Day 14: Silistra to the end

The last day ended as it was intended to with a stunning view over the Black Sea. However, today also had a variety of hurtful stings remaining in the tail end of the journey.

That's the Black Sea that is.

To get to the Black Sea I had 136 km to ride and, more worryingly 1,369m of climbing to do. Given that every stage so far had been pretty flat I wasn't really prepared for the climbing. 1,369m of climbing isn't a Mallorca 312 but it's not nothing and, despite today being cooler than the previous few days, it was still going to be 36 degrees for most of the day. Eeek.

Here's the first “interesting fact” of the day. Last night I had done some calculations on the flow rate of the Danube (“Big D”), found some stats on the width and depth of the Danube and made some heroic assumptions about the shape of the river bed. An isosceles triangle with a base of the width of the river and a height of the average depth of the river seemed to be the best model. It turns out that the flow rate through the Danube is well documented at various points. More heroic — but broadly justifiable — modelling assumptions led me to discover that if I had dropped a stick (pooh-sticks!) in the Danube from the Chain Bridge in Budapest as I had crossed it on Day 4, the pooh-stick would — very roughly — be floating past Silistra as I left this morning. Cool eh?

The Hotel Drustar lived down to its undeserved five star rating by not serving breakfast at 7am when I was ready to leave — despite reassuring me twice yesterday that breakfast started then. I had to put on my Not Angry But Very Disappointed Eyes™ and eventually a waiter rustled up some weird fried croissanty sort of things filled with melted cheese. What is it with the Slavs and their penis shaped food filled with spurty melted cheese? In a strong field, this was the worst breakfast of the trip.

I rolled past the sad and despoiled pool “complex” mentally rehearsing my booking.com review for the Drustar and burping horrible cheesy burps.

The border between Bulgaria and Romania crosses the Danube here — no doubt as the result of some blokes with fabulous moustaches and top hats drawing a line on a map in 1918 or 1945 or something. There was a sad and quiet border crossing personned by a very happy and loquacious young Romanian chap who looked a lot like a famous pop star of the 1980s. We chatted about liquid intake and cycling for a bit and then he waved me off. He must have knocked off his shift about 15 minutes later because he sped past in his car on the road and gave me a toot and a cheery wave.

Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling cheery at that point. As soon as I got into Romania, I was on the DN3. The low number had filled me with some trepidation but it turned out that for at least 100 km, this road was relatively quiet and safe. What made me less cheery was this monstrosity rearing up out of the vineyards that dominate this part of Romania.

Moscow suburb in the middle of endless vinyards.

I would have taken more photographs but decaying apartment blocks on quiet roads are a home to packs of scary dogs who fancy a nice bite of juicy cyclist leg. There were a number of dog-defying sprints during my first hour

My friend Saeed suggested I read The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinnes. It's a very personal and harrowing novel set in the last days of the Ceauşescu regieme. Here is an extended quote where he's talking about the results of the forced relocation of peasants off the land into tower blocks like these.

To balance out the dream of the old city, Leo made me visit the new Bucharest, where whole peasant communities had been forcibly relocated to the cement outskirts. Families were broken up and moved into tiny flats, often without water or electricity or even windows. Many took their animals with them: goats and pigs rummaged around the rusty metal and broken concrete, shat in the corners, rutted in the courtyards. Cockerels, disorientated, crowed beneath builders' floodlights in the dead of night and hens yaffled in the scaffolding. Old men with narrow eyes and calloused hands peeled potatoes and old women sat on deckchairs in peasant dress, watching the cranes stalk the strange horizon, listening to the mixers and diggers, new beasts lowing in the asphalt fields. It was a tragic transplantation. Many wandered off, back to the land, or to where the land had been. They were found, half-mad, walking the motorway hard shoulders; or, if they ever made it out of the city limits, weeping over their flattened shacks, their lost livestock. The few who stayed on the industrialised farms took jobs as machine hands or in abattoirs, or staffing the vast hangars where dioxin-filled pigs were shackled to the ground and fattened on darkness and fear.

Come for the cycling, stay for the searing commentary on one of the darkest periods in recent history.

The cycling was going pretty well despite the occasional high speed sprints past the roaming packs of feral dogs. I felt quite strong and, unlike previous days, my heart rate was high. There was a downside of it being cooler in the morning. All the exercise made me sweat as usual but on previous days the temperature had been high enough to evaporate the sweat quickly. Today it was a little cooler and so sweat was running into my eyes and making it impossible to see. I had to break out my casquette which I had carried for just this eventuality. I certainly hadn't carried it for its sartorial panache.

Last view of Big D.

On the way out of every village and town in Romania there's a post like the one on the right. It says “Drum bun” which means…”good way” or “good road”. I fervently hoped that the next 120km were going to be a drum bun.

