Postcard from Europe
July 24, 2009
The mountain pass is known as the ‘Transfagarasan', since it crosses the Fagaras range of mountains, part of the Carpathians, or Romanian Alps. The road often appears on the world's "top ten motorcycle routes". Yet Tom doesn't have a motorcycle, and so opted for pedal power. And he sent us this postcard of his experience.
Cycling the Transfagarasan isn't just a journey guaranteed to turn your legs to jelly. It's also a fascinating Romanian history tour.
Curtea de Arges, where your journey begins, is home to the legend of Mesterul Manole, the architect of the city's cathedral. According to the legend, the construction kept falling down, and when Manole prayed for help, God told him to wall his wife inside the construction, alive, as a sacrifice.
It's a grizzly myth indeed, and the grizzlyness only continues as you head on down the road.
At the point where the mountains rear up on either side, just before the road begins to precariously cut its way up the sheer sides, you'll find the castle of Vlad Tepes – that's Vlad the Impaler to you, the historical inspiration for Dracula.
The castle sits perched high up on an unassailable hill, a position that meant it never fell to enemy hands. In fact, the 1,500 steps that visitors have to climb to get there is enough to put many people off. That's nothing, however, in comparison to the grueling climb that was ahead of me.
By the end of the first day, I'd made my way to Capra, a mountain cabana situated right at the bottom of the final, hellishly steep section.
This being a summer weekend, tourists were out in force, and I managed to get the last room in the complex. It was a good job too – I soon realized that it's not the best place to have to spend a night outdoors.
The area is swarming with bears. Delinquent bears, in fact. Bears from other, more touristy parts of Romania, who have been harassing visitors, are now captured and released in this valley. It's a kind of borstal for bears.
At night, the cabana manager told me, the reprobate animals come out and search through the hotel rubbish. I planned on staying up for a bit of bear-watching, but wasn't able to keep my eyes open long enough.
The next day I began the climb. If the ascent itself wasn't enough, I had to suffer the witticisms of tourists at every lay-by. Upon reaching the top, some 2,034 metres above sea level, the cyclist has to negotiate Romania's largest car-tunnel, which cuts through to the other side of the mountain.
Brilliant sunshine had accompanied me on the way up. However, on the other side of the mountain, it was freezing fog and terrible visibility – the Transfagarasan has its own weather system, making ascending it all the more unpredictable.
Now, you can say what you like about totalitarian regimes, but they've got at least one good thing going for them: they're able to create impossibly ambitious and utterly pointless construction projects.
Take the Transfagarasan, for example. It serves utterly no purpose, is closed for nine months a year due to snow, and was constructed at huge human and financial cost.
We're told that the idea was to provide Romanians with easy access to the mountains in the event of a Russian invasion, but I think the explanation is simpler – Ceausescu was an avid cyclist. Because nothing can quite compare to whizzing down the other side.
Author: Tom Wilson in Romania
Editor: Rob Turner