Paul wanted to be on the bike by 6am, we ended up getting underway by 7am. Progress was slow for the first three hours – speed limits rarely above 70km/h, long villages stretching for many kilometres. While Craiova was very charming indeed, we didn’t give the rest of Romania much of a chance to get us under its spell – lots of traffic, including many trucks, on narrow roads with few opportunities to overtake and fewer roadside eateries, meant we ended up stopping only once for coffee – after the beautiful, but not incredibly so, section along the Danube, and once for fuel, just before the motorway an hour before Temeswar.
Once we hit the motorway, the bit was between our teeth: Paul kept the R80 at 120km/h for long stretches, including on the toll roads in Hungary – once we’d crossed the border without so much as stopping. We didn’t leave the motorway in Hungary, so caught only occasional glimpses of the beauty of the puszta – including glimpses of storks crossing above us and stalking the marshy fields. Our final fuel stop, rather fittingly, was at OMV – the major Austrian oil company that has networks of filling stations in Eastern Europe.
We entered Austria along the A4, i.e. further north than I’d expected. Reminding me of the wind turbine blades we’d encountered en route to wind farms in western Kazakhstan, we were met by combined wind power generation and PV facilities. The ride through the villages was charming, but slow – eventually we ended up back on the A2, heading west along the S6 across Semmering: in the tunnels I ended up riding in front of Paul, mainly to escape the terrible racket of the R80, but also to get him to stop blinding oncoming traffic with the high beam ; )
A little over 12 hours after we’d gotten on the bikes, we reached Kindberg. Our well-laid plan of first taking a picture in the main square, then picking up the key for apartment, before heading out to grab schnitzel and beers was derailed by the fact that a storm had toppled the town’s landmark maypole at the end of March. We had pictures taken at the church instead, and headed off to dinner after picking up the keys – savouring every bite as the sunset coloured the sky in countless shades of red to celebrate the conclusion of this journey full of discoveries and surprises.
