I
love Sophia. A city of parks. A city of animated pedestrian crossings. A city in boom. It’s a great place to gather yourself before a big trip. Finding time to locate the esprit de corps on a few few bag-free city rides. Winding our way down broad avenues of walnut trees, around torturous one-way systems (always the wrong way) and through an impassable maze of coffee shops, inexpensive restaurants and interesting themed bars and nightclubs. The massive communist era central station left its peculiar atmospheric music in our ears as we pulled our bikes up from ground level platforms. There’s no place on these trains to put a bike even though we’d gone to the trouble of securing a bike ticket. The train guard was theatrically flummoxed, but we eventually found just the right place to block all the aisles and our guard left us alone without even a bribe... We had no common language but Frank and Ivan, who I shared a table seat with, managed to give me a whole history of their lives, the region, the migration of the Cyrillic alphabet and then set us up with some local girls. We had time to share a coffee with them before catching our boat across the Danube and into Romania. The north side of the Danube greeted us with great aplomb. There were thunderclouds, flocks of screaming ravens at dusk and Adams Family architecture. But this wasn’t Transylvania yet. The way to Transylvania, which translates literally as ‘beyond the forest’, lay across the southern Carpathians. We found our way into the mountains on a trail built to access the high monasteries. We found the monks too, and their kindness. But the trail became too steep for us and our laden bikes, so after a night camped in the forest in Ben’s ‘experimental’ tent (it fell down), we had to return to the truck road in the valley. These roads are terrifying. We always try to find a back road to travel by, even if it means a dog leg of a journey, but some days the truck road is all you can find. So you put on your brightest clothes, sup an extra mouthful of Go and leave the dogs barking as you fly by the coffee huts and hooker stops.
I love the experience of riding into a town through its ugly industrial belt. Watching it change. But Sibiu’s centre was too much of a contrast. I feared for the fate of the absent street dogs in this sanitised city. Not the Transylvania we had been looking for. Still some bug found its way through and Owen spent two or three days in our hotel room on a diet of live yoghurt as we made day rides out of town. One of these was up a road built by Ceausescu so he could take the mountain air without the rigour of climbing to its 2,200m peak. The top and back in a day was our mission. Beyond a certain point on a big climb like that I think fitness becomes irrelevant and it’s stubbornness that counts. Arlo disagreed with this idea and turned back just two hairpins from the top, thus earning himself the handle old man mountain for the rest of the trip. A sharp turn from a truck road out of Sibiu found the four of us back in the saddle again. Owen, who should have been taking it easy, sat at the front of out petit peloton, setting a neat pace as we glided along parallel to the Faragas peaks, part of the Southern Carpaths. There is a mania for miles when cycle touring, it’s got us into trouble in the past. After a couple of days without gaining any distance we were all pretty keen to make up some distance and these roads were beautiful. Walnut trees and hawthorns along the way supplemented our trail snacks. The light in September had that golden tint like a super 8 movie. There were stretches where we’d pass more donkeys and carts than cars and these back roads led through all the villages. Most of the villages in southern Transylvania have a similar layout, often just a handful of houses. Faded now from their brightly coloured past, the houses have a standard vernacular. Two storeys, a regular front door and a giant courtyard entrance to the side of
the house with huge wooden doors to match. But even at close inspection these houses kept their secret. The reason Transylvania has been touted as a model for sustainable living in Europe is behind this simple facade. Land. Not acres of it, but each house has a garden that stretches out beyond it for up to 80m or so. This is growing land, enough to grow most of your own veg. There are fields around the villages too, but they seem mostly turned over to potato production. Several times we encountered groups of fantastically old men and women in these fields, each older than the last, still collecting their own crops with an impressive vigour. Kicking up the dust of the villages were a collection of free range chickens, children, horses and cattle, all ranging happily under the collective eye. It was sunset before we started making camp. That hunger for miles had its way again. We found a wood some way off the road where the light from our fire would be less visible; not that we were expecting anyone to trouble us but seclusion makes for a sounder night’s sleep. Romania has most of Europe’s wild bear and wolf populations. When camping off piste in these conditions there are several precautions you must take. The main ones are to have your cooking fire at least 200m from your camp and to store all your food at the same distance and keep it about four metres off the ground. These kinds of tasks make you feel great, like you’re Lord Mears or Shackleton, though the likelihood of there actually being any bears in these low hills was pretty small. I slept out that night in a hammock slung near the last embers of the fire. We had brought hammocks as a Transylvanian friend of mine told me tales of him and his brother sleeping in the forest in
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