Day 9: Vinci to Drobeta-Turnu Severin

What a day! Probably one of the most beautiful and scenic rides that I have ever done. As such, this post is going to have an awful lot of photographs in it. Apologies for the travelogue style today. However, as always, it wasn’t without its interesting moments of pain and suffering.

It wasn’t a terribly restful night. The Kod Dzimija didn’t supply sheets and, although there was air conditioning, it was of the “amazingly loud for 2 minutes every 5 minutes” variety. The other guests were having a party downstairs with the chain-smoking family until about 12. I woke up at 2 thinking about digraphic languages and couldn’t get back to sleep for ages.

Ok, I realise this is very geeky but I really have been thinking about Serbian as a dígraphic language and was thinking about what a giant pain in the arse that must be for Serbians. The same language but with a one to one correspondence between different symbols that sound the same and spell the same words. I was wrong. Think about the word “nag”, “NAG” and “NAG”. In the first two, I’ve used the upper and lower cases and in the last a handwriting font. In none of them are the letter shapes the same but from an early age we learn that there’s many “shapes” that make the “g” sound of the voiced velar plosiv.

Eventually I got struggled out of my sheetless bed at 6:30. I showered in a minuscule dribble of variable temperature water and headed down to the deserted but still extraordinarily smoky lounge. Breakfast was nowhere to be seen and neither was anybody else. So I fixed my seat post in the porch in the quiet morning.

This was where my bike lived overnight. Nobody stole it because they were too busy smoking.

There was a really beautiful bike path which ran the 8 km from Vinci to the main town of the region, Golubac. There I negotiated a chicken sandwich and two coffees from a couple of fat guys running a cafe. They were, like everybody else I met in this part of Serbia, smoking “like lums” as my grandmother used to say. When the coffee and sandwich arrived, the coffee was so weak it was transparent and the sandwich had a slightly suspicious “ashey” taste. Oh well, it was energy I guess.

After Golubac I was going into the Iron Gates.

Like this. But a lot less throney.

We’ve done linguistics, we’ve done archeology, now it’s time for some geology.

The Iron Gates are a sequence of four gorges running through the Carpathian Mountains. Reputed to be the longest and deepest gorges in Europe, they’re a geological marvel.

“How does a river cut a gorge through a mountain chain?” I hear you ask. Very good question and prior to the discovery of plate tectonics, it was a bit of a mystery. The Danube has been around for a long time flowing (very roughly) in the direction it currently flows. Some time around 30m years ago, the African continental plate smashed into the bottom of Europe and created the Alps and the Pyrenees. It also caused the land around what is currently Albania, Serbia, Romania to buckle and created the Carpathian Mountains. This happened over millions of years and as the land rose up, the Danube just eroded it away and kept flowing in the same direction. Hence the gorges.

The Iron Gates were one of the “proof points” for plate tectonics. Now you know.

There’s one road on the Serbian side and one road on the Romanian side. These roads are relatively new since, when the gorge was flooded, the level rose by 30m, submerged the old roads and new roads had to be created. The whole thing was done to tame the very difficult navigation conditions through the gorges — and also to create electrical power as we shall see later.

The road and the road surface are modern and perfect

Because everything was flooded when the dam was built, the Yugoslavians and the Romanians built new roads just above the new level of the river. They’re new, well surfaced and beautiful. There is some controversy about the people who were displaced by the flooding. Unsurprisingly given the history of this region, they tended to be Turks, Jews and Albanians. They tended to be told to piss off home since they didn’t have houses any more.

This sort of topography means you need tunnels and bridges occasionally. Bridges are cool, tunnels are not.

The Golubac fortress and tunnel 22. An easy one.

There’s 22 tunnels between Golubac and the dam. Some are easy like the one above. 50 metres long and you can see the end from beginning and so you’re silhouetted against the light for the cars coming behind you.

Others — in particular tunnel 14, 6 and 4 — are more than 250 metres long and have bends in them. They’re unlit and they’re terrifying. I had bike lights but, given the quality of Serbian driving, lights didn’t fill me with confidence. At each tunnel, I would wait at the entrance looking back down the road until I could be sure(ish) that there weren’t any cars or lorries coming and then I would sprint like a mad sweaty version of Chris Hoy for 300 metres to get to the other end. I put out some pretty impressive power numbers on those sprints.

How fast can I sprint 256 metres? Pretty fast it turns out.

