ABroad: road trip

Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 January 2017

Romanian Road Trip

04:17:00 2 comments

After nearly 48 hours I'd finally come to terms with my speeding fine....

A cold hour wait on the street in dirty clothes for a spare-of-the-moment AirBnB after a quick decision to leave WA5... Finally a young bloke rolls up and shows us around a newly renovated self contained apartment before we quickly run all our clothes through the washing machine and have a nice long shower.
What should we do for tea? Bugger it - lets order some takeaway! I quickly looked through tripadvisor for restaurants which deliver... Dominos... I quickly downloaded the iPhone app. and within about 5 minutes we had ordered a couple of pizzas. Within 45minutes it was delivered to our apartment!!! Kudos Dominos!

With a couple of days up our sleeve before we needed to get to Bucharest, we decided to hire a car and venture around. It was only a few hours to Moldova, but I couldn't find a car company who would let us take their car out of Romania... Or if they did - you wouldn't be covered for insurance.

We found a blog post on a road trip through Romania - Drink tea and travel - which looked pretty good, so using this as a guide we decided to take advantage of what turned out to be a crappy situation and have a bit more of a look around Romania.

I decided to give a local private hire car company a burl instead of the big Eurocar, Avis or Sixt. This local company called Ecoline was significantly cheaper, and seemed less hassle with insurance, unlimited kms etc. When we picked the car up the next day, the whole transition was fantastic - no significant paperwork to record previous scratches, just a couple of photos of the vehicle. Return it with a clean interior and a full tank of fuel - easy! The deposit was 300 euro (as opposed to 1000+ when using larger car companies), and the cost was 22euros per day. The plan was to get a little Toyota because via their website, this was the cheapest option, but we were up graded to a slightly bigger Peugeot.

The rocket!

We had an extra day at our Brasov accommodation, so we ducked out to Pele's castle to go for a bit of a drive and fill in the afternoon. It was only 60km out of Brasov, but took nearly two hours to get there due to speed limit restrictions, traffic and windy roads through the Carpathian Mountains .. When we got there we had to fork our a bit of cash for parking (3AUD). From the car park it was a bit of a walk up a steep hill of rough cobblestones to get to the castle.

Another castle eh - building this sucker took 10 years but wasn't "complete" until 40 years after it had began. The castle is still owned by the royal family (currently King Michael 1 of Romania), and sits on a 1000 hectare estate.

The castle itself was pretty nice, and had a lot of detail in its construction.

Unfortunately we didn't realise it until we arrived, but we couldn't get into the castle because it was closed for maintenance.. so we had a quick wander around the outside through the garden etc. before deciding to head back for a bit of an underwhelming afternoon.

Three Day Road Trip

Day 1 - Singasora & Baia Mare
Easy, about an hour and a halve up the freeway from Brasov were were at Singasora in no time. It was a frosty foggy morning but when we finally reached Singasora we had sun! Amy directed me to the city centre where we found a park featuring its own parking intendent, we bought an hour ticket and went for a quick look around!

Singasora was super impressive! The town was mostly untouched from medieval times!

The houses were all colourful and streets were quite! It really felt like it was untouched by an modern and western influence.

After a quick coffee and a chat to a local bloke, we were back on the road heading north for Baia Mare. The roads had changed from a highway to a typical two lane road which worked its way through country side, though so many villages. Sometimes we would be traveling for 20minutes constantly through little villages passing horse drawn carts carrying wood, manure or the entire family. It was slow going.

It was also hard to get my head around the speed limits here. On the way into a town there would be a 70 sign, then a 50 sign - ok, I'll obey. Then I'd get past by about 5 cars and a couple of trucks through the town who seemed to be doing at least 70kph... I'd have trucks up my ass until they could pass no matter what speed I through these villages. . I even had people tooting me when I was doing the limit. At the end of the village there would be a 50 with a red line though it and nothing else so at assumed it meant I could speed back up to the 90kph open road limit. After a couple of hours I decided to just follow the traffic and the speeds they were doing. In some instances it was 90kph through these villages behind a truck, and up to 110 on the open road. This was good because we stated to get somewhere. We only had to do a couple of hundred km's for the day, but it was taking a long time to get anywhere.