My first stop was planned for the first village on the route which was called Băneasa. I had thought that the villages I rode through a few days ago were run down, I was wrong, they were Hampstead compared to Băneasa and the rest of the villages on this route. Băneasa was dominated by Roma who, like the Jews, have suffered appallingly in just about every conflict for the last 1,000 years. It doesn't look like it's getting much better for the Roma. There were a lot of physical deformities and many people were not just short but stunted.

This ProfiLoco had a very strong bunker vibe to it.

I locked my bike, took everything valuable with me into the shop and waited for 30 minutes in a queue while every transaction was minutely examined by tiny shreweish Roma women in traditional dress in case the bar code reader had screwed up.

I scored three bottles of water and a couple of cans of coke. The guys you can see next to the door in the pictures obviously make money by recycling plastic and cans. They were very aggressive and surrounded me wanting my used bottles and cans. So much so that one guy snatched my coke can out of my hand as I drank the last dregs. I might have been 30cm taller than everybody else in the village but there was a lot more of them. I don't often feel threatened in my life but there was a strong "fuck off" vibe and so I fucked off out of Băneasa pretty quickly.

The hills kept coming. None of them “a real leg breaker” as our favourite Eurosport commentator Sean Kelly would say but they were relentless.

I realise with a little bit of sadness that the ghostly and lugubrious voice of Irish cycling legend Sean Kelly hasn't made an appearance in this blog since last year in Sweden. There were opportunities today for him to witter on “Kirk's givin' it won hundert percent on this climb. Oi tink it's going to be a difficult one to keep this up when he's sufferin' majorly in the heat”. That's enough from Sean for this year.

Up hill and down dale I went. My average speed was a pathetic 18 kmh — you just don't make enough back on the downhills to make up for the miserable progress up the hill.

The land heated up and, as is the way with metrology, air flowed from the cool Black Sea where I wasn't towards the hot interior where I was. By 11am, there was a 25 kmh boiling-hot headwind which would be my constant tormentor until I eventually arrived in Constanța. During the Falklands Crisis, Denis Thatcher once said that the Falklands were “miles and miles of bugger all”. I rode for hours through miles and miles of bugger all but in temperatures never experienced in the Falklands.

It was like riding across the high plains of Spain.

The elevation profile was unforgiving.

None of these are individually big but all the little ups and downs kill you

I stopped at crappy general stores to pick up water or something to eat because the spurty cheese filled croissants were a long long time ago. These stops were also an opportunity to have a much needed rest. In a town called Viişoara — yes, two “i”s in row and I will definitely have to do something on the Romanian language in a future post — I ate the best Twix of my life. It was the sort of day where eating a Twix can be the best part of the day.

On the positive side, the DN3 was pretty quiet. A few lorries, vans or cars every couple of minutes. However, when a Romanian driver sees a nice straight and empty road, he's hardwired to put his foot down to find out how much speed he really can get out of a 15 year old Škoda. The answer is something around 130 kmh which isn't really much to write home about compared to proper cars but it is a terrifying experience when it comes up behind you when you're battling a 25 kmh headwind up a 4% slope.

“Let's open the throttle on this puppy and see what she can do”

I encountered some road repairs which consisted of painting some liquid tar on the road, throwing down some gravelly stones and expecting the traffic to bed it all in. If you're in your BMW X5 travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, this isn't much of a problem but if you are the aforementioned hot and sweaty bloke fighting the headwind up hill it has two side effects. The first is that you get hit by little bits of gravel travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light — and those little buggers really hurt. The second effect is that the gravel is new, sharp and almost perfectly designed to give you a puncture and, predictably, I got a puncture. However, Tyre Jizz™ worked its magic. A couple of revolutions of the wheel — which, to be completely transparent, did spray sealant all over my legs — and the puncture was repaired.

I know there are some readers of this blog who are very sceptical about the value of the new tubeless technology for bike tyres but they are very wrong. I have cycled more than 7,000km on tubeless tyres now and have only had one major failure which was my own fault. You run your tyres at lower pressure and therefore everything is a bit more comfortable, you can bump up and down kerbs because pinch flats don't happen and punctures repair themselves. They are magic.

After what seemed like multiple windy, hot, sweaty and painful lifetimes I finally got to a more downhill section on the descent down to the town of Murfatlar. On the way down in a white BMW 3 Series skidded to a halt in a lay-by in front of me. I was expecting yet another confrontation but it turned out he just wanted to get out and inspect the sad, overheated, topless sex-workers plying their trade along the DN3. Whatever it was he wanted, it wasn't there and soon afterwards he was spraying me with high velocity gravel as he headed off to the next lay-by. I said a lot of rude words about this man and not because of the gravel.

I was travelling downhill because I was coming to this.

It's just a canal right?

No, it's not just any canal. It's the Danube Black Sea Canal.