In general, the traffic on the road was light. I’ve certainly had worse on the MA10 in Mallorca which is another contender for the “most beautiful cycling road in Europe”. There’s a 50 kph speed limit on the road which is routinely ignored, in some cases by a long way.

As people sped past me I shouted “fifty kilometres per hour?? MY ARSE that’s fifty”

Amongst the broadly respectful van drivers and holiday makers there was the usual sprinkling of young men thrashing crappy 20 year old Renault Scenics like they were in a rally.

Driving shit cars at speed has the all too predictable and depressing outcome that results in a sad procession of poignant memorials alongside the road. Each one a granite plaque with a name, a picture of a bloke in his twenties, a mouldering teddy bear, dying flowers, some car keys and other mementoes as a tribute to the indirect lethality of testosterone.

A typical example out of hundreds on a 70km section.

It’s hard to imagine but I was once 20 and did stupidly dangerous things because of…testosterone and girls. I survived but could easily come unstuck in a car or on a rock face. I felt for these guys.

The road continued and the views were spectacular.

This was what I thought the entire trip would be like. It was glorious.

I did nearly 50 km before I stopped. As you can see from the photographs, it was actually cloudy this morning and the temperature was in the mid 20s. I hadn’t realised just how debilitating the heat had been in the past few days so I really flew along the road.

I’d planned to stop and load up with water and something to eat in Donji Milanovac which looked like a reasonable place. Unfortunately all the bars and cafes in town didn’t take cards and there was no way I was changing more money into dinars given I was 40 km from Romania. Therefore it was back to my default haunt. The garage. They always take cards and, as long as you don’t mind eating and drinking surrounded by the smells of exhaust fumes and gasoline, they’re ok.

2 litres of water, iced tea, two ice creams and a lot of exhaust gasses.

It appears that my addiction to peach iced tea has returned with a vengeance and a new one is building for ice cream. I had consumed liquids and carbohydrates and it was time to continue riding up the road. “Up” is the operative word here. Some places are just too difficult to get tunnels through and so you have to ride over the spurs. The gorge narrows here to its narrowest (120m) and its deepest (90m — the deepest river in the world!).

Spectacular. Worth the “tunnels of death” experience.

The road climbed higher and the thermometer joined it in sympathy. I was trying to have a “restrained” day without any stupid efforts — except the tunnels of course — so on the hills I just slammed it into the granny gear and trundled up at some embarrassingly slow speed. Old ladies out walking with their shopping trollies passed me sneering “Is that all you’ve got?” in Serbian. When you’re in the middle of this sort of trip, there’s no point in stupid heroics on the hills. You’ll just pay for them later.

Well that’s a bit pants despite how lovely the view is.

As I neared the summit, I could look over and see the famous rock carving of Decebalus.

Showing a sequence of photographs is there to highlight how insignificant this sort of thing is when it’s set against the natural grandeur of nature. It’s the same thing with Mount Rushmore. When you get there you say to yourself, “they’re awfully small”. Anyway, Decebalus is a folk hero to Romanians because he fought off Trajan when he was crossing the Danube. Or something: the history here is mind-bendingly complex. He was and still is a really important figure for Romanian nationalists. Even during the communist era, Ceauşescu listed him as one of the 10 greatest leaders of Romania — guess who was number one eh?

The Rock Sculpture was paid for in 1994 by a Romanian nationalist businessman called Drǎgan. He seems to have been a pretty nasty piece of work of which the best example is that he inscribed his name next to Decebelus’s in the sculpture. Like Serbia, nationalism is still very strong in Romania. However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. There will be a lot more chances to talk about the history of Romania in future blogs.

What goes up, must come down and, given how good the road conditions were, the descent was an utter joy. I’m sorry to say that I broke the speed limit of 50kph by quite some margin as I freewheeled down.

There were lots of signs to look at and I stopped at a few that interested me.

Trajan was a dude. Looks like he’s taking a selfie.

The Danube was considered the frontier of the Roman Empire and Trajan built a road along the southern bank which is sadly now flooded due to the dam. There’s a tablet with his words inscribed on it which was saved from the flooding and moved up the valley to avoid the water. Impossible to see from the road so you’re just going to have to look at the sign about it like I did.

