Thursday, October 13, 2011

Almost Transilvania

The last town before our accent was a little dirty and boring so we pushed on knowing it couldn't hurt to start our climb that day.  Even if we pushed out another 20km we would be in the cool pine trees or a little guest house sipping on soup and rubbing some deep heat (Cara pretty much eats the stuff) into the legs.  After passing a couple of bear signs and seeing no other signs of life we stopped after 18km.   

With darkness approaching and a little tea house in our sights we pulled up and to our amazement we were greeted like royalty.  We were the first Australian tour cyclists to come through, with only a Japanese cyclist ahead of us by a few months.  The owners took photos of us and we signed the guest book scribbling a kangaroo, thanking our hosts for the outstanding homemade Romanian meal that would fuel us for the two mountain passes we had to ride the following day.  As we began to ride higher I saw wild rhubarb lining the side of the road, and fresh raspberries drooping on bushes.  We pulled over to sample the raspberries and I had one of those moments in life - I looked at Curtis and said "we are in the Romanian mountains, riding push bikes, eating wild raspberries? Does it get better than this?"

The first pass was 1600mt, then we had to decend 450mts to climb again to 1800mts before the long decent into the Transilvanian plains.  The roads were gravel to start off but we were lucky enough that a new road had been built over this mountain range and officially opened two weeks prior.  The bad news was that it was still really fucking steep and every Romanian who owned a car was going for a Sunday drive on this new road.

It wasn't Everest and we know we weren't saving lives but it was the most empowering, mind blowing, tough and self satifying experience to cycle the bikes, bit by bit to reach the passes.  At the second pass we stopped to soak it up, however, the wild pigs on the road side eyeing us off made us kick on.


I didnt want to put this pic up but it really does capture me chasing the pain!
We had just climed the one behind me, and started to climb again.





Free camping was a little tense. We never did see the flowers.













   

1 comment:

  1. Ahhhhhhh what more could u want...........

    ReplyDelete