Of nuns and helpful habits

May 17, 2007

I have started to fall in love with Romania. Hungary didn't win my heart but Romania has enchanted almost from the start. But note the 'almost'.

I'll explain.

To leave Hungary, we had two options. One was to ride to the Romanian border and make a simple crossing. The other was to go into Serbia, which was nearer and had the advantage of adding another country to the journey but had the potential snag of a more difficult crossing.

Serbia isn't in the European Union. That means a proper border with checks and controls. Not a snag in itself except that the map suggested no right to enter on most roads that appealed to us as cyclists and, on other quiet roads, a border open to nationals only of the two neighbouring nations. Since the same would apply on leaving just a few hours later, we decided to cross straight into Romania.

It turned out less than a brilliant idea. We crossed on an E-road, a trans-European highway, because there was little choice and because the map showed an escape to the south a few kilometres further. There, we could ride through a couple of villages, take a ferry shown on the map, cross the river and get down towards Timisoara in the south.

What we hadn't appreciated was how rough Romanian side-roads can be. This wasn't simply unsurfaced, it was made of the heavy, sharp-sided stones used to support railway tracks. Where tractors had torn them aside, there were deep holes.

Well, we pressed on, guessing things would improve when we got to the first village. And indeed they did, although those first kilometres cost nearly an hour. In the village, we were the stars of the day. Touring cyclists evidently don't come that way and even foreigners must be a rarity because we were cheered from a school we passed and two boys showed such interest when we stopped at a small shop that they followed us into the street, smiling without speaking, never once taking their eyes off us or the bikes.

It wasn't rudeness: it was the first sign of a warmth, interest and friendliness that - though we didn't know it then and might later have regretted the circumstances - we would soon learn is typical of the country.

The ferry was supposed to be down another unmade road. That was the way a local on a bike showed us, even leading us to where we needed to turn off.

"Go down there," he said in Romanian, or at any rate I suppose he did. His gestures suggested it, anyway. "Then when you get to the bottom..." - his arms made a sweeping gesture to one side - "turn to the right and there you'll find the 'comba'".

We bumped down yet another Romanian country road, although this time not as bad as before, each turn of the pedals threatening a twanged spoke that never came. On this trip

"This way to the 'comba'..." The silly hat looks all the sillier, by the way, because I have to push the front up into headwinds, otherwise I can't see. A picky point, I realise, but...

we have ridden so many bad surfaces that I am amazed we haven't broken spokes by the handful. In time we reached the river, the Mures, on a gentle bend with some sort of industrial area on the other side. If the industrialists ever needed to cross the river, though, they hadn't shown signs of doing it recently.

We walked this way and that, pushing heavy bikes through the undergrowth, then rode as far down the river's edge as sense would allow us. Of combas, there were none. Disheartened now about Romania and Cartographia road maps, we bumped back to the road and headed to the next village. And there we met our first lovely Romanian.

"Do you want me to bring you out a table?" he said and gestured as we sat on a bench with our sandwiches. We said we were fine, thanking him for the thought, but it was obvious nothing would please him more than to help strangers. A few minutes later, he was back to offer advice on wherever we wanted to go.

"Not that way," he seemed to say, pointing the way we'd come. "The road is..." -he gestured bumping up and down and made sweeping signs to indicate a bad road.

We told him we knew, through sad experience. He laughed.

"And to get to Arad?"

Arad was where we had to get over the river.

He looked at our maps and pointed at the E-road we had taken so much fruitless trouble to escape.

"That's the only road?"

"Da."

To get there, the road surface wasn't as bad as the shingle of the first experience but it was a bone-jarring ride. The potholes, of which there were many, weren't a problem. You can see holes. What you can't see are the millions of minor undulations, each no more than a centimetre but at a thousand angles and a hundred different frequencies so that, along with attempts at patching the road, it was hard to pedal more than five turns without being bounced to the peak of the saddle.

We weren't, as you can imagine, happy. Nor were we any more pleased by the E-road. It was smooth enough and easier riding but the shoulder was less than a metre wide and half of that was filled by sand. To ride a 50cm strip with heavy trucks passing in convoy by your left ear is not the way to conduct a cycling tour.

Well, by then we weren't wholly cynical about our expensive and large scale map - 1cm for 3km. When it said there would be a bridge down a side road built from slabs of concrete, we believed it. And down we went, bumping like a train on an old-fashioned track, then thrown about for another three kilometres on slabs the size of coffin lids and each laid at a different angle from its neighbour.

By now you don't need me to tell you there was no bridge. Nor had there ever been. What there was was a ferry, but that was on the other side, looked as though it hadn't moved in months, without any way to summon it.

Is there anything in the world more frustrating than a ferry on the other side of the river, when you've no way of calling it?

"The ferry man is in church," a man told us - there were just four or five houses - "but we don't know how to contact him. If you ride back up there" - he gestured the way we had come - "there is a church and there they will know the number of the other church."

Puzzled but reassured, we rode back and found not a church but a convent, a wonderful collection of buildings set back in trees and the sort of place you'd happily get away from it all whether you had religious leanings or not. The nuns couldn't have been more enthusiastic, which is as well because within 20 minutes we had the attention of seven or eight

Holy water from the riverside nuns... but no way of crossing the river

of them, plus an older woman who seemed to be in charge, plus a male gardener. Only once we had established the problem by drawing diagrams of rivers, ferries and stick-men with crosses drawn through them did we get as far as finding that, yes, they had the number but, no, they couldn't get a phone signal.

Alas and alack!

By now it was too late to go further and the prospect of camping along the E-road was as remote as it was unpleasant. We rode to where the ferry should have been and then, before setting up the camp, made one more attempt to find the ferry man. And that was how we came to spend an hour with three wonderful guys who were drinking round a table in their garden and immediately decided that nothing would improve their late afternoon more than by having two tired and frustrated foreigners drink with them.

Come and sleep in the garden... come and have another beer. Romanians are at their friendliest when welcoming ferry-less cyclists

We talked of cabbages and sealing wax and whether pigs have wings. We talked of where we had been, where we were going. We translated the Romanian "noroc" into the English "cheers" as we lifted our glasses, then wrote out "cheers" and wrote "cheese" under it to avoid confusion should they ever go to an English-speaking country. We talked of other things and maybe at times we talked about different things at the same time, which is the charm of conversations between people who don't understand each other but are prepared to have a good stab at it.

And all this time, one of the three was persisting with his mobile phone, so long and hard that he eventually got me someone who spoke English who said she would arrange for the ferry to pick us up at 9.30 next morning.

Ovidiu, Doru and Dan were all for us drinking into the evening with them and wanted us to pitch our tent beside the house. But sobriety and tiredness demanded a retreat and we spent the evening watching kingfishers on the river and fell asleep to the sound of the singing of monks from who knows where.

In the morning, still no ferry. We still had to ride the concrete road and then the main highway, but by then there was less traffic and we had a tailwind and we wiped out the kilometres of 50cm tightrope as fast as we could, not grumbling but charmed by the happy encounters that misfortune had brought us the previous day.

That's the lovely thing about cycling: you meet people you'd never meet in other circumstances and, while things go wrong, they have a happy habit of turning out better than they'd been in the first place.

Good, innit?

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