Into the wild

The day did not look promising weather-wise, there were grey clouds hanging over me. Still, the decision was made: today I would be crossing the Romanian Alps, on the so-called Transalpine Highway.

The first task of the day was to get there, I was still on a smaller road a few villages away. Then my stomach roared and I stopped at a shop in Jina to buy some stuff. I was about to sit on a (pretty wet) park bench outside, someone waved to me and told me to go with him, he opened up a little bar, offered a nice table - and brewed a nice coffee for me - quite a treat. Thus, enforced, I started on my journey, climbing on steep road. Suddenly, it started dropping and one could see it would make a full curve around a mountain, going all the way down. This was fun, but I knew the pay-back time would come, when I would have to regain all the altitude lost.

When I reached the Transalpine Highway, I was up for a pleasant surprise: it was a gently rising road, very quiet with almost no traffic, the only noise was the river next to the road. I made pretty good progress, when I reached the first damn, behind it a smaller artificial lake. Another 20 km uphill came a second artificial lake, this one much larger, it took me quite a long time to just go by it.

Then destiny caught up with me, as each day: it started raining pretty hard and I was cold, wet and tired. But luckily as usual, the rain did not last for too long and I was dry by the time I has reached the first summit of 1580 meters. The only thing that bothered me was that there was no sign proclaiming the altitude, I like taking a photo at the passes. It was all downhill, so by 3 pm, I had already covered 80 km - time for a good lunch. And it was good. For the price of less than 10 Eur, I had an excellent Ciorba (Csorba) soup, which is a spicy vegetable broth, followed by a Romanian version of goulash with polenta. I had to eat fast, as I knew there was a summit ahead of me.

Leaving close to 4 pm, I started climbing: it was no longer the gentle climb, we were at around 1000 meters and the summit at 2228. It was a grueling climb, even worse, it started raining again, and yet again worse, it became foggy. I was already thinking of emergency scenarios, such as turning around, hitch-hiking or something, but pressed on. The road I was on was actually closed, due to the snow (yet, there was snow right next to the road), but this did not seem to bother the few cars passing me.

Long story short: I made the summit, but hang on, this wasnt the real one, after dropping for 6 km, it yet again started a horrific ascent, up to the highest point. The one sweet thing was a little mountain goat, who evidently thought I was his mother (or father), he kept following me. Then it was all over: it was doooooown, really down, down, down. I passed a mountain resort, then reached the town of Novaci at the bottom of the mountain.

That was it for me that day, about 140 kilometers and 3 passes - I happily jumped into the bed of the first B&B.