Arto's Blog

Last week I crossed the Eastern Carpathians from Transsylvania to the region of Moldavia. On the way there were still two places which deserve a special mention. At Lacu Rosu, a landslide pushed trees to the lake long ago. Still today dozens of dead tree stumps stick out from the water creating an odd landscape. Soon after Lacu Rosu, the road went through the impressive Bicaz gorges, some 300 meters high walls on both sides of the road. In certain places the road actually was partly below the rock.

That was my farewell to the mountains for a while: after Bicaz the landscape turned into hills and later to flatland. My picture this time is from Pipirig, one of the villages where I could admire traditionally decorated houses. Some typical features are visible in the photo: a two-part gate featuring both a larger and smaller entrance, decorations on the walls and roof edges, and the ubiquitous horse-drawn carriage. I cannot count how many of them I've seen on this trip. The carriages normally move at about 10-15 km per hour, so usually at least ten times per day I find myself behind one. I take a look at my mirror making sure that no cars are right behind, and then accelerate to overtake as fast as possible.

In Moldavia I also went to see a couple of beautiful religious sites, namely the Neamt and Agapia orthodox monasteries. Although the trip was not a religious pilgrimage for me, the places were certainly worth a visit. I especially liked the Vovidenia hermitage close to the Neamt monastery and the older part of the Agapia monastery on top of a hill, featuring a pretty wooden church surrounded by a garden full of flowers.

At Lacu Rosu I also met Nelu, an avid cyclist who has traveled with the Romanian professional cycling team in many places around the world, working as a bicycle mechanic or volunteer organizer in the competitions. I got his contact info from a Romanian friend in Finland. It was very nice to spend a couple of days cycling with him, he was kind enough to reduce his normal average speed by about 10 km/h to match mine. :-)

At the moment my bike is at Nelu's apartment in Bacau and I'm on a short side trip using public transport. The main destination of this trip is an European capital - Chisinau in the Republic of Moldova! In Slovakia during Ecotopia biketour I met some Moldovans who are waiting for me there, and there's a big wine festival this weekend. I'll head to the border tomorrow, armed with a printout of a web page which says I should be able to get a visa free of charge, conveniently because of the festival. Well, I'll see what happens.

Last weekend I celebrated my 29th birthday hiking and camping out in the wild. The picture is from the top of Mt. Pietrosul, the highest peak of the Calimani mountains. At 2102 meters above sea level it's not very high, but the views were still great. And I had great company plus chocolate pudding for the birthday breakfast. :)

After a couple of days in Targu Mures and the Calimani mountains I rode 50 km south to the town of Sighisoara. It was a pittoresque town, no surprise as it's included in the Unesco World Heritage list, but one afternoon and morning was enough for me to see it. Today I continued further east to Odorheiu Secuiesc or perhaps I should rather say Szekelyudvarhely, which is the Hungarian name. Most of the inhabitants here are ethnic Hungarians and that's by far the most common language heard on the streets too. Unfortunately I've already forgot some of the words I learned in Hungary, and I find it difficult to set my mind to "Hungarian mode" as I've tried to pick up at least a few words of Romanian during the last three weeks.

An interesting detail told me by Erika, my host in Targu Mures (who was also Hungarian), was that you can often distinguish Romanian and Hungarian houses by the color of the gates. Blue gates are Romanian, green ones Hungarian and others could be either. Red seems to be a common color too, I saw a lot of red and green gates today when riding through villages.

My bike also had a special day today, as the odometer went over the 30000 km mark. Roughly half of the parts have been changed at least once since I bought it but it has still seen a lot of road for a bike. On this trip I'm at 4540 km and will add about 90 tomorrow riding to Lacu Rosu, yet another mountain lake which should be a beautiful place.

As a technical note, my site has been moved to a new server which uses a more recent version of php. This finally resolves an annoying bug with the admin interface of the blog software. If you notice that something has been broken due to the upgrade, please drop me a line.

Last Tuesday I was cycling in Northern Transsylvania and planning to camp or stay in a pension somewhere by lake Colibita, a beautiful mountain lake next to the Calimani mountains. The road was following the lake shore but from a few dozen to a couple of hundred meters away from it. I took a smaller road which seemed to lead towards the shore through a small patch of forest, hoping to find a place to camp or at least take a swim.

I indeed found the shore, but also about one hundred sheep, a few dogs and two shepherds there. They were quite surprised to see such an unusual visitor. I greeted them and we exchanged a few words in Romanian using the very limited vocabulary I had learned from my phrasebook during the trip. Then I asked if I could camp somewhere nearby. After pondering for a few moments they pointed at two houses saying that a third shepherd had a free room and I could sleep there.

In a moment I found myself in a small but beautifully decorated guest room. It had a separate entrance from the house and looked like it might be a room to rent for agroturistic holidays. I'm not sure if that was the case (I didn't see any signs indicating that), but at least this time they wouldn't accept any money when I offered to pay for the room.

The shepherds went back to take the sheep in a fenced area for the night. I had some bread, cheese and fruit for dinner and walked out to the lakeshore which made the dogs go wild for a while. The shepherds were still within eyesight so I wasn't too scared of the dogs but I abandoned my plans for swimming. After a while the owner of the room came and asked me to turn off the small lamp - the house didn't have electricity and the lamp was being powered by the tractor battery! I switched to my own headlamp, put my own bedsheet on top of the bed and was just about to start writing my travel diary as the owner came back and invited me to have a drink.