Starting in the early 1950s, the communist leadership in Romania came up with a plan to dig a canal direct from the Black Sea to the Danube cutting a couple of days off transiting through the Danube delta. It is said that Stalin suggested to Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej — the communist thug that preceded Ceauşeceu — that this would be a good plan. They gave some picks and shovels to political prisoners — no surprise that a large number were Jewish I guess — and told them to get on with it. This is a canal that required more earth to be moved than either the Panama or Suez canals. Estimates vary but it's certainly true tens of thousands of people died in horrific conditions during the first attempt to build it. In some accounts, more than a 100,000 Romanians were killed in this first attempt to build the canal.

The project was discretely shelved reputedly at the behest of Stalin in 1953 — maybe Stalin didn't think enough people were dying. As was the way for Stalinists, somebody had to take the blame for not building a giant canal with wooden shovels and a show trial executed a few hapless functionaries. When Ceauşescu got his venal hands on the Great Helmsman leadership prize, this sort of thing really appealed to his crazy megalomaniac side and he borrowed some money from the IMF, bought some proper equipment and started building it in 1973. It was completed in 1987 at a cost of over 2 billion dollars but the canal brings in about 3 million euros of revenue a year. A waste of money and a waste of lives.

Imagine digging this by hand with shovels.

Time to get back to the cycling. It was about 30 km from here to Constanța. How hard could this be? I'd be sitting next to the Black Sea with a beer in my hand in no time.

This was not going to be the case. The nice DN3 joined the main road from Bucharest to Constanța and everything got serious and scary. This road was a dual carriageway with no hard shoulder and little or no cycling infrastructure anywhere else.

An example of shit cycle paths. Bumping up and down junctions every 50m is a pain.

Eventually I had no choice but to brave it on the dual carriageway. To be fair to them, the lorry drivers were pretty good and generally pulled out into the outside lane when they went past. The car drivers, not so much.

There was a hard shoulder for about 2 km. It was full of death nuggets and therefore unusable.

The DN3 intersected with the Bucharest-Constanța motorway in an unbelievably dangerous and scary junction. Imagine trying to cycle through the M11, M25 junction. It was like that.

Easily the worst bit of the entire trip.

Even when I got into Constanța, it didn't get much easier. People were parking along the inside lane of the dual carriageway and so I had a choice: hug close to the cars and risk getting “doored” by somebody opening their car door in my face or move out into the outside lane where I was risking getting “squished” by somebody watching porn on their phone as they zoomed through the 50 kmh zone at 100. This was not an easy choice. You become very aware that everybody else on the road is travelling very fast with a solid metal exoskeleton protecting them and you're not travelling very fast sitting on top of a few wisps of carbon fibre held together with resin…

Constanța has the familiar “doughnut of shit” around the outside. Decaying apartment blocks, cheap supermarkets, tyre stores and car washes. I wearily wound my way through traffic just wishing for it to end and finally the core of the city appeared and it all got a little easier. There were quieter tree-lined avenues with only a few potholes to keep me on my toes.

And then…there was the Black Sea.

Beautiful enough to make me forget about 2 hours of hell.

I had a beer to celebrate.

I've drunk more beer in the last 12 days than I've drunk in the last five years. I love it.

Rather annoyingly, this turned out to be a premature celebration. My route had taken me to my original hotel called the Hotel Cherica. I'd cancelled the stay here when they started sending my crypto scams and phishing emails from their official booking.com account. Mad. My new hotel was only 10 minutes away but I had to cycle carefully due to the beer.

My new hotel was the Olympic Boutique which is everything that you would expect a “boutique” hotel to be in a middle income country. Self check-in and poorly executed funky decoration but it had a balcony overlooking the cool hipster street in Constanța so all's well that ends well.

Pretty nice to be honest

As I sat down to write this post, I was sad that it's all over. Despite this trip being considerably more challenging that my previous trips, I enjoyed doing it most of the time. These trips are a way of seeing places that you just can't do on weekend city breaks or on a traditional holiday.

Tomorrow I have to get to Bucharest somehow. My bag has made it to the Marmorosch hotel and I have a flight booked to get back to the UK on Saturday.

There will be no more cycling oriented posts on this trip but there will be two more general ones. I'm looking forward to my day in Bucharest and my obsessive searching for weird and off-the-beaten-track museums and sights will no doubt make for a fun read.

There will also be a wrap up post about the whole trip. It's too soon to do it now.

Stats:

• Distance: 136km. Not massive but into a headwind, that's a lot.
• Climbing: 1369m. This is a lot.
• Average speed: 17.2km/h. Pathetic on the flat but with the wind and the hills, all I could manage
• Bike: The bike has made it. A thing I made out of bits I bought from china has taken me this entire way. One problem with a slipping seat post but apart from that, faultless. I am so pleased.
• Body: Not much power left in my legs. The SudoCrem strategy avoided any undercarriage problems but my hands are properly buggered up. Hopefully the nerve damage will repair itself.

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