In the previous post, I outlined how we drove from Finland to the southern border of Poland, then to Slovakia and Hungary in a matter of days, and continued south on our long way around to the Nürburgring.
So, Romania. We crossed the Hungarian-Romanian border at Oradea, and up until then we had pretty much been plain sailing, without much regard to the road conditions, as they were mostly fine. The biggest potholes had been encountered in Latvia after the Estonian border, and there hadn’t been reasons to complain about anything since.
But after the border, which was situated on a field in the middle of nowhere, it soon became apparent the small side roads weren’t really suitable for enthusiastic driving. The pic above shows where we stopped, and it’s sort of decent there, but it wasn’t uncommon to encounter fist-sized boulders and wonder if it would have been smoother to drive across the fields. We scrapped our route plan and headed to the main road towards Cluj-Napoca soon enough.


Despite trying to feel accustomed to gravel road antics with the 205’s heritage, I thought the car felt a little creakier after our excursion.

Marghita, Romania.

We had a good night’s sleep in Cluj-Napoca, the first rest since Zakopane. We had started from Poland that morning, driven through two countries and ended up in the middle of yet another.

Romanian highway, thunderstorm, old Peugeot with flickering illumination. The epitome of ambience.

The next day, we visited a salt mine in Turda. It was an incredible place of human-dwarfing dimensions, fashioned inside a mountain during centuries.




Our next resting place, and a home base for a few days would be near Sibiu and Paltinis. We spent a little time in Alba Iulia, looking at the churches and statues there at the old fortress, and continued south on the recently-constructed, super-smooth motorway.

And at Pensiunea Alpin, we finally met up with our other FinalGear friends from all around Europe. We teamed up and hit the road from there, after having either fried eggs or omelette for breakfast every day.

It was incredible to finally make it to the Transalpina and Transfagarasan roads. Both built to slash through mountains, with dams a dime a dozen, we stopped every now and then to admire the scenery and buy snacks and coffee from the little huts on the side of the road.

I can still transport myself in my mind to these places surrounded by forest, with the sense of absolute nothingness save for the strip of road there.

And a bunch of guys with beater cars, taking photos of each other.


I loved the Transfagarasan. The weather wasn’t great, the road surface was surprisingly harsh, but to see a serpentine road there with a good while to spend on it, having reached one of your destinations in your small French economy car: I was in high heaven. No wonder the clouds were almost reachable.





Some rather heavy rainfall had caused landslides, downing trees and creating some small obstacles for us. And it wasn’t uncommon for some of our cars to have tire issues, as a couple of us ran on quite low profile tires.
[youtube width=”720″ height=”480″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cBMCGWYZyE[/youtube]

And then there were sheep.

There weren’t too many barriers anywhere, either, hence this face from your intrepid reporter:


The Transalpina road (DN67C) takes you as high as 2145 meters above sea level. Getting up meant gunning the car in second and third gear, trying to preserve momentum, not letting it bog down. And it did get all the way up, to the roof of the world in sight.


Accompanied by Dacias, of course.

We continued to Targu Jiu for our last Romanian day, as the next day we would continue west.

This little guy was friendly enough to make it on these pages.
My idea of Romania had been completely transformed in a few days. If the chance arose to spend time there again, in Transilvania, driving around or just wandering in the towns, I’d jump at it. It’s a country worth visiting, with sights worth preserving.