Eventually we came into a town and I was sitting about 100m behind the traffic doing about 70kph. All of a sudden a police car appears on the other side of the road with his lights on and he sort of signals to the car in front of us. It kinda looks like he flashes me too so I pull over behind another vehicle who was flagged down too. I was defiantly speeding but I thought the rest of the traffic was too...
The copper came to my window and said something in Romanian, I replied with a sorry do you speak English? He sort of shock his head and waved something which I though was get out of the car so I did, and walked up to the front car. When I got there he said something else to me and then waved up the road which I took as - nah your right to go. So we left.
I reckon everyone was speeding and the bloke parked in front of me was the first in the line to get caught so unfortunately he got the ticket.

We got about 10min up the road and the copper was BACK with lights and sirens behind me! Bugger, I couldn't pull over right away because we were on a pretty long bridge, but he was right up me hassling! I sort of half pulled over as soon as we got off the bridge hoping maybe he wanted to go around but unfortunately he was pulling me over...
He rolls up to my window and says Problem, problem - and waves me back to his car. I got our and head to his car where he shows me a video of me doing 69kph back in the village. I agree its me and he writes out some paper work. Turns out to be a 120lei (40AUD) on the spot fine - which I luckily have the exact amount of cash in my wallet, and then we are free to continue... I was fuming!!!

Baia Mare clocktower which used to be a church - the only real landmark we came across on a little wander around at night. We were staying right in the centre of the old town in a old style AirBnB. Other then Hotels there were only a few places on AirBnB and this one was the cheapest.

Baia Mare had a really cool vibe, a few trendy restaurants and bars. They were currently setting up the old town square for the Christmas markets, including a ice skating ring and plenty of lights.

Oh hey - another beer. Loved this pint glass/jar!

Day 2 - Merry Cemetery to Sibiu
Back in Albania a couple of Polish girls at a Hostel recommended we visit the Merry Cemetery, and I saw it on another couple of blogs that said it was worth a visit. Unfortunately nobody said it was practically out in the middle of nowhere! It was a good couple of hours of slow windy, village to village road from Baia Mare on the border of Ukraine and Romania in a small village called Sapanta.

The cemetery stands to show the lighter side of death with plenty of bright colours, sometimes funny stories and hand carved scenes on gravestones. Unfortunately its all in Romanian which I didn't know, so the experience was a little disappointing after it had taken us such a long time to get here.

One of the crosses read: This is where I rest, Holdis Ion is my name, For as long as I lived, I praised the political party (communist party), Aid I tried so hard for people here to have a good live, I had no children, But I helped, The town management.

Typical Romanian farmland in between villages.

After the Cemetery it was another long slow drive back down to Sibiu for the night. We took a couple of detours off the main roads to get away from impatient truck drivers and see more of the country side. We past through tiny wooden villages on dirt roads, a quite snow field on the top of a mountain, and plenty of farm land. The roads were generally in pretty good condition. We've been pretty impressed with the Romanian landscape, its pretty wild and would be magic riding a motorcycle around the winding roads in summer.
Day 3 - Sibiu, Brasov then Bucharest.
We only had a couple of hours to wander around Sibiu first thing in the morning before we needed to be back to Brasov to drop off the hire car, and catch a train down the Bucharest. It was a pretty nice place with plenty to offer!

Massive brick Holy Trinity Cathedral.

The medieval fortified walls are still in place around the city, just like Singasora the old town is in ripper condition. The main pedestrian street was pretty big and had plenty of coffee shops (best coffee we'd had for a long time). Sibiu actually had the Christmas markets up and running and what looked like an impressive light set up in the large town square - it would have been well worth a look at night.

This AirBnB shower was missing a door - there was no attempt by the host other then the mop bucket to fix or reduce the amount of water the came out of the shower.... Its inspired me to do a post on our AirBnB experience because every. single. place has had some sort of zinger.

We managed to get back to Brasov around 1pm to drop of our hire car. It was a Saturday so unfortunately the bloke we hired it off had to come into the office to grab the keys (no extra charge like Sixt or Eurocar). Then he dropped us off at the train station - legend!!!

