An Unexpected Welcome

We ped­alled slowly down the dusty track out of the last Hun­garian vil­lage. An unsettled even­ing was in store — clouds brooded above, hanging men­acingly as the air gus­ted and whipped around us, and the silence of the plains was inter­rup­ted only by the dis­tant sound of cow­bells on the wind. I had cycled a hun­dred kilo­met­ers, and was ready to pitch my tent and sleep, but the lure of the unknown drew the three of us onwards for just a little longer. The map showed a road across the bor­der into Romania, and it would be a sat­is­fy­ing achieve­ment to cross it before the end of the day.

The bor­der itself came and went in a spec­tac­u­larly anti­cli­mactic fash­ion. It was noth­ing more than an unmanned metal bar­rier, which we instinct­ively skir­ted round on our bikes. The road went from dirt to tar­mac, and we stopped, won­der­ing uneas­ily if we had missed some­thing. Surely there was more to it than that? But then, what with Romania join­ing the E.U., trans-continental travel was sup­posed to be a whole lot easier, wasn’t it?

As I rode into the gath­er­ing dusk, the unease I had felt did not dimin­ish. Instead, as we arrived in the first of many Romanian vil­lages, the feel­ing was intens­i­fied. People shot us looks of sus­pi­cion and hur­ried away from us. We tried ask­ing an old lady where we could camp — she got agit­ated and shook her head, point­ing back along the road we had come in on and mak­ing noises of con­cern and dis­ap­proval. This was not good.

It was not a great first impres­sion of the coun­try. As we con­tin­ued uneas­ily through the vil­lage — farm anim­als roam­ing freely in the streets — we were met with the same cold feel­ing from the res­id­ents who sat watch­ing us from their door­steps. Dark­ness was approach­ing. The cold, sharp smell of thun­der drif­ted on the wind.

We car­ried stoic­ally on into the countryside.

The next vil­lage was no dif­fer­ent. A trickle of para­noia began to infilt­rate my mind. What if… no, nobody really cared enough, did they? As we rode out of the vil­lage across the open plain towards some dis­tant ram­shackle cow­sheds, I felt the worry lift slightly. We were off the road, hav­ing found some­where secluded to camp, and it was almost night­fall. We would pitch our tents, cook a quick meal, and bed down for the night.

Light­ning struck in the dis­tance across the plain, and the first big drops of rain pierced the grow­ing dark­ness as I strapped my headtorch on and began to pitch my tent into the wind. I was cold and my poncho kept flap­ping in front of me so I couldn’t see my hands. I stumbled about, clutch­ing tent pegs and try­ing to con­trol the bil­low­ing fab­ric that played with the wind as if it were a sail. In the gloom, I ran over to my bike, extrac­ted the night’s neces­sit­ies and back to the tent, try­ing to avoid them get­ting wet in the driv­ing rain that now came down in sheets. My tent was up, and I was ready to escape from the ele­ments for the night.

Sud­denly, a fork of light­ning crashed down close by, tem­por­ar­ily dis­or­i­ent­at­ing me like a flash-bulb in the face. Then, head­lights swung round the corner, carving great shafts of light out of the rain. I was try­ing to make out what was hap­pen­ing. Andy was over by the bikes, try­ing to fig­ure out what was what in the black­ness of night. Fig­ures appeared from the car and a voice shouted “Bor­der police! Pass­ports please!”

What fol­lowed was 10 minutes of con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion. We stood about in the dark­ness. Every few seconds an arc of light­ning would smash to the ground within a few hun­dred metres of our camp­site. Pour­ing rain lashed down, soak­ing everything where it stood. Maria, together with a Romanian cowherd who spoke to her in Span­ish, pleaded with the small group of offi­cials who marched around, inspect­ing our sorry little situ­ation and mut­ter­ing things into radios. After what seemed like a delib­er­ately long stale­mate, we real­ised that they were order­ing us to pack everything up and come with them. Frus­tra­tion turned to anger and des­pair. I couldn’t believe the utter misery of what was hap­pen­ing to us. Everything was wrong. It was cold, dark, wet and miser­able, and we were tired, hungry, unable to com­mu­nic­ate, and now we were uprooted in the night and told to pack everything and march across a muddy, pitch-black expanse of grass­land, with only the dimin­ish­ing tail-lights of the police car as a guide.

I remem­ber the walk across the plain. It seemed to last for hours. In real­ity it was prob­ably no more than half a kilo­meter. My pathetic headtorch was use­less. Rain­wa­ter ran down my poncho, down my legs and into my boots, where it slowly developed into a cold, squelch­ing mush of mud, water, sock and foot. I could see noth­ing except the dis­tant vil­lage street­lamps. The red tail-lights had dis­ap­peared. Every now and again I would catch a glimpse of Andy’s headtorch, flick­er­ing way ahead of me. A nearby bolt of light­ning bathed the world in white­ness for a split second. I was trudging past the back end of a non­chalent cow. I remem­ber think­ing that this was quite a sur­real exper­i­ence and one that I would cer­tainly look back upon with a cer­tain nos­tal­gic pride.

To my sur­prise, my spir­its actu­ally took a turn up. It was one of those situ­ations where everything is so des­per­ately out of line with what you were intend­ing to hap­pen that everything becomes imbued with a cer­tain amount of humour. I star­ted to see what was hap­pen­ing and laugh about it. When I had nego­ti­ated the rabid dogs, giant cowpats and ran­dom ditches, and rejoined the oth­ers by a large police van, Andy had also seen the funny side and was crack­ing sar­donic jibes at the ignor­ant offi­cials whose Eng­lish exten­ded to a vocab­u­lary of about 10 immigration-related words. Des­pite the sheer hideous­ness of what was hap­pen­ing, we had tran­scen­ded the ini­tial des­pair and were now rid­ing the wave of this new and unex­pec­ted process.

The rest of the night con­tin­ued in an unpre­ced­en­ted dis­play of point­less bur­eau­cracy and ignor­ant, bored fron­tier police beha­viour. It took 14 offi­cials until 1:30am to drive us and our bikes and lug­gage to the nearest offi­cial bor­der (10km away) and hand us over to the Hun­garian bor­der police who then told us we could cross into Romania (thanks). And so it was that 4 hours of red tape later, we asked if there was any­where we could camp nearby. Yes, cycle 50km to Oradea, we were told. Well, thanks for understanding…

So the night wound up in the nearest 24-hour pet­rol sta­tion. We sat in our wet clothes in the cafe area, ordered 3 beers, bought a moun­tain of snack food and attemp­ted to get as much sleep as pos­sible in vari­ous pos­i­tions of dis­com­fort. The fol­low­ing morn­ing, we set off into what would be by far the most chal­len­ging and var­ied coun­try we’d vis­ited so far… Romania.

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