Cycling Romania: Turda to Ocna Mures to Blaj

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Emboldened by the good roads and beautiful views en route to Turda, we hit the road the next day in high, high spirits.  We possessed what we believed was a phenomenal road map, at a respectable 1:160,000 scale.  I'd spent quite a bit of time carefully choosing our route according to the map key's color scale, and I believed I'd chosen the ideal route along decent but lightly-trafficked roads.  I had everything highlighted and the appropriate pages inserted into my handlebar bag's map view window.  We'd done the homework and we were ready to reap the rewards of our clever planning.

We made our way out of Turda, asking directions in broken Romanian at the village where we had to hit the correct part of a fork in the road.  Satisfied with our exchange, we confidently forged on -- right on to a clay cow path, a pack of sheep dogs, and a steady light rain.  So much for my route planning!   Here´s where it started to get really interesting.

At first, the cow path seemed pretty okay.  It was a little hard to ride on, but the map showed only 6 or 7 kilometers to the major road we would turn on, and we didn´t really have another way to get where we planned to go.  But then, the rain started.  The clay began to stick to our tires.  Next we encountered the pack of sheep dogs who ran barking towards us.  The trick here, we had learned, was to let the shepherd know about our presence so that he could handle his dogs.  This more or less worked here, but we were going so painfully slow that the dogs basically escorted us, barking intermittently, for about half an hour.  This was the least of our problems.  Clay stuck to our tires, more clay stuck to that clay, grass and weeds and rocks and more clay stuck to that clay, and so on and so forth.  The result was something with which I´m sure we could have built a crude hut.  This bizarrely sturdy substance clogged the area between our wheels and the forks of our bikes with such a vengeance that the bikes became utterly immobile about every 75 meters.  When that happened, we had to try to unclog them.  This not only involved getting the muck from in between the fork and wheel, but also basically peeling the layer of muck off the entire tire.  Otherwise, as the tire turned, the new muck would just reclog the wheels within about 5 feet of travel.  At first we used sticks, which worked poorly, then we just gave up and used our bare hands.  Since our hands became muddy paws during this process, we only have photos from the beginning of this ordeal.  We were a mess!!!  It took about 2 hours to cover the 6 or 7 kilometers to the main road.  But by god, we made it.

Our troubles were rewarded in a most unexpected place, the small totally untouristy and not terribly interesting town of Ocna Mures.  Here, we located a somewhat bland-looking, but brand new and spotless, hotel.  The owners were ridiculously kind to us.  Rather than treating us like the hideous mongrels we appeared to be, they took us in, cleaned our shoes, cleaned our bikes, and served us up some good eats in the hotel restaurant.  And please understand that their cleaning our bikes was like a god-send, and they did it without even asking us.  Dirt and weeds and rocks were  everywhere in the bikes, in all the grooves of the tires, in the chains, everywhere.  It was impeding the performance of the bikes and it had to be taken care of.  I could have cried when they wheeled up our clean bikes.  Thank you, Hotel Europa!!!  They rock.

Okay, so with clean bikes and reenergized spirits, we hit the road for Blaj.  Blaj seems to be in the middle of nowhere, and it actually is, but it was on the way to Gura Raului, so there we were.  Things started out well.  Another lightly trafficked road through pristine hills and forest, but, amazingly, we once again ended up on a cow/horsecart path.  This particular clay path was in a bizarre village where everyone was drunk (no, they really were!).  After spending some time listening to a drunk man recite numbers in Russian, then struggling for some time in the rain to get up the cow path, which was on a steep incline, and watching a car get stuck trying to do the same, we gave up.  This decision was encouraged by another drunk man who had a rifle over his shoulder.  He basically laughed at us and stood bizarrely close to me breathing liquor breath, then we headed quickly back the way we´d came.  Another drunk man attempted to persuade us to come into his home to wait out the rain, but we had to bid their bonny village adieu.   Aaahhh, that reminds me about the homemade liquor all Romanians make and offer to you, but that´s a story for another entry.

Having again spent a great deal of the day navigating muddy roads (so much for those clean bikes!), and having been turned back from our intended route at The Drunken Village, we decided to hitch a ride down the interstate.  I suppose it´s possible to bike on the interstate in Romania if you are very brave and care little whether you live or die, but we don´t really fit into either of those categories.  So, after making a big sign ("Blaj or Bust!" - no, I'm kidding), we waited only 45 minutes before someone with a truck actually gave us and our bikes a ride 15 kilometers down the road to the turn-off for Blaj.  After that it was smooth sailing, but it was nearing dusk, so we pedaled like lunatics for the remaining 24 kilometers to Blaj.  Tole said he´d never before seen me ride remotely as fast.  The truth is I was scared of wolves (we did see one, but actually they´re harmless), of getting stuck in the dark in Romania in general, and of our total lack of information about Blaj.  Fear is a mighty motivator.  But we made it to Blaj just as the sun was setting.