Bike to Asia

After Csávó went home, the two of us crossed the Romanian border. We asked the lady there where should we change money and she suggested us a house in the first village, Turnu: number 500 with a wrought iron gate. But there will be no sign of it! And there really was no sign but they changed and we got 310 Lei for 20.000 Forints. (We have estimated a 1000 HUF budget per day per person which is about 5 USD).

Shortly after that, in the middle of nowhere, two aggressive dogs started to chase us, running from a nearby farm. Zsofi suddenly accelerated up to 30 kmph in a headwind. The dogs finally stopped after I’ve yelled at them loudly (I had to yell at them one by one). We’ve used this trick many more times, there are plenty of untied watchdogs in Romania. And Zsofi is afraid of dogs.

Then we’ve tried the main road number 7 to Arad in a headwind, where the trucks almost blew us off the road when overtaking. But they were kind enough to horn well in advance. Then we grasped firmly at the handlebars and tried to stay balanced. I liked the feeling very much. Zsofi always shouted on her high voice, “it comes again!”. We both have mirrors on both sides – which is a must on a tour like this.

In Arad we couchsurfed at a Romanian guy who offered his bedroom to us and went to sleep to his girlfriend’s place. He wanted to upgrade his 4-core PC to a 32-core (and 5k USD) server because he is doing 3D architecture renderings. It was not easy to carry the bikes up to the 6th floor…

On day 5, we had breakfast in a nice park near the castle (which is under military control and closed for tourists – they can only enter on Fridays. But, as a local man told us, the city has just got it back from the military and is going to upgrade it to a tourist attraction). We finished breakfast at 1pm. Then we visited the monument of the 13 Hungarian generals who were executed in Arad on the 6th October, 1849. The monument was enclosed between a football and a tennis court…

To avoid high traffic and close contact with trucks, we took the smaller roads out of Arad – it was tricky because from far it looked as if it was good quality, but in reality it was very bumpy – to such a degree that we only could travel at 14 kmph. On top of all that, there was a headwind blowing on the open fields that we crossed.

However, Zsofi liked the small villages, she found them cute and roomantic, especially Lipova (Lippa). I could only whine about the bad quality of the cobbled roads in Lipova. Today was the first time to switch back to 1/1 gears – in the Hungarian lowland we didn’t need it.

After Lipova there were nice forests, but Zsofi started to whine about me still wanting to ride because it was getting dark, but after she took off her sunglasses, she changed her mind and said, “OK, it is not so dark, we can go on”. Then we found a nice grassy area with trees and bushes covering parts of it from the sight of those who drive on the road. There was also a brook and a lot of water on the ground in patches which ensured a loud cacophony of frogs and a lot of mosquitoes. We pitched the tent for the first time!

Day 6 started with an alert: Zsofi made a mistake of telling that it started to rain, because I made her jump out of bed and pack things very quickly – I dind’t want to wait for the big rain and wet the tent too much. But it turned out to be just a day-long drizzle. We tried to switch on the tracking device but couldn’t, so I’ve installed the solar cells for the first time to charge it. I was stupid because I left the solar charger connected to the battery for 5 days (thinking that it doesn’t consume much power) and during this time it went dry, with the low voltage led on. So I had to charge it for a long time in the cloudy weather…

We went on bad road, then worse road: the asphalt disappeared.

After a friendly invitation from a local Hungarian-speaking grandma (we could eat at their place while it was raining outside, and she also fried us some eggs), we joined the main road, then the even mainer road (the dreaded road number 7).

So after riding at 13-15 kmph all day, we finished at 20-25 on the main road and finally arrived to Deva, where Zsofi has arranged a 4-bed room with internet access for free. We decided to have a rest day here, which our legs deserved, I think.

Our plan for the next few days: Petrosani (CS) on Wednesday, Lake Vidra (tent or guesthouse – because of bears) on Thu, Ramnicu Valcea (CS) on Fri, Slatina (CS?) on Sat, Turnu Magurele (tent) on Sunday.

Tags: On the way

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 11:03 PM and is filed under Romania. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.