The road to the monastery was narrow, winding and was pretty much damaged everywhere. Flower stalls lined the road and enhanced it with bright colours. The first sign of what was to come were two full size tour buses lined up by the side of the road. As we came closer to the monastery itself we found 20 odd souvenir shops on both sides of the road, neatly aligned like market stalls. To my utter surprise they were operated by monks... The tourists were also guided in and out of the buses by monks... parking was to be done on pay and display parking areas operated by monks... Here I was thinking that monasteries are all about religion and faith, leaving the worldly goods behind and that sort of thing. Well, not here. These monks love money and are as commercial as Walt Disney. Having an intercom meant we could talk about what to do. This isn't a monastery I said but a Money-stery, a commercial tourist trap, the only thing worshipped here is money. Mike fully agreed and we thus turned around and left.
The results of that kept us busy for the rest of the day. Right at the turnoff to tourist route 74, we ran into road works. Roadworks that went on for 30 km... Dust, rocks, potholes, cracks, gravel... it was all there. Plus a series of one-lane sections with traffic lights. It was literally the road from hell. To put it in perspective: we have been on the Dalton and Denali highways in Alaska, quite a few dirt roads in the USA, Mexico, Belize and we went into the highlands of Guatemala which was mostly mud, rocks and holes. But this main road in Romania topped them all! Our maximum speed was 40-45 and the average at best 30 km/hr. Yet we were the faster vehicles out there.
There were sections where riding next to the road was actually better than on it. The roadworks lasted indeed for 30 km, and then the next section started which was 74 km... followed by a road that was just as bad of another 85 km... All in all 189 km of 'road' took us more than 6 hours. It battered our bikes and suspension, was tricky in places as missing one pothole meant going down or upside down; and there were thousands of them. Cars were zig-zagging around it trying to overtake trucks, who made the situation even worse by kicking up enough dust to start a sandstorm. Mix this with a smokey diesel flavour and you probably get the drift. We don't have a problem with roads like this but had expected to find them in Kazakhstan, not here and certainly not with this much traffic.
And yet the ride was beautiful! We saw little villages, people working the land like they had done thousands of years and the surroundings were breath taking. At the end of the day, with not a campground for another 300 km, we settled for a guesthouse. Casa Apuseana was signposted but walking in my first thought was 'oh, oh... this is expensive'. Marble on the floor, luxurious rooms and quite a fancy entourage. The girl who had showed me the room, said we could also have dinner in the restaurant. I had seen the restaurant with all it's silverware and crystal everywhere and thought we'd better give that a miss... She then quoted 70 Lei for the room... That's not even 18 Euro... ok, we'll take it! It also made me wonder about the restaurant... 13 Lei for a pizza, a delicious home made pizza for just 3 Euro... so guess what we did? The bikes could be parked inside the gates and we didn't have to put up a tent either. What more could we ask for?
