This is part of the sixteenth section of our around the world trip.
Complete Trip Overview & Map

Coming from Bulgaria or read about our previous visit to Romania
 

27/5/10 Cars were passing easily, Bulgarian or Romanian, passengers showing only identity cards. We had to wait, documents entered into the computer, but no motorcycle insurance check. Some cars, three while we waited, were avoiding the bridge toll by driving out the in border crossing, dropping off a bottle or two of soft drink at the immigration/police booth along the way, a seemingly standard, known, well established price. A different bridge toll! Entrenched corruption is hard to suppress. We had prebooked accommodation in Bucharest, a one bedroom serviced apartment right in the centre of the city, two nights. An older style, modernised, very comfortable for 29 Euro a night, on the fifth floor of an ex-Soviet block. The agency has a number of apartments in the area that they let on short term. It was a welcoming relax after the lunch time traffic of the bustling city.

28/5/10 Bucharest is a city still undergoing enormous change. The previous rulers, during Soviet times, built tall buildings surrounding the city's churches and destroyed much of the old city centre. Today it is a pedestrian area under construction with little finished and much to be done, partially stalled by the country's economic problems. Refurbished buildings sit alongside dilapidated or renovation projects whilst street cafe's haphazardly dot paved areas interspersed between earthworks. Not everyone likes the new Romania, faster, busier, more traffic snarled. Not everyone likes the boom bust that has occurred recently, but being a member of the EU carries benefits and disadvantages. The country is currently in recession but we are finding the prices here much higher coming from Bulgaria.

29/5/10  We followed the ancient flatlands crossing many tributaries that flow into the Danube River. Broad acre farming, strips of ploughed, crops, pasture and mown grass flicked by alongside the motorway but traffic slowed to an almost crawl near Piteste as we got a full dose of the busy Romanian roads, trucks, horse drawn wagons, old drivers in ancient cars, young drivers in fast cars all wanting to use the good surfaced but inadequate road westwards through the mountains. Our destination was the small village of Talmacel, just 18 km's short of Sibiu, where we had booked accommodation in an historical, restored house, where more horse drawn wagons rolled the streets than cars. We had dodged showers all day and managed to arrive dry, just before afternoon rain and managed a walk out through the village and into the surrounding timbered meadows where villagers grazed a milking cow or a horse late in the evening.

30/5/10 A visit to the historical town of Sibiu. Similar to the uninitiated, us, as many other historical old city centres of this region, however this one has been restored recently and on a Sunday was a promenade for locals and tourists alike. Another walk into the surrounding hillsides of our accommodation village in the evening, following the fast flowing creek to open meadows.

31/5/10 Heavy rain was forecast in Arad in the early afternoon so we left at 7am hoping to arrive undrenched. A mixture of fast flat riding and twisty rolling plains, of sparsely trafficked to annoyingly slow congestion. We covered the 300 km's with one stop in about five hours and entered our hotel just as the forecast downpour arrived, nice timing.

1/6/10 Still showery we decided to hang out here for another day and after phoning the entire family back in Australia with wi/fi and Skype we ventured out between showers to look around the city. Not touristy, nor traditional, Arad is a normally functioning industrial based city with some lovely unrestored old buildings, parks and a river flowing through. Not seemingly wealthy nor poor we see it as a cross section of Romanian society, something we are looking for in our visits to countries this trip. Most of the ground floor apartments of the old Soviet style apartment blocks near the city centre have been extended outwards and have become shops, slowly creating a consumers centre, something missing from the Soviet era.

2/6/10 Hanging out for another day in Arad. The way different countries cultures handle money matters can sometimes give an indication of that country. We mentioned the giving of gifts to the Romanian border officials to avoid the bridge toll as we entered the country, but that was added to by a few experiences of minor money adjustments in this country, money things that we haven't experienced elsewhere in Europe. There was the attempted doubling of the price of a cup of coffee from the advertised listed price, the short change of 2 Euro from our accommodation place in Bucharest and the hefty rounding down each time we changed money at currency exchanges. On the other side people have sometimes been unnecessarily generous here. We received free cups of coffee and snaps, plus a plate of home made local meats, cheeses and bread at our accommodation in Talmacel, a difficult country to assess.

3/6/10 Past our time to leave and this morning we rode to the border, again using the last of our local currency for petrol. As has been the case at the last few borders there were no exit formalities and we simply rode out. The roads we followed in Romania were generally good quality, new asphalt and smoothish. Our only complaint was the level of traffic, mostly trucks, slowing our progress, along with horse drawn carts that often blocked one side of the road. It made averaging a decent speed difficult but we had plenty of time to look around at the scenery. 

Move with us to Hungary or go to our next visit to Romania
 

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