I won't suger-coat this. Today was 7 hours doing a spin class in a sauna while miserably
listening to The Rest Is History podcast.
If that's your kind of thing then let's get started.
I have a little guide book which I used to help to plan this route. I've brought it with me and I'm ripping out
the pages I no longer need as I go — weight is everything remember. On this stage, the author says “There is
nothing of interest for the tourist or cyclist for 96 kilometres”. He is right.
The Anna Christina was quiet and I slept well apart from waking up at 4am stressing about whether or not my bike
bag will actually make it to Bucharest.
This is not the time or the place to go into the woeful tale of DHL's customer service. Suffice to say
that I have spent at least an hour every night trying to get this bike bag delivered and failing.
Hopeless call centres, laughable “AI powered” chatbots, telephone numbers that don't work if you dial
them from outside the UK. As you might imagine, this is not what you want when you are trying to recover
from a hard day cycling. My lovely family stepped in to take the mantle and fight DHL from UK soil.
I felt bad about this because part of the point of these trips is to be self-sufficient. But I was at
the
end of my tether.
Breakfast at the Anna Christina was the standard three star fare but amusingly served in a dungeon under the
hotel. Apart from the excellent coffee machine, there wasn't much that was appetising except a couple of jam
doughnuts. Big shock of the morning was that almost all the overweight families that I'd seen round the pool
down
at breakfast were British! To me it seems like a "long run for a short slide" to get all the way to Bulgaria and
sit around a crappy pool getting shitfaced and smoking but…YMMV.
We stuffed bad breakfast into our face holes together and watched Bulgarian TV which appeared
to consist of a
German Police Show dubbed into Bulgarian incredibly badly — indeed so badly that a German cop would say a
single syllable word and a stream of Bulgarian would come out of the TV. The dubbed TV Cop excitement was
punctuated every 5 minutes with adverts where meaty and moustachioed Bulgarian men would sell…meat. Surreal.
It was still cool as I rolled down the boardwalk along the bank of the Danube. I passed the Baba Vida Fortress which is the big
thing in Vidin. It has the usual story about Bulgars, Ottomans and Hapsburgs kicking the
crap out of each other over hundreds of years for the ownership of it.
To be honest, it isn't much
I retraced my steps (pedal revolutions?) back to the New Europe Bridge. Due to the proximity of the bridge,
Vidin is ringed with lorry parks and, with the heavy density of truckers comes the inevitable heavy
density of sex workers. Young and not-so-young women sat topless on discarded sofas by the side of the road
selling themselves at 8am in the morning. It was a sad sight.
I rejoined the same bike path onto the bridge and crossed back into Romania. This was the last time I would see
the Danube all day. My route took me inland.
The customs post was as crazy as yesterday. There were huge queues of
impatient drivers — who got more impatient when I
weaved my way through to the front of the queue.
The folks sleeping on the ground on the left must
have had a hard night.
There was some reasonable cycling infrastructure to get me into Calafat and then my route took me onto the RN55A.
I was dreading this since the previous A road had been a roller-ball-derby of huge lorries and narrow bike
lanes. However, as I probably could have worked out, the density of heavy
goods vehicles on the RN56A yesterdat was due it
being the main road to the bridge.
The RN55A was incredibly quiet. No lorries and very few cars. In fact, a very large proportion of the
traffic was consisted of horse drawn carts.
Maybe a quarter of all vehicles were these.
The RN55A links together the poor and predominately Roma villages which dot the
road every five or ten kilometres.
Between the villages the road is long, straight, hot and flat.
This picture taken at 9am. I would be seeing a
lot of this.
Occasionally I would see a little old man on a bike ahead and I would up my pace so I could sweep
past him with a cheery wave.
Cheerily waving cyclist approaching on your
left…
I had thought that the low temperatures would continue and I could make some serious distance without
dehydrating but by 10am the temperature was over 35 and by lunchtime it was 40+. It's hard to describe how
debilitating it is to realise you've got 100 km to go and it isn't going to get cooler until 7pm.
I'll spare you the photographs of the road which I took over the subsequent 6 hours. They all look identical. A
long, hot and straight road disappearing off into the heat-hazed distance.
