My Romanian Folly — In search of vampires and the Transfăgărășan

After being invited to visit the set of the Discovery Channel’s Harley and the Davidsons, Matt King decided to add a small ride around Romania on to his trip... however, little did he know this diversion would be full of its own challenging obstacles

Earlier this year I was invited to visit the set of the Discovery Channel’s Harley and The Davidsons mini-series, which was filmed mostly on location in the Romanian capital city of Bucharest. Like most other Americans, if we ever have a reason to think about this somewhat mysterious former eastern-bloc country, the mention of its name invariably conjures up images of dreary Transylvanian castles, Count Dracula and vampires.

Figuring I would likely not have another chance to visit the country for quite some time, if ever, I put out feelers to some of my colleagues in H.O.G.’s European operations to see about arranging to ride a motorcycle for a few days while I was there. That turned out to be quite easy, since there is actually a Harley-Davidson dealership in Bucharest (I was surprised to learn that with a population of 2.2 million, the city is the sixth largest in the European Union), and with just a few emails I arranged to borrow a V-Rod Night Rod Special^® for a few days.

That’s when Ross Chambers, H.O.G. Regional Manager for Central Eastern Europe, emailed me with a proposal: “I heard you’re going to be in Romania. Can I come down and meet you? I’ve always wanted to ride the Transfagarasan Highway.”

A few years ago the popular television show Top Gear anointed the Transfagarasan as the ‘Best Road in the World’, wrestling that title from Italy’s Stelvio Pass. The brainchild of notorious Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, it was built in the early 1970s ostensibly as a way to move tanks across the Carpathian mountain range in the event of an invasion from the Soviet Union, with which the country was loosely allied as part of the Warsaw Pact, hence its nickname “Ceausescu’s Folly.” With a maximum altitude of 6,700 feet, it's the second highest mountain road in Romania, second only to the Transalpina, which I'll get to in a moment. We had a plan.

Forward Planning

A few weeks went by and I was busy making arrangements to visit the movie set and didn’t give much thought about the bike ride until a couple of days before Ross was set to ride down from Prague to meet me. I don’t remember who it was, but one of us finally had the foresight to check into the road conditions and we found we had a little bit of a problem: The Transfagarasan was closed for the season. Hmmm, if we’d researched that ahead of time we would have known that due to snow and frequent rock slides the pass is officially open only from late June through October and we were there in early May.

Here’s where I want to mention that throughout my visit to Romania, I enjoyed nearly perfect mobile phone and data coverage, even in the most remote locations. So over email and texts we quickly hatched a plan to shift our attention to the Transalpina, Romania’s other great alpine road, and Hotwired hotel rooms in Râmnicu Vâlcea, about 70 miles from Bucharest.

Nestled near the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, Râmnicu Vâlcea is a quiet city of about 120,000, world famous for one thing: hacking. If you look it up on the internet, you’ll find dozens of articles proclaiming the town to be an epicentre of internet scams worth billions over the years, from eBay and Craigslist scams to corporate and government data breaches. I spent two days there and didn’t get hacked, so I’ll have to take that on faith.

On the day we planned to meet, I took a leisurely ride from Bucharest and arrived at our hotel in the mid-afternoon, waiting for Ross and his friend, Radek Pekarek, the Director of H.O.G. Ostrava Chapter from Strážnice, Czech Republic to arrive later that evening. About two hours after their expected arrival time, I started to get worried and sent a few messages. Finally Ross texted back that they had hit traffic and rain on the way down and it was taking much longer than they planned.

When Ross and Radek finally rolled in near midnight after what sounded like a fairly nightmarish two-day ride, we gathered in the hotel bar and made plans to tackle the Transalpina. With conflicting information about whether it was open or closed, we decided to wing it, because we were in Romania and we were going to ride somewhere!

The next morning we got up early and headed west on Route 67 and then north on Route 67C, the Transalpina, enjoying the beautiful vistas and sweeping curves of the southern section of the road. Passing through the ski village of Rânca, there were a few cars heading up and down the mountain, so we pressed on until the switchbacks started getting tighter and more frequent, signaling we were nearing the top. And then we saw it: a road block of two large concrete barriers across the road. I don’t understand any Romanian, but ‘closed’ is pretty obvious in any language.

We stopped for a few minutes to assess the situation, opted not to take ‘No’ for an answer, and rode around the barriers. And we got about three kilometers farther before running into a snowbank across the road. Closed means closed.

A Small Diversion

Thwarted, we headed back down the mountain and stopped for lunch at a roadside café near the entrance to the Defileul Jiului National Park. Lunch dragged on and it was about 3pm before we hit the road again with a plan to ride through the park and link up with another road on the northern side of the Transalpina. It was well-marked on our maps (it even showed up on Google Maps) and looked like a good option to avoid retracing our path.

Heading north from our lunch stop we enjoyed a beautiful twisting ride north on E79 along a river before heading west on Route 7A, which would take us along the northern side of the mountain range the Transalpina cuts across. The road started to slant upward about the same time rain began to fall and the sun began to fade, and its cracked road surface soon morphed into a rutted and washed-out dirt track, made even slicker with the light rain. Navigating the off-camber switchbacks and washed-out ruts made for a real white-knuckle ride, especially on our big Harleys. Fortunately traffic was minimal, but we did have to contend with a few logging trucks heading down the mountain. We also saw a couple of riders on big BMW adventure bikes who looked at us like we were nuts.

After an hour or so of intensely stressful riding, we pulled to the side for a break and assessed the situation. The road conditions were bad and we had no idea how much worse they might get the rest of the way up, but it was too late to turn around and head back the way we had come. So we sucked it up, got back on our bikes and crossed our fingers. As luck would have it, we had already passed the worst of it. The rain started to let up and when we finally crested the highest point, the dirt gradually returned toroad surface.

Back on tarmac, we chased the remaining daylight alongside a beautiful alpine lake, rode past the northern junction of the Transalpina (if we’d had more time it would have been tempting to see how far up we could have gone in that direction) and finally rolled back in to Râmincu Vâlcea about 8pm. After 12 hours in the saddle we’d only ridden about 175 miles, but we’d seen a bit of everything the country had to offer.

An Understated Beauty

A funny thing about Romania, at least to an outsider, is that the people there have not embraced the whole ‘vampire’ thing. Maybe it’s because they spent so much of the 20th century cut off from the rest of Europe and western culture that they didn’t realise it’s their most marketable tourism commodity, or maybe it’s because it annoys them that the whole story was just made up by a British novelist (probably the latter). In most other countries, the two most famous Romanians are Count Dracula and Nadia Comaneci. But I spent nine days there and never saw anyone with a cape and fangs or a gymnast. I also didn’t see a lot of motorcycles, especially Harleys, which makes this country with its amazing scenery, well-kept roads and epic mountain passes a riders’ paradise. Just check to make sure the roads are open before you go.