Motorcycle Travel Guide Romania – Roads To Die For

It’s mid-summer in Romania and I’m about to die.

Storm force winds are shrieking between the lampposts and lashing me with horizontal rain-bullets as I struggle to control my heavily-laden Honda Varadero motorcycle over broken cobbles. I’m on my way into Bucharest city centre and wishing I was anywhere else.

Surrounded by suicidally-impatient drivers who are nudging my bike with their bumpers, and dodging un-fenced road works trenches full of swirling brown floodwater, I think things can’t get any worse. Then I see they most definitely can…

The car ahead of me rears into the air, crashes down and slithers sideways as it hits some obstacle in the road. Now I can see what it is: glistening steel tram-tracks cross the road at 45 degrees. These rails stand a full six-inches above the road surface.

“My God!” I whimper, “They can’t expect us to ride over those?”

Realising there’s no alternative, I stand up on the footrests just as a bell rings beside me. A quick glance to my left confirms my worst fears. It’s a tram. It’s going to cross the road at the same instant I hit its tracks. There’s no time to stop. I’m going to die.

There are moments in life when one has to make a snap decision. I crack open the Varadero’s throttle and the big V-twin surges forward. Turning my bike at the last moment to hit the wet steel at near right angles, we lurch, bump and crash over first one, then two slippery rails.

Miraculously I’m still on the bike, still upright and the tram has missed me. Phew! Then I remember my wife Viv, riding her Honda Transalp right behind me. Omygod!




I twist to look over my shoulder just in time to see her bouncing her bike over the rails only feet in front of the advancing tram. By some miracle we both made it.

Many others weren’t so lucky. Next day, as we watched the TV news from a flood-bound hotel in neighbouring Bulgaria, we discovered the nightmare storm had washed away houses, roads and bridges. Cars, lorries, buses and pedestrians had been swept away in the biblical deluge. In all 62 people were killed by the floods, falling trees or lightning. Thousands more were left homeless.

What on earth were we – a pair of dithery grandparents – doing riding through all this on our bikes? Were we mad?

The answer was obviously YES. But we were mad with a motive. We had set off from home in Norfolk to visit the overseas projects of UK children’s charity EveryChild and, hopefully, raise some publicity for their good works in the process.

Inspired by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s Long Way Round trip when they visited Unicef operations in Eastern Europe, we figured we could do something similar, but without the TV crew, fixers, medics and support vehicles. We knew we would take in 12 countries along the way and clock up something like 5000 miles, but we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.

For more details of this ridiculous journey – hairy, scary and often hilarious – why not read the book of our travels. It is titled ‘Beyond Bucharest: Motorcycle Adventure Travel’ by Bob Goddard and contains numerous maps plus colour and black & white photos. www.timbuktu-publishing.co.uk

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About the Author

Bob Goddard

A short video taster is available at the publisher’s website: http://www.timbuktu-publishing.co.uk/ where you can also read reviews, see...