Cycling from the UK to Romania

Le Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:49:23 -0700, Bill-Dorset-UK a écrit :

(...) I'd try to shy away from mountains and stick roads
rather than tracks.


I'm just back from a short week in Romania (no cycling), and what I saw
suggests one or two comments.

- Roads are in a very bad condition. Many potholes almost everywhere.
Minor roads might even be unpaved. Last week, "unpaved" meant "muddy".
Even when roads are paved, most local cyclists stick to the muddy zone at
the edge of the road. This is probably not what you expect to do when
riding 160 km a day, but I don't know whether our view of "vehicular"
cycling can be fully exercised there. If cycling in this country, I would
probably not chose to use a pure road bike, but rather a touring or even
a mountain bike with 35C or 1 1/2" tires.

- As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, major roads are overcrowded with traffic
including trucks, due to the absence of motorways. The density of traffic
is increasing much faster than the infrastructure is improving. If I judge
from the behavior of our bus driver, the policy is not to give extra space
to slow traffic. Instead, they seem to expect that bikes and horse
carriages will somehow pull to the right (muddy) edge of the road. You
should then try to stick to minor roads, but not so minor that they might
be unpaved.

- As for bike shops and spares, I would be surprised if you could easily
find decent bike parts in anything but major cities.

All these things considered, I would expect it to be difficult to maintain
the same 160 km daily average in Romania as you do at home in England.

It could however be that my present views are too much influenced by the
way I travelled in a little part of this country, which was by bus in a
group tour.

Have a good trip

Turtle

Yup, I concur with you on that. I spent 10 weeks in Romania teaching
English last summer and travelled around by every means with the
exception of cycling.

The romanian leg would be about 400mi of the 1800mi journey, so
hopefully the annoyances will be ones I can put up with. The biggest
vexation in the butt will be the hoards of (rabid) dogs which accompany
every city, town, street and house.

I think most reasonable sized towns will have a bike shop and every
reasonably sized village will have a garage where so long as there are
two alpha males, there'll be competition in successfully fixing any
problem.

The bike I propose to use is a touring bike.