The journey continues....
Germany whizzed by at a great rate of knots but unfortunately we had a little more trouble once we got into Austria. It turns out the driver didn't know how to use the sat nav properly and he had merely plugged in the final destination and let the device do the rest. This is one of my major bug bears with sat navs, they stop people thinking. The mistake he made was to say that he wanted to avoid toll roads, this meant that instead of cruising along the E60 motorway avoiding the mountains we ended up snaking our way through mountainous back roads in the middle of the night. Along with the fog and the constant blind turns you might be forgiven for thinking that what you shouldn't do is drive in the middle of the road. This, apparently, is the safest way to negotiate such a route but having had to swerve back onto our own side of the road a few times I found myself strongly disagreeing with this philosophy.
After a couple of hours of this meandering at 20-30mph we eventually stopped for fuel at which point I leapt out of the car and bought an atlas. I eventually managed to pin down where we were and led us back to the E60 but the whole time the sat nav was forever telling us to get off the road. I insisted on being given the wretched thing and reprogrammed it, properly this time, and we soon made good progress through the rest of the country. Dawn brought Hungary which whizzed passed without mishap.
Since getting off the ferry in France the borders between each country have been non-existent. If you didn't keep an eye out for the sign announcing the frontier then you would never know you had passed into another country. There were no barriers or gates, no tolls or customs and no need for anything as archaic as a passport.
All that changed when we got to Romania, however. All of a sudden everything ground to a halt. Perhaps because they only get one car all day to look over the border guards decided that they would make the event last as long as possible. I wouldn't have expected three Romanians and an Englishman to have too much difficulty getting into Romania, but there were questions aplenty and the need to go to the little hut off to one side to pay the 'tax'. Once we were finally on our way again the going was a lot slower than it had been previously. Beautiful, slick, black tarmac gave way to pitted, gravelly tracks. As we crossed a wide, flat plateaux dotted with villages and farmsteads the difference in affluence between the people of Hungary and Romania was stark.
As I look back the main images I have of that area are of a dead dog in the middle of the road, frozen stiff and entrails being picked at by crows; and an old man (I almost want to say 'peasant') sat on a crate at the roadside selling some home grown vegetables on a blanket. It's fair to say none of the produce at hand would have passed the QC of a British supermarket. The people here were dirt poor and I feared that all of the worst stereotypes that many of us will have of Romania were true after all. As we progressed, slowly, we got to the city of Timsoara which, happily, looked like any other city; although the undercurrent of poverty never completely faded.
This picture was taken by Georgiana as I slept. We had eventually come across a good road that should have shuttled us down to the capital, Bucurest, but it appeared to be closed. The third and final fuck up of the journey was when it was decided that instead of following alongside the main road on smaller roads for a while and then joining it later, we started ascending the Transalpine road. This felt a lot like climbing into Narnia. The road was frozen, the trees were frozen, waterfalls were frozen; everything was white, cold and hard. After nearly thirty hours of non-stop driving I didn't feel that this was the best way forward; the road was single track, the tyres we had were completely unsuitable, the driver was exhausted, and the place was completely deserted. It could have gone very badly wrong. I was, however, overruled. I was so pissed off about this that I decided to try to sleep my way through it.
This picture was taken by Georgiana as I slept. We had eventually come across a good road that should have shuttled us down to the capital, Bucurest, but it appeared to be closed. The third and final fuck up of the journey was when it was decided that instead of following alongside the main road on smaller roads for a while and then joining it later, we started ascending the Transalpine road. This felt a lot like climbing into Narnia. The road was frozen, the trees were frozen, waterfalls were frozen; everything was white, cold and hard. After nearly thirty hours of non-stop driving I didn't feel that this was the best way forward; the road was single track, the tyres we had were completely unsuitable, the driver was exhausted, and the place was completely deserted. It could have gone very badly wrong. I was, however, overruled. I was so pissed off about this that I decided to try to sleep my way through it.
