Hello,
this is me having a go at an ADVRider style ride report, meaning a lot of pics and a little text. This first post is meant to be somewhat of test, so if you care to get more updates, please let me know. You can also follow the journey on my own blog (link in my Signature).

So, where and how long am I going? It's meant to be a six weeks trip around south eastern Europe, or 'the balkans'. The idea was and still is to do the Enduromania in Romania, ride around Romania for a bit, then do a quick blast down along the Black Sea coast until I hit Istanbul, where I want to hang out for a couple of days.

After that I'll turn back west, go through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania until I hit the Adriatic coast where I turn north.

I have a reservation for the so called Autozug (a Train I can put my motorbike and my lazy butt on) on the 5th of September in Trieste, Italy. Until then I'll try to keep on drifting

The Enduromania would deserve an entire thread for itself. I'll skip that part and just say it was great fun and I would recommend this to everybody who's into offroad riding and looks to spend some time in Romania.

This is the only pic I have from me at the Enduromania (a guy from Sweden took that):



After a Week of fun with a great team it was time to get going again and especially getting used to handling the fully loaded bike on loose gravel.



While taking some twisties and admiring the sceenerie I stumbled upon this:



I think it was the local garbage dump. It was right next to the street and there was also one guy waking around there and doing whatever. The stench was quite bad and I moved on as fast as the KTM and the Gods of Acceleration would led me.

Soon the Scenery got quite better again:



As you can see Romania can be quite beautiful, if she wants to

The scenery stayed quite montainous and riding was great fun. It looked a bit like the alps to me:



This is something that you will see quite often in Romania:



The 'Vulcanizare' Workshop is where they fix flat tires of trucks and cars. You will find these workshops in almost every small village. Apparently the reason for all these flat tires and hence all the workshops are these guys:



The horseshoe get's attached to the hooves by hammering in a nail and once in a while the horse will loose one of these nails. Since there's quite a few of these around (you'll see them everywhere, especially in blind corners, right in front of you, going SLOW) there's quite a few nails lying around on the streets.

I tried to make it up to the Urdele Pass this day, but the weather was getting quite bad and at some point it began not only to rain but to hail as well. I decided to turn back and get the first Pensiunea I could find.

20€ got me this room:



And while the weather outside was looking like this:


I decided to get out the gear and fix me some dinner:



Apparently there's too many images in my post, so I'll just split it in two halves.

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Projekt Balkan
www.buebo.de - Der tägliche Wahnsinn