Kim – RidePlanetEarth.org – de la Sofia la Budapesta prin Romania si Serbia

Kim a actualizat site-ul cu un articol despre drumul de la Sofia la Budapesta, si evident 🙂 a avut numai cuvinte frumoase la adresa Romaniei.

I have had an infatuation with Romania since I was a small kid. We had a little Olympics event in my primary school for some reason and each child was allotted a nation to “represent”. Mine was obviously Romania. Since then I had tried to follow the fortunes of the country as best I could but in reality apart from the fortunes of the nation football team I knew nothing except that I would love the place.

The first day tried to dispel this feeling as we took the longest route into Bucharest possible. There is a direct highway but again, under Andreas’ influence, we took the small roads until we got stuck. Stuck in kilometres of thick, sticky, glue-like mud. I was used to it after Laos and Mongolia but Rich was starting to panic. The reality was that our road into Bucharest would take a week as we couldn’t even walk the bike so much mud was attaching itself to the wheels. We turned back and had to take several more detours before finding a road that was heading city-wards. To make matters worse both Andreas and Rich started getting multiple punctures and it started to rain. We finally arrived in the city in the middle of the night, tired, muddy, wet, wretched. We stayed at a hostel paid for by a supporting organisation. But the hostel owner was distraught and disgusted at the sight of us and spent  most of the night and morning trying to get Andreas to clean up.

Luckily we moved to a couch-surfing place of a girl named Raluca. Everything was brilliant from then on. Raluca, first a contact via the internet is now a firm friend and travelling with us from the Carpathians into Belgrade despite the worst weather I have experienced in 14 and a half months.

In Bucharest I had the tremendous good fortune to meet and work with Ioana, from WWF Romania, who linked me in with cycling orgs and media and arranged a sweet event in front of the enormous Romanian government building. It was hard to get information about how exactly Romania is and will fare under the impacts of climate change but our discussions showed there is a lot of action needed in the country to ensure the problems are not worsened by deforestation and other environmental abuses that still occur within the country.

There we met a lot of other local guys, all fantastic and willing to do whatever they could to support us. Vlad Dulea and his lovely wife Dana I was sure were the most hospitable people in the world, helping us in a variety of ways, until we met their parents, whom we stayed with in Pitesti, who were so above and beyond hospitable they ended up chasing Richard around their apartment trying to give him some money.

Cycling through Romania was bliss. We didn’t have to cross the mighty Carpathians , well, not much of them, and instead headed directly West to where the mountains meet the Danube, 150 km before Belgrade. There, in a town nestled inside a breath-taking gorge Raluca caught up with us and we rode towards Belgrade together.

The people of Romania were so welcoming, the land so inviting, it felt like I was back on the islands of Indonesia or East Timor, where a stranger becomes a friend at the exchange of a smile.

Sursa: https://rideplanetearth.org/?p=704

Thank you Kim for your wonderful words!