It was a bit more than one drink. I joined the dinner of the shepherds which consisted of several cups of home made palinka (a kind of aperitif) followed by soup, meat, vegetables and wine. I tried to share some of the food I had but they wouldn't even want to taste salmiakki. ;) This was one of the occasions where I really wanted to be able to speak the local language, but even without many common words we managed to communicate a little bit. In the morning I was still treated to a similar breakfast (well, with a bit less palinka) before I was let on the road again. I left an origami swan, which seemed to be a funny thing to them, as a small memory and got their address so that I can send at least a postcard later.

This was not the only case of Romanian hospitality I've encountered during my trip. Near Gherla I met two local cyclists and we rode about 30 kilometers together. One of them, Alin, invited me to stay for the night at his home with his grandparents and I also there I was offered delicious meals and food to go on the trip. In the Apuseni mountains I met Michael from Germany and Tibi from Romania (but who was living in Germany), had a dinner with them and later also met Tibi's wife in Bistrita. I came to Romania with few contacts and little knowledge of the country but I seem to meet wonderfully friendly people all the time.

Now I'm in Targu Mures, staying with Erika, a Hospitality Club member. She loves mountains and tomorrow we're going for a weekend trip to Calimani mountains together with three other friends of her. I'll see if I'll meet more foxes or other animals there. :)

I was camping in a beautiful place by a small river in the Apuseni mountains, Romania, close to the Padis mountain hut. I had spent a good part of the afternoon climbing uphill narrow and bumpy gravel roads, resulting in a record low 9.0 km/h average speed during the 37 km of cycling that day. After that I had put up my tent, cooked a dinner and was looking at maps and writing my travel diary in the tent.

Around ten o'clock in the evening I heard small noises next to the tent. I opened the zipper and popped my head out without seeing anything special. After a few minutes the noise came back, this time clearly indicating that something tried to get inside the tent. I put on my shoes, grabbed my headlamp and went out, finding a pair of eyes staring at me in the moonlight about 10-15 meters away. It was a fox which had just stolen the plastic bag containing my half-full tuna can. Running towards the animal and making some noise made it run away in the forest, without dropping the catch.

I went back in the tent, but after about an hour heard noise again. Oh yes, I had some salami inside one of my bicycle panniers a few meters away from the tent. It was properly wrapped inside two plastic bags and then packed in the pannier, but the smell was certainly strong enough for the fox to notice. Quite persistent was the fox - I took some photos using flash just meters away and it was still trying to get inside the pannier. Moving yet closer and making noise made it to run away.

Experienced trekkers are probably already trying to hide their smile behind their beard. It's common wisdom that food shouldn't be stored inside or right next to the tent. However, having mainly camped on campsites where it's convenient to gather all your gear as near to you as possible, or having been lucky when camping in the wild, it just didn't occur to me that time. I was glad it wasn't a wolf or a bear, but also happy that due to the mistake I got some nice pictures of the fox. :)

My next step was to carefully pack all the food and related items such as the trash bag and hang them up to tree branches as high as I could reach, away from the tent of course. The fox came still back at least once, but after not getting anything eventually gave up.

Besides the fox, I saw some impressive gorges and caves in the Apuseni mountains. More about them when I get my pictures sorted, which never seems to occur in a timely fashion. I've also been in two cities, first in Oradea right after the Hungarian border and now in Cluj-Napoca at the western edge of Transsylvania.

Riding through the Romanian countryside I'm clearly an odd sight, even more so than in Poland or Slovakia. On the roads shared by pedestrians, horse carriages, hens, ducks, dogs, cows and nowadays also an increasing number of cars, a touring cyclist doesn't exactly blend in the crowd. I've taken the habit of waving my hand and saying hello in the local language to the people standing next to the road and looking curiously at me.

Traffic on the main roads and in cities has been a bit wilder than in the previous countries I crossed, with the exception of Kaliningrad, where it was comparable. I need to pay attention, as it only takes one bad accident to end the whole trip, but I haven't found it too bad yet. Small roads have been fairly quiet. People have been friendly and I've liked it a lot this far. The only sad thing has been the large amount of trash carelessly thrown in the nature. Most of the young Romanians I've met mention it too, it seems to disturb many of them as well. Maybe that's an indication that it'll change in the future. I hope so, the country is too beautiful to be spoiled by trash and other pollution.

I spent the last eight days cycling through the North-Eastern Hungary, stopping in a few places. The landscape was hilly in Eger and Miskolc, and then turned into great plains when continuing towards Debrecen. Here are a few nice memories from the area, this time written only as short notes:

• Climbing up the very narrow stairs to the top of the minaret and tasting local wines in Eger
• Enjoying delicious pörkölt (a meat stew) in Sajoszentpeter (near Miskolc) at the home of Gabi, a friend from the Hospitality Club
• Looking down to the green Bükk plateau from the Tar-kö peak in the Bükk national park
• Listening to the wind while camping wild by the Tisza river
• Watching snakes wiggle on the ground and cranes fly across the sky in the Hortobagyi national park
• Meeting the Balogh family in Bocskaikert
• Taking a peek inside the impressive university main building in Debrecen

Tomorrow (or actually today, as it's already past midnight) I plan to reach Oradea in Romania. From there I'll continue towards the mountains again. New country, new adventures coming up.

(Slighly edited 2006-09-06 22:00)