One has to be extremely careful doing exercise in this sort of heat. Without enough liquid, one is in danger of
terminal heat stroke and therefore I was very diligent about seeking out refreshments. I had worked out that
each
village had two betting shops, two cafes with beer-bellied blokes hanging outside drinking beer and…a ProfiLoco!
Profilocos are probably the equivalent of the Nisa Locals that you get everywhere in the UK. Big advantage is
that they're air conditioned and they take Apple Pay.
A typical ProfiLoco stop.
Even if I had enough water in my water bottles, I would stop at each ProfiLoco and get some fresh cool
water and chuck out the disgusting 40 degree liquid that remained in my water bottles.
Some observational work in the ProfiLocos suggested that every man over the age of 20 has a beer belly and
every woman between the ages of 15 (!) and 25 is pregnant. The beer bellied guys have the disturbing habit of
rolling their T-shirts up over their bellies when they get hot. This is really not a good look. I checked
my Rapha kit for sartorial elegance before venturing into a shop. I don't want to let the
cycling side down.
This is a very poor part of Romania — I would discover one of the reasons for the poverty at the
end of the ride — and that makes everything more challenging. For the first time I locked my bike before going into
a supermarket for food and drink and took my passport with me. It doesn't feel…safe…which is sort of fair enough.
I know that
my bike only
cost me £1,000 to buy the bits to make it but it still looks like an intergalactic space cruiser next to the tumbled
down knock-off Chinese mountain bikes that most people ride here.
In between the long dispiriting kilometres of hell there were some interesting sights. Amidst the
tumbled down but occupied cottages which looked like this…
Lots and lots of these
…there would be a very thin smattering of houses that looked like this.
Bling palace
I mused on the provenance of the money which allowed people to build these houses amid the
squalor. The words “organised” and “crime” floated through my head.
The weirdest thing about these houses is that they had golden plaques on the gates which were Armani or
Louis Vuitton branded. Some examples below:
Ignoring the blatant trademark violations, it's hard to understand why people would do this. I realise that
people wear Ferrari baseball caps or Burberry scarves to signify a tenuous association with a luxury brand
but what does this say? “Hey! I've got a big house and I also get my underpants from Armani!”.
However, it was mostly just non-stop grinding rural poverty with the occasional ProfiLoco.
There were lots of horse drawn carts carrying everything from a Roma family of 9 to a consignment of scrap
washing machines. They travel a little bit slower than a hot sweaty tired cyclist and so I would pass them
with a wave which became increasingly perfunctory as the long hot day continued.
Grumpy hot cyclist passing on your left.
The prevalence of horse drawn transport adds another cycling hazard to negotiate.
At least it's concentrated in the middle of
the lane
In every story ever told, the hero has “the long dark night of the soul”.
In cycling stories the long dark night of the soul generally
happens with about 2 hours to go to the end. You've had the fun of the cooler morning. You've had the excitement
of getting to 🎵half way there, livin' on a prayer🎵 but then the motivation and will-power drains out of you.
Even a ProfiLoco stop for food doesn't help much.
This was surprisingly good. Hurrah for
ProfiLoco.
The digital thermometer on my Garmin hit 42 and I was reduced to cycling for a couple of kilometres
and then sheltering in the shade of a tree next to the road.
I did this every couple of k. It was grim
stuff.
As I got closer to Corabia my speed seemed to drop proportionally. At 25 km to go I was going at
25 kph, at 20 km to go I was going at 20 kph. Maybe I would go slower and slower as I got closer and closer. I spent
some time trying to work out this slightly more sophisticated version of
Xeno's
Paradox but, to be honest, my brain was buggered and there's no way I could to do an infinite
summation in my current state.
This photo was taken 6 hours after the previous
near-identical photograph.
I did manage to keep my speed up above 20 kmh and so I finally reached the outskirts of Corabia and here were
some of the reasons that this region was so poor. For a good two or three kilometres, there were abandoned
industrial plants and buildings
Lots of these hidden behind trees
Huge numbers of these
During the 70s and 80s, the mad bad bastard Ceauçescu decided that Romania needed to be an
industrial powerhouse. Why? His Stalin complex probably. Or as an illiterate failed shoe maker's apprentice he
probably didn't know any better. We will be seeing more of his (and his insane wife's) work as we progress
through Romania.
