January 16, 2014
Constanta: How about five?
Those of you who followed my rather unfortunate New Years story from Ukraine will remember that I came to the conclusion that 'blind couchsurfing' was a bad idea and that I was never going to do it again. It is just a bit silly to stay with people when you don't know the first thing about them isn't it? But I had no luck finding a host in Constanta on the regular couchsurfing website and when Hanna (the lovely girl I spent Christmas with) told me that Dasha (the lovely girl that I spent Christmas with) had a friend in Constanta that I could stay with I thought 'Well, why the hell not?' Dasha was hardly the type to have dodgy friends. So she put me in touch with a guy she knew from Constanta named Liviu who maybe I could stay with. Liviu contacted me to tell me that he was on a boat in Algeria, but he would organise for me to stay with someone else that he knew called Ion. So now I was going to be staying with a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend that I knew absolutely nothing about other than his name and given that I had no idea how to pronounce Ion, I didn't even really know that much. But Ion sent me a message on Facebook saying, and I quote, "I live in the yard and I have a room that you can provide ... how do you stay?" and I was very much reassured about the whole thing.
But before I could meet Ion and have another awkward and/or potentially life-threatening experience in his yard or room that I provided I had to get in to Constanta. Approaching the city from the north I passed by large regions of heavy industry which were as ugly as you might expect but then suddenly moved into an area of relatively nice apartments and hotels as I passed through what I would later find out was Romania's most popular holiday resort area of Mamaia. I left the road and went down past these empty resorts to the beach which was of nice white sand and I looked out over the Black Sea for the first time. I have to tell you I was frankly very disappointed to find it wasn't black at all.
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
The road through Mamaia was horrible - narrow with a lot of traffic and a bumpy and intermittent shoulder. It was made worse by the fact that the dogs in this area, unlike anywhere else in Romania up to this point, took great delight in chasing me while barking viciously. Trying to ignore a pack of wild dogs biting at my panniers while maintaining a straight course over pot-holes and gravel and simultaneously avoiding the stream of cars zooming past my left shoulder was about as far away from a relaxing holiday as I could imagine.
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
But beyond Mamaia the road got wider with two and then three lanes and the dogs left me alone. I guessed maybe they were somehow trained to protect the expensive holiday resorts during the winter when nobody was there. "Hey, you gang of stray dogs. Protect my hotel from nasty cycle tourists through the winter and there'll be a nice juicy bone for each of you come spring."
Either way as I moved in to the city of Constanta the dogs left me alone, but the traffic grew to such levels that even with three lanes in each direction I didn't feel that there was enough space for me to be safe cycling in the road. I was early anyway and had plenty of time so I got off and walked along the pavement, although that was difficult because most of the pavement was blocked by parked cars - there were a lot of cars in this city.
In a typical act of thorough preparation I had drawn a very crude map of where I needed to go and then lost it, but I remembered that I needed to turn right off this main street somewhere and then Ion's place was somewhere on a parallel street and I would probably have to ask lots of people where to go and then spend ages looking for the right number. I had arranged to arrive at four pm and it was now two pm but if I got lucky and some of the people I asked knew something I might not be more than an hour or two late. I took a right turn and cycled in what I hoped was vaguely the right direction then I stopped to look at a street sign. By some considerable good fortune it was Ion's street. I looked at the nearest house number. It was Ion's number. A city of 700,000 and I had stopped outside the right house by mere fluke. Maybe this wasn't going to be such a bad day after all.
It turned out that Ion was a very nice man of middle years who lived with his wife, their two teenage children and his mother-in-law. I was pleased to see that none of them lived in the yard and that they actually had a house which I didn't have to provide. Better still, there were two rooms and a bathroom attached to the house but seperate from it which was to be my living quarters. It was like having my own apartment! Blind couchsurfing appeared to have redeemed itself.
There were four bikes outside the house as Ion is a keen cyclist. He told me that there was a cycling event taking place that evening and invited me to come along. A group of fifteen or twenty local cyclists were going to meet up and cycle around the city. This sounded like a terrible idea to me.
"So you will just cycle around?"
"Yes"
"Around this city with lots of cars?"
"Yes"
"In a country with bad drivers?"
"Yes"
"In the dark?"
"Yes"
"For what reason?"
"Fun"
"I doesn't sound very fun. How far?"
"Maybe forty kilometres. So will you come?"
"I'll think about it."
Ion wanted me to come and meet his friends and I wanted to do that so I told him that I would come along for a bit but that I was too tired to be cycling forty kilometres. He agreed and, pulling his Bianci off its hooks on the wall, suggested that I take one of his other bikes. We were standing within earshot of my own bike at this point. We exchanged glances, my bike giving me a 'You better not go off with that whore' look and I told Ion that I would prefer to ride my own bike.
We rode the two kilometres to the meeting place along the very busy main road that I had earlier decided was too dangerous to cycle on in the daytime. This all felt a little unecessary to me. I accept that, because of my strict principles of not using other transport, sometimes when I stay places I might have to cycle across a city at night to get to an event. But this was the event! And I hate cycling in the city at night. I know for a fact that it is dangerous because the majority of my near-misses while cycing in the last few years have come at night, despite the fact that ony a tiny percentage of my total riding time happens after dark. There was that time in Miami when that woman pulled out because she didn't see me, then there was that time in Paris when that taxi driver didn't stop because he didn't see me, then there was that time in Switzerland when... You get the idea - its dark, people don't see things!
We met up with the other guys (and they were all guys.) It was a motley gang, with some on road bikes dressed in lycra, others on mountain bikes, some wearing jeans, one guy looked like he was about to rob a bank. I spoke to a few of them while we waited for everyone to arrive.
"Why do you do this?" I asked a couple of guys standing next to me.
"Its fun."
"Have you ever had any accidents?"
"Me no, but him" he pointed to the other chap, "Yes he got hit by a car. Just over there in fact" and he pointed to the busy main street.
Ion turned to me and encouraged me to come along. He asked me how much of the ride I wanted to do.
"Will you do twenty kilometres?"
"How about five?"
"Will you do ten kilometres?"
"How about five?"
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
We set off, about twenty of us. I was greatly relieved when we immediately turned off from the busy main street and instead took the second busiest main street. I tucked in inside everyone and rode near the back of the pack for the five kilometres until Ion said we could go home. For all my protestations it was actually okay. With such a big group it was easy for cars to see us and they basically left the inside lane to us and I relaxed and chatted with some of the guys. To be fair, its actually great what they do and I certainly don't want to do anything but encourage people to use bikes more. After all, its not the bikes that are dangerous, its all the cars - if everyone were on a bike, everyone would be safe and, well, that would be some form of eutopia wouldn't it? Or 'The Netherlands' as some might prefer to call it.
The next day Ion had to work. He has a cool job working in a crane moving containers around at the port. He showed me a video and it is certainly no job for someone with vertigo. The crane has a glass bottom and he looks down on all the containers and moves them around like some sort of giant version of tetris. With the day to myself I went out and took a walk around Constanta. It was a warm and sunny day but unfortunately the city was a concrete jungle filled with big metal beasts called cars and in many places smelt quite a lot like urine. In many other places it resembled a building site although the historical centre of Piata Ovidiu salvaged something, being a nice place to sit. This I did and looked across at a the roof tips of a mosque and thought about how close I was now to entering the Islamic world and a little shiver of excitment ran through me at the prospect.
Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 12,487 km (7,754 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 5 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |