “Big
D” as I’ve taken to calling it. Most of the corners on the road had a sad little shrine to the people who
hadn’t taken the corner correctly. For some not very difficult to understand reason, these really affect me.
If you zoom in, you’ll see that it’s not just
testosterone that kills teenagers.
Once up on the plain, it was like this. For a really long time. I’ve spared you the endless
photographs that I took which look…exactly like this.
Straight hot roads with “Big D” down there on the
right.
I dropped down to the river to cross at the Gogoşu power plant which is located on a branch of the Danube. By
this point I’d ended up on the RN56C! The extrapolation model worked well, this was a really quiet road.
It was like being back in the Elektrotechnikai
Múzeum in Budapest.
Very soon after I crossed over the hydroelectric station,
I discovered the downside of quiet country roads. Dogs which aren’t scared of traffic.
Three vicious junk-yard dogs came haring out of a mouldering scrapyard and chased me. The dogs and I were both
doing 35kph for a long period of time as they snarled and snapped around my wheels and calves.
Spot the dog moment in my power and heart
rate.
Finally the dogs gave up the chase. My heart was 150bpm, I was hot, sweaty, I was down to my last water
bottle and the air temperature was 38 and it wouldn’t drop below this until I got
into the air conditioned room in the hotel in the evening.
I went off-route into a small village called Balta Verde which seemed to be the only place in 20 miles
which might have somewhere to buy liquids. Very quickly when you get off the main roads in Romania it
becomes very rural.
A flock of geese on the road.
There were geese, there were horse drawn carts. It was rural and ,if you secretly think that “rural”
means “smells of dung”, in this case you are absolutely spot on.
The topless tubby bloke look is
very big in rural Romania.
Just when the village was about to run out, I saw a supermarket! Hurrah. I dashed in and bought two bottles
of peach iced tea — I told you the addiction is getting strong — a bottle of water and an ice cream. The
queue in the supermarket was huge. I stood there for 25 minutes as the person on the till laboriously
scanned every item and then checked that the scanned number was the same as the barcode number…on every
single effing item. Given that almost everybody in the queue was buying 3 litre bottles of unbranded
beer and a packet of cigarettes, you’d think that they would have learned the numbers by now.
25 minutes wait for this. A poor haul.
I chugged the iced tea,
poured my melted ice cream down my throat and filled my water bottles with the water. Ready to go once I had
negotiated the horse obstacle.
Who leaves their horse in the middle of the
road?
I was back on the plain pounding out some hot kilometres when I took the first drag from my full water bottles.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that the big bottle of water I had bought was cherry flavoured.
I couldn’t afford to not drink and therefore I spent the next hour squirting minging lukewarm cherry stuff into
my face hole and grimacing every time.
The farms and fields here were absolutely enormous. I live in East Anglia and so large fields are sort of the
thing that is done there but here the fields stretch to the horizon. Maize and sunflowers exclusively in fields
that are easily 4 km by 4 km. That’s 1,600 hectares for a single field.
I know that efficient agriculture feeds the world but the traces of the
smaller farms that didn’t make it to be the “Mr Big of
Corn” are all over the landscape shown in the tumbled down and
abandoned buildings that line the road.
There’s a lot of this.
And a huge number of these.
Just after I took this photograph something happened that really drove home how far I am away from the UK both in
distance and culturally.
As I pounded along in the 40 degree heat in the middle of nowhere, a VW Sharan stopped at the side of the road
about 200 metres in front of me. I’d noticed it going past me unusually slowly. A middle aged couple, man
talking on his phone,
woman smoking. I was a bit worried that I’d done something wrong and there was going to be a confrontation.
However, this was not going to be an argument. The woman jumped out, opened the boot, took out a burlap sack
and shook out a puppy onto the side of the road. She jumped back in the car and they sped off.
I stopped and took a picture of the puppy which was cute in the way that 6 month old puppies are…but deleted it
because…it wasn’t going to end well for that dog. Abandoned amid endless monoculture maize fields without food
or water at least 10km from human habitation. I know I’m a “dog guy” and therefore hard wired to say this but
who the fuck does that sort of thing? Hard not to imagine your own dog in that situation…and impossible to know
what to do. I got back on my bike and rode very angrily for a long time.
I found another supermarket after some angry kilometres which was a much happier retail experience and in
which I managed to buy real water. I poured the disgusting cherry stuff away down a drain
Profiloco are my go to chain now.
The RN56C turned into the RN56B and still the traffic wasn’t too bad — excepting the BMW
drivers who lived up to their caricature by careering along the straight roads at near-light speeds. Bastards.
Then the RN56B turned into the RN56A and things got serious. Time to turn off podcasts and music and
concentrate. On the A roads, there is a small strip which is designated, presumably, for cyclists.
Everything on the right hand side of the line are
our lands Simba.
Once you get your eye in, this isn’t too bad. You just stick to your side of the line and ride. The lorry drivers
pull way out when they pass you as do the car and van drivers. The BMW drivers don’t. Bastards.
Then the RN56A turned back into the RN56. The rule appears to be that the busier the road, the wider the
bike lane. By now I was supremely relaxed about this type of riding but not relaxed
enough to wear headphones because
it requires a lot of concentration and I’m not suicidal.
This is a piece of cake now.
The temperature was still 40+, the road was hot but the gradients were easy. The reason they’re
easy is — oh the irony — it’s easier for the lorries.
I was heading to
The New Europe
Bridge where I could cross into Bulgaria and, obviously, a very large number of lorries from places
as far afield as Sweden, Poland and Turkey were also heading to the bridge. About 5k from the bridge start there
was queue of lorries. So the single lane each way road was effectively blocked in one direction.
5 km of this.