He bought outdated — and in many cases non-functional — industrial machinery from other communist states and
paid for them with grain and food. The machinery was installed in badly built factories in stupid places. all
the agricultural production had to be sold abroad to pay for this and he thus
managed to engineer a famine in a country which is
one of the most fertile farming locations in Europe. As a result of this, in
the black market, the unit of exchange was the chicken
thigh. You'd give the party functionary a bag of chicken thighs to get your kid into a school or get your
driving licence. Why thighs? Because the rest of the chicken was exported…
The truly crazy thing was that Ceauçescu then decided that the reason why the Romanian economy was tanking was
that there weren't enough people. He instigated a huge state programme to encourage women to have as many
children as possible. Contraception was not just discouraged, it was illegal and punishable by hard labour
prison terms. At the height of the AIDS crisis, condoms were unobtainable. This natalist policy resulted in the
Romanian Orphan Crisis which we all
found out about in the West when he finally was deposed and executed in 1989. A truly tragic sequence of
events. It is deeply surprising that Romania is managing to slowly drag itse lf back from these historical
catastophes.
When the cold winds of western capitalism swept through Romania in the early nineties it was painfully obvious
that Ceauçescu's industrial vanity projects were wildly inefficient and they all closed. EU structural funds
have softened some of the impact in the rural areas but the farms are now so huge and mechanised that there's
not much work. It's hard to see how this will change until the generational migration from the land to the city
is completed.
It was a sobering last few kilometres through Corabia as I contemplated these catastrophes.
I'm staying at the Sinner's Hotel in Corabia. Before anybody gets too excited about what's to come, it appears
that the owner's name is Sinner. It is a very strange hotel and has the vibe of a badly built modern
tourist hotel in
Africa. It is located miles away from the centre of Corabia but I didn't care by this point.
There was nobody on the desk when I arrived but there's an attached pizza joint next door so I explained in
sign language that I wanted to get into the hotel and the woman running the pizza joint phoned a bloke who
turned up and proudly talked me through an unnecessarily sophisticated code based key system.
No plug in the basin and no heated towel rail but it'll do.
I know it doesn't look promising but after today,
anything will do.
According to Google Maps the nearest restaurant which isn't the pizza joint next door was a 20
minute walk away. After the exertions in the heat, I could barely walk to the room and so
it was an easy choice to have pizza. It would have been
nice if the restaurant wasn't playing atrocious euro pop at deafening volume but I can
put up with a lot for food and
beer after a long day in the saddle.
Beer, pizza, blog authorship. A classic
combo.
Today was really difficult in places. Possibly cycling across southern Central Europe in August was
a mistake. Possibly taking up riding a bike was a mistake. Possibly the mistake is being so bloody minded about this
that
I'm not going to stop now.
Tomorrow is sadly a virtual carbon copy of today. 158 km without much climbing in the same easterly direction
towards Giurgui where I cross the Danube for the final time and end in the Bulgarian town of Ruse where I'm
sleeping tomorrow night.
I think I can do it — I know that there's going to be a ProfiLoco every 20 km and therefore I'm unlikely to
die.
However, these sorts of days are just about getting from A to B. If I can get tomorrow done then I've got one
shorter cycling day in Bulgaria (woo hoo!) and then a final day cutting east to the coast on the Black Sea.
Can't stop now.
Stats:
- Distance: 157km. I can't really do any more than this in the next few days. This is the limit.
- Climbing: 526m. Absolutely nothing compared to the distance but the little rolling hills are a
trial in the heat.
- Bike: Still working well. A few worrying creaks from various places but still getting the job done.
- Body: I'm keeping hydrated so I am in no mortal danger. My feet are blistered, my hands are
totally numb and the less said about my soft tissues the better. Finally there's a strange “twang”
going on in my Achilles tendon which doesn't bode well for the next three days.
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