Day 15: Constanța to Bucharest
The Olympic Boutique was a lovely place to stay. Quiet, cool and it had an outstanding breakfast. The coffee shop downstairs did double duty as the breakfast location for the hotel and hence the coffee was superb.
I packed my bean and saddled up for nearly the last time and rode from the old town up to Constanța railway station. I had been worried about getting to Bucharest by train for the last few days. This train trip with the bike was second only to the DHL Bike Bag Omnishambles on my list of “things to worry about that I can't control”. In reality, the single most important “thing to worry about that I couldn't control” should have been not joining the sombre ranks of Romanian Road Kill but eventually you get numb to that risk.
The lovely lady in the ugly train station building hummed and hawed about the possibility of taking a bike on the train but she eventually found me a ticket on a slow train leaving in a couple of hours which, she assured me, would allow my bike to travel. I would have to pay some unspecified amount of money — in cash — to the train guard but what's a little bit of low grade grift between friends?
I had two hours to wait so I explored the train station
Having explored the station and taken a picture of a train I now had one hour and 55 minutes to wait. Even the stunning Zürich Hauptbahnhoft is a bit of an awful place to hang out hence you can imagine that a Romanian railway station was a very bad place to hang out. The toilets were a horror show. I walked about the environs of the railway station, sat in a park for 5 minutes until it became clear it was infested with biting flies, read some signs in Romanian and tried to work them out. Time dribbled by dispiritingly slowly.
With 30 minutes to go my train clanked and shuddered into the station. The slick express service didn't take bikes and thus it was going to be a second class seat on the stopping service for me. I got on with my bike, found my seat and looked around me. This was a train designed and constructed by a worker's committee in 1952. Uncomfortable seats too close together, unfinished bolts and screws, a wheezing air conditioning system that blew hot air…
It was absolutely rammed to the ceiling, all the passengers were watching TV or TikTok on their phones without headphones, everybody had giant suitcases and I was convinced that at some point somebody would bring on goat.
We set off and the train guard arrived. It turned out that the unspecified amount of money was 15 LEU. The notes — roughly equivalent of £2.50 — disappeared into a back pocket and the deed was done. I could have asked for a receipt but I didn't think that a receipt was part of the transaction.
All of life in its rich tapestry was there. A tiny but hugely fat couple argued vehemently for three hours in hissed undertones that spoke of deep seated hatred and betrayal. A giant suitcase fell on a dwarf's head. A tiny dog tried to pee in my bike helmet which I had inadvisedly put on the floor. Flatulence and body odour fought it out for supremacy. Walnutty grandmothers stuffed sweet fatty treats into the gobs of their spherical grandchildren — no doubt whispering in their ears about the privations of rationing as my grandmother had done to me when I was a young child. In my grandmother's case she was talking about 1943, in their case they were talking about 1989. A disabled man showed delighted children that his right leg appeared to have developed so that the knee went the wrong way. He whizzed up and down the aisle of the carriage on a stolen scooter in a most disturbing way. I've said this before but “we're not in Kansas now Toto”.
In the “miles and miles and miles of bugger all” between Constanțan and Bucharest the only notable thing was the Cernavodă Nuclear Power Plant. It produces 20% of all the electricity in Romania and the surprising thing about it as you rattle by on the local train is how small it is. I remember the Chernobyl complex of multiple reactors being much larger. The other surprising thing is that both the Americans and Canadians were cool with giving reactor technology to a murderous Stalinist dictator. I mused a bit on this and also what the optimal density of large scale reactors are on a site but I didn't get very far because the bloody dog tried to pee in my hat again.
After multiple subjective lifetimes, the journey was over and we arrived at Bucharest Nord.
Getting the bike down the “Gordon Jackson stairs” was a bit trying. The bike is absolutely filthy and the chain looks like a stretch of Prince William Sound in 1989. This is not a problem when you're riding but when you're manhandling the bike past suitcases, people's legs and your own legs, you leave a lot of traces of your passing. I had “chain tattoos” as did a lot of random people's suitcases and socks.
In a surprising departure from my standard operating procedure, I had actually thought ahead and had set up a route in my Garmin from the railway station to the hotel — no buggering around with Google Maps at difficult junctions for me. As I found out later, this day was a big national holiday — Assumption Day I think — hence the roads were actually pretty quiet despite being big and broad.
Last year I had sent my bike bag to Stockholm with DHL. Pretty much hassle free. This year's bike bag delivery would be very different indeed. I'd put an AirTag in the bag so I could track what was happening.
A bloke turned up in a DHL van 2 hours earlier than the advertised “one hour pick up slot” and bundled the folded up bike bag into his van and it was off. From Cambridge to Wellingborough, short stop in Eastleigh in Hampshire, back up to Birmingham and then to the East Midlands airport. Where it stayed for a couple of days before flying to Budapest and an overnight lorry trip to Bucharest. I was feeling good about this.
Just as I actually started my cycle from Budapest I started getting emails from DHL saying they couldn't deliver the package. There was a link to click but it led to some branch of DHL which wasn't the right branch. There was a telephone number but it was only able to be dialled from numbers within the UK. Every night for a week I spent 45 minutes to an hour trying to sort this out. I tried their laughably bad AI ChatBot service — although to be fair to DHL, all AI Chatbots are laughably bad — which would ask me to rephrase my question three times before suggesting that I go to the web page which…contained the link to the AI ChatBot. I phoned DHL Romania who didn't pick up for three days. When they did they told me there was duty to pay. Sure, I'll pay it I said. Ah but you can only pay it with a Romanian Bank Account…
A week passed, I got stressed about this. My family offered to help and didn't have much luck either. Finally I phoned the Hotel Marmorosch and threw my bag problems into their lap. They were superb. They put a rocket up the arse of DHL Romania, paid the duty themselves charging it to my room and the bag arrived two days ago 14 days after it was sent. DHL were terrible and without the support of a luxury hotel and their great staff I would now be out on the streets of Bucharest working out where I could buy a bag.
Right, got that off my chest. I had booked my flight back to the UK on Saturday and therefore everything was drawing to a close. Tomorrow would be explore Bucharest day. There's a lot of interesting stuff to see and fans of my crazy museum visits are in for a treat.
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