Cars and vans (and hot sweaty blokes on bikes) had to try and avoid the oncoming cars, vans and lorries in the
small bit of road you can see on the left here. It wasn’t too bad on a bike although the heat coming off the air
conditioning units on the cabs vents out to the left side and therefore the temperature was even higher. It was
like a sauna.
All the customs, passport stuff is on the Romanian side of the bridge and, being a bike, I had the advantage of
slaloming through the huge queue of cars and vans right to the front of the queue. Had I cared, I almost
certainly could have learned some rude words in Romanian and Bulgarian as the frustrated and annoyed drivers
shouted loud imprecations about my queue jumping but I think I was justified in doing this. I’d put in the
effort
personally to get here. They had just pressed on their accelerators in air conditioned comfort.
I approached the border post with a bit of trepidation but everything was sweetness and light. I gave my
passport to the Romanian border guard with whom I had a nice chat and then he passed my passport to the guy next
to him
who was the Bulgarian border guard. We exchanged views on the madness of trying to cycle from Budapest to
Constanțan and he
made a big play for me to go through Bulgaria rather than Romania. It was friendly and both smoke and porn free.
At the third booth, a blousy woman laughed at me when I asked if I needed to pay and then I was on the
bridge.
This is not the Pančevo bridge. The Pančevo
bridge has a lot to learn.
The bridge was constructed between 2007 and 2013 — I really recommend clicking on the
link to find out more:
it’s an
interesting story. The most important thing for me was that it was constructed during a
more enlightened period where
architects thought “hey, maybe bikes would like to go across in relative safety”. The bike path was beautiful
and the views of “Big D” were stunning.
This is a big big river. Maybe I should call it
“Big Big D”.
As I descended off the bridge, I had 10 km to go. I’d added the diversion to Vidin in Bulgaria as a little
fun diversion from four continuous days in Romania. It added 15 km to both this day and the next but, in the
comfort of my office at home clicking on the Garmin Connect app, it didn’t seem like much. I rather cursed
my decision as I ground out the last 10 km on the quiet roads along the Danube towards Vidin.
I saw my first EuroVelo 6 sign since Serbia. There’s literally no signage in Romania although, to be fair,
what are they going to do? As a result of the interplay between geography and economics, the hard
facts of riparian agriculture means there’s…one big road.
Like seeing an old friend.
Vidin itself is surrounded by lorry parks — presumably for the bridge crossing — and as you get closer to
the centre, there’s the usual serried ranks of communist era apartment blocks. I wound my way through
neighbourhoods which even Cumbernauld residents might turn their noses up at. I wasn’t feeling
terribly confident about my hotel choice but then I burst out of the crumbling-concrete zone and out onto
the boardwalk along the banks of Big D and there was my hotel.
I’d spent the extra energy to do 15 km extra to Vidin mainly because there was nothing available in
Calafat on the Romanian side of the border. There were a few properties on booking.com which said
“managed by a private host” but I’ve tended to avoid them. Somehow I think I would turn up at some
random dude’s house and the whole family would be round the dining room table dressed up for their
Saturday night satanic ritual and I would never see Sunday. This is probably deeply unfair to
“private hosts” on booking.com but…better safe than sorry. I’ll have to do that extra 15k back
tomorrow as I cross the bridge back into Romania.
A very Austrian feel.
The Family Hotel “Anna Christina” Vidin or СЕМЕЕН ХОТЕЛ АННА КРИСТИНА as it is known here — we are back in
cyrillic land — is very funky. A combination of old world charm with a crazy swimming pool out back where scores
of enormously fat families are sitting around getting shitfaced and smoking.
I should point out that I’m really deep in smoke land. I haven’t seen a single person not smoking in
any situation indoors or out where they could be smoking. Throughout Romania and this bit of Bulgaria,
smoking is just a thing that everybody does. Just assume that everybody I interact with is smoking unless I
tell you otherwise. It’s like being trapped in 1970s Glasgow.
However funky the Anna Christina was it has turned out to be great. Maybe that’s because I paid 60€ for the
VIP room? On the plus side the room was absolutely enormous, had a huge bed, serious air con, 6 giant towels and the
plug sockets didn't turn off when you leave the room. On the downside, no towel rail, taps with a confusing API,
and no plug in the washbasin. What is it with hotels in this price bracket and not providing
plugs for the hand basin? I didn't have a washbasin with a plug any time during the previous 8 days.
Every time I had to
fashion a plug out of wadded up toilet paper or an upturned cup just so I could wash my cycling kit. Grrr.
Searching along the Danube walkway for some food, I found a huge Bulgarian restaurant.
There was no menu in English and
nobody spoke any English except for a Moldovan waiter who translated Bulgarian into English via Russian.
I managed to score a Wiener Schnitzl and some beer which was a win for me. As I looked around there were
probably 200 people here and every single one of them over the age of 14 was smoking furiously as they eat. It’s
a different world.
Apart from the puppy dumping incident today was a good day. I was now acclimated to the heat a bit more and I was now
relatively relaxed about cycling on the busy roads — not complacent…definitely not complacent. I was really
loving this
trip despite it being great deal harder than the Warsaw trip. Poland is Denmark compared to Romania.
Tomorrow I go back across the bridge and join the RN56A/B/C and continue along the northern banks of the Danube.
I realised as I crossed the bridge today that I only have four more days of cycling left. I felt sad about that.
Stats:
- Distance: 151km. This is as long as I want to do. The next four days should all be shorter.
- Climbing: negligible although didn’t feel like that on the short steep hills.
- Average HR: 115bpm. Max 158 (dogs)
- Average Power: 110W. That’s about right. Max power 740W (dog sprint)
- Body: Most things holding up although my hands are really screwed. Not easy to type since they’re tingling
all the time…
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