The Long Road Home

I’m now in the town of Oradea, in western Romania, close to the Hungarian border. I’ve been riding through Transylvania for the last few days.

It’s quite easy - hills, but nothing like turkey, never mind NW china etc. These are wooded gentle hills, mild hairpins from time to time, nothing drastic. There are villages dotted everywhere with church spires and autumn sun and the shadows of trees and smell of woodsmoke. I’m doing long days, over 120km, just rolling and rolling from one valley to the next.

Now there are foggy mornings, chilly, then mostly blue sky and sun later. Loads of insects and bugs are out, sometimes I’m going through nasty clouds of flying ants getting in my ears and everywhere, grass full of furry caterpillars, and very thick spiders webs which stick across you when you go into the verge.

Places are hungarian, german, romanian. You see all different styles of houses including (a) small old pink and yellow cottages with arches into farmyards, (b) wooden cabins with wide eaves where people pile their stuff and sit out (c) squat square bungalows mostly dark green, with roller shutters. Etc.

There are farmyards with wells that have a huge tall post, and then the bucket on the end of a beam. Chickens running (surprisingly fast), dogs chasing pigs, barking, other pigs just flopped at the roadside.

People are ploughing fields with tractors, collecting sweetcorn by hand, grubbing for potatoes, cutting grass with scythes, loading hay or marrows onto horse-drawn wooden carts. There are loads of horses and carts clip clopping along, all registered with wood number boards on the back. Men in green hats with cord hatbands (look sort of Austrian to me) say bun giorno (or something). There are bent old women in black, standing alone, clutching a tree, or leaning on sticks.

The verges by village houses are covered wth roses, michaelmas daisies, yellow chrysanthemums, and there are rows of marigolds and mysembrianthemum (?not sure spelling) down by the wall, hanging baskets with petunias, pots of geraniums.

Along the fields there is purple clover, dandelions, pale blue cranesbill (a new plant), and a thing with spikes of yellow flowers like snapdrogons. Hillsides of thistles and teasel, rose hips and blue sloes, and grassy fields dotted with purple autumn crocus (very nice).

Sometimes I take the minor roads cross country, especially if it’s a more direct route. Mostly it’s been ok, but I got lost on the hills east of of Cluj-Napoca, where the road became one of those awful rubble tracks, uphill, confusing junctions etc. After ages scrabbling uphill, I stood at a sunny windy road junction, white tracks leading here and there across hillsides of green and yellow stripes, a wayside cross. No idea which way I should go. In a car you’d just think how annoying, and bash on till you got somewhere, but on a bike you really don’t want to go up extra hills etc. Very frustrating. I eventually got to a place on the map, and sorted it out from there.

I’d not thought about him for a while, but TIMURLANE even came here. How extraordinary is that. His Mongols raided in 1241, and apparently the German towns here started out because Germans were invited to fill up land timurlane laid waste. I went through Sigisoara, one of the Saxon German towns, which has huge clock tower, Lutheran churches with the hymn boards in old gothic writing, and a lovely graveyard all ivy and horsechestnuts and tombs of german people, identified by job - tradesman, railway official, mayor. Scruffy schoolboys were shouting to each other in german, organising football games.

There are also people in most surprising costumes - men in startlingly big black wide-brimmed hats like Zorro, and women and girls in enormous pleated long skirts. I think these are Hungarians, but not sure.

I am a bit scared of some of the people. Barefoot kids and wild looking people roaming about, especially at the edges of towns. I haven’t seen such poor wild children since I left the tibetan bits of china. And lots of dogs. After that knife-throwing incident, I stopped in another village and was buying some bread quite normally, but when I tried to get out of the shop, the door was blocked wth people. I heard shouting and barking and saw there was a horrendous dog fight going on outside, a black big muscly dog was biting the neck of a white fluffy one and lots of poeple gathered round. A man was ramming a wooden hand cart at the dogs, but bits broke off his cart and the big dog still was going at the little one. Finally poeple threw water and it got sorted out but then the men started fighting, and it was all awful. I got quite worried about stopping in little places.

BUT I have to stop, and of course most people are perfeclty normal and nice. In one Hungarian village I was chatting in a huge half-bare shop, and they forced me to take a whole bag of bananas, chocolate, salt crackers and drinks without paying. I’m still eating their stuff.

The towns are just full of very proper Culture. They were doing Aida at cluj napoca, Ploeisti has a huge list of art and dance classes you could enroll for, there were organ recitals at Sigisoara, chamber music by Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov in Targu Mures, and plays by Ibsen, Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams. That’s just in October.

Now I’ve pretty much finished Transylvania, and Romania. I’ve now reached flat flat land in its far east. You see the lorries driving towards Hungary’s Great Plain silhoutted against the evening sun, far ahead. That’s the way I’m going too, aiming to cross the Great Plain and get to Budapest.

Sometimes these days I feel suddenly really lonely. You look bakc at the road you’ve just ridden and it’s empty, and you sit sometimes for a moment finishing a cup of tea by a field and it’s lonely. Don’t know why I feel it more here than in places before. It’s ok, you just have to turn back round look forwards hum a tune think of people smile at someone - and it’s ok. In fact, I should be fine, I’ve had quite a lot of poeple to talk to, after I was on Romanian TV news. Fame! Actually I wasn’t sure if they’d broadcast any of the film which they did on a dull rainy day in Brasov when I was really cold and wet. But they did, and in the days after it was on, people even asked me for my autograph etc in the street. One big lady clapped her hands, knew my name, told me all about myself, and gave me kisses on both cheeks. Bit of a surprise. Nice of her really.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 5:30 pm and is filed under On the Road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.