Sunday, 4 September 2016

Vienna, Petronell-Carnuntum & Rust - Austria

23:52:00 No comments

The weekend of - 12 August 2015

Vienna Austria, NOT Venice Italy!!

Or Wein as its know in Austria, and on all road signs directing to the city. Vienna is the capital and largest city in Austria and the second largest German-speaking city in the world after Berlin (fun fact). For the last few years it has ran second to Melbourne for the most liveable cities in the world, and is known for its culture and new world thinking...

These are all things we didn't know about Vienna (which I originally confused with Venice) so the day we spent there, we sort of just rode around the town not really knowing what we were looking at or doing.

What we've learn't from our experience:

There are no gates or ticketing machines (as such) on the metro system so you can ''go black'' and travel the metro without tickets. At the risk of getting caught which i've heard is small.
The bike infrastructure was amazing. Dedicated bike lanes throughout the centre of the city, and along most roads bikes take priority.
Vienna Schnitzel - delicious, best schnitzel I've ever had! Potato, schnitzel and some lemon.
After the Schnitty, we stumbled across this coffee and ice cream place called La Romana and it was a bloody beauty!

Swimming pool floating on a river....

We find ourselves at Vienna after dropping Jake and Tarn off at one of their old workaway hosts from a couple of years ago for a catch up. It took a bit of driving and some wrong turns but we managed to find a caravan park about 6km from the city. Unfortunately the park was full (holding 300 campers) but for 15euros we could camp just outside the gates and use their facilities for the night.

Loving the bike paths, bike specific traffic lights

The street dancer to my left was doing a cracking job!

La Romana - Best coffee and Ice Cream of the trip!

Statue to Mozart

Best way to get around, I miss my cycling.

Interesting, I believe this is an old mountain bike with road handle bars and large road tires. Went to a bike shop to purchase a bike lock.

Big buildings, and statues. We aren't sure exactly what its all about but very impressive. We are becoming a bit numb to it all now...

We must of done about 40km on the bike this day getting from the van into the city and back.

Riding back to the caravan park

our cellar

We have few nights up our sleeve in Vienna but after one day decided to hit the road and explore eastern Austria for a couple of days.

While we only spent one day exploring Vienna, on reflection we possibly did rush around a little, but we really weren't in the exploring zone while we were here. I think we were a bit buggered and just looking to relax I defiantly had the Melbourne feel about it, it felt very safe and was really easy to get around. The city itself was beautiful, the notable buildings were significant in size and architecture. Unfortunately we couldn't find a walking tour for the day which would have been nice to do to understand a bit more about the area... At the end of the day we'd enjoyed a good day out on the bike, seeing a couple of parks, the major city, ridden along the river for about 10km and just soaked it all up.

Petronell-Carnuntum

We had a Lonely Planet "Austrian and Switzerland road trip book", and it had some key places to visit east of Vienna so thats where we went to fill in the next two nights. Petronell-Carnuntum was a sleepy village, we rolled in pretty late, found somewhere to camp. Got up early and went for a run then left to see some sites.

35AUD for this powered site next to a tennis court.

The site of a couple of thousand year old roman colosseum which was expected to seat a couple of thousand spectators.

Animal enclosure for Lions before they were sent out to battle the gladiators.

Another castle on a hill.

You can't quite see it but in the distance is Hungry

Rust - a lake town for the arvo for a swim. We had to paid 4 Euros each to get into this little beach on the edge of the lake. I'm reading a book on Amy's phone!

Not the clear water we were expecting - it was muddy and exactly like swimming in a dam. Fun though.

Frothies

The lake is massive, and surrounded by dense reeds

Rust is popular for its lake, its wine and many stalks nests - note the stalks nesting on a chimney.

We snuck out of town and found this little park on top of a hill next to a winery, decided we'd try and park/sleep here for the night to save some cash.

Pretty nice view over the lake...

The next day, Monday, we had about 200km of traveling in the morning back to St. Polton to pick Jake and Tarn up around lunch time. We'd had a nice relaxing couple of days and were keen to continue the adventure with the aim to be down in the Swiss Alps by Friday night.