Sometimes these trips have some strange surrealists moments. You shake your head and think “am I really seeing this or is it some early symptom of fatal heat exhaustion?” Round one corner I saw a strange bouncing black ball. I had to stop and take a picture of it. Why? Well this won’t mean much to many people but if you’ve ever played Half Life 2, this reminded me of the bouncing mines that blow you up on the “Coast Road”. God I loved that game.

Niche. Sorry.

Before I had really registered it, the Most Scenic Road In Europe ended and I was crossing the Danube (yet again) on the top of the Ðerdap power station, dam and lock complex. Built during the communist period during a love-in between the two regimes which didn’t quite fit into the Soviet sphere. Yugoslavia because Tito was experimenting with market reforms and Romania because Ceauşescu was a mad monster who was intent on creating his own Stalinist cult of personality. It still produces about 2GW of power which is shared equally between the two countries.

Its other main function was to make the Danube a lot more navigable. Which it did but, if you’re going to dam a river to make it navigable, the ships have got to be able to get through the dam.

There’s another one this size on the other side to get to a 30 metres lift.

Riding on top of a power station is not terribly picturesque but since I’ve take photographs on every Danube crossing so far, it only seems right to do the same here.

Like cycling through Mordor.

The Serbian border post was pretty perfunctory but on the Romanian side I got told off by a guy who gestured with a gun that taking a photograph was forbidden. He then smoked aggressively at me while he was checking my passport and pointedly stopped half way through to text somebody and watch some porn on his phone. It took two cigarettes and what sounded like three orgasms before I got my passport back. You’re not in Kansas now Toto.

I’d been looking across the Danube to the parallel road on the Romanian side thinking “jeez, that looks pretty busy. Lots of lorries, glad I’m not on that side of the river”. Yes, you’re right. The road I was joining was the DN6 — a suspiciously low number — and also the E70 route. The “E” routes are the main lorry routes across Europe and this one was exceptionally busy.

It was only 10km to Drobeta-Turnu Severin (DTS) so I would just have to grind it out — there literally was no alternative. There was a hard shoulder on the edge which was about 75cm wide and if I stuck in that, the lorries definitely missed me by…oh…25cm. Strangely it didn’t feel as dangerous as the tunnels. The lorry drivers are professionals and generally do a good job.

After 5km the lorries were directed off onto a proper motorway and I had the, now much quieter, DN6 to myself. The road into DTS passed by decaying communist-era ship yards and smelting works. It was pretty grim. Although a nice bike path appeared I trundled through town thinking “this is pretty run down”.

My hotel is the Hotel Clipa. It’s an oasis of desperate hipster desire in the middle of houses made of communist concrete and corner shops that look like they’ve been transplanted from Malawi.

Be glad this isn’t a video. The music would make your brain melt.

The room is really much better than I had hoped. Comfortable bed, bed linen, towels and air con and a shower that both work. There’s a non-functional heated towel rail but you can’t have everything.

Who needs a heated towel rail when you’ve got this?

Call the Midwife was playing on the TV when I arrived.

This was really awfully nice given it cost 40 EUR. The Kod Dzimija needs to up its game.

It was the traditional end to the day: an hour of fighting with DHL about my bike bag which is now in Bucharest but needs to have some duty paid on it. Thank you Brexit. Oh thank you so much. Everything washed, everything charged up for tomorrow and time for some food.

No Maiden’s Delight for me tonight.

That was a fantastic day. Something that I wouldn’t ever have had the chance to see without going through all the pain and suffering of the last few days to get to this point. I know that nobody reading this blog is thinking “oh wow, let’s go and do that trip next year” but…maybe you should. This was quite an experience.

I have a strong feeling that Romania is going to be very challenging in many ways. Despite being in the EU, it’s still got a long way to catch up given what its starting point was in 1989. Then again, here I am in the land of Vlad the Impaler and Dracula! Spoiler alert, they’re the same person!

Tomorrow I’m following the Danube as it snakes south and east. In a change from my original plan I’m going to cross the huge new bridge over the Danube (again) and spend the night in Bulgaria!

Stats:

• Distance: 131km. Not a long day by any standards and felt quite relaxed.
• Climbing: 837m. Less than the Garmin said when I left (1183m) but I think the Garmin got confused with the tunnels.
• Average HR: 113bpm. This is much more what I should be aiming for on these days
• Body: an opportunity for my “soft tissues” to have a day where they’re not taking a beating but my hands have gone completely numb. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

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