Last night we stopped at a small camp site near Zalaegereszeg in Hungary and had a much needed quiet night with noodles and a good night's sleep. Roads through Hungary were reasonable and we made good progress. Today needed some serious miles doing as to keep on schedule we needed to be in Bulgaria by nightfall. That seemed more than achievable but we had definitely underestimated how bad Romania would be. We had initially planned to head south from Hungary, through Serbia and into Bulgaria but we don't have a green card covering car insurance in Serbia and we've heard rumours of the border guards charging huge amounts to buy on the border. With that in mind we decided a short trip through Romania would be the way forward.
Heading for the Romanian border, we had our first police stop. A single police car and 3 armed policemen and 1 policewoman pulled us over at their checkpoint. We went for the usual formality of gathering our papers to show them but it soon became apparent they weren't interested and only wanted pictures of the car and phone box! So we obviously asked for photos of them next to the phonebox! Definitely one of the most friendly police experiences I've had.
The popularity of the mini and phonebox still amazes and will no doubt improve the further east we get. Arriving at the Romanian border saw all the border guards leave their posts to come and take photos and laugh at the car. Clearly they didn't see us as any kind of threat and after they all had enough photos they waved us on through. And that is pretty much the only nice thing to say about Romania. Apart from a group of guys who we met at a petrol station who found us so amusing they gave us a watermelon!
The roads in Romania were bad, constant road works and the drivers, especially the lorry drivers are crazy! They were quite happy to overtake us on uphill blind corners. Because of the roads and horrendous weather progress is very slow. At one point we saw a huge, expensive looking LED sign informing us of the air temperatures and also how bad the roads were. Obviously the government deemed it a better idea to spend the money on a fancy sign warning about pot holes than actually fix them! Think that sums the place up. We've also noticed that don't seem to be any young people here, especially girls. There are, however, plenty of scary, wrinkly old women with no teeth!
Only car trouble today is the light switch breaking. We used to have the choice between dipped and side lights but now it's just lights on or off and bunch of live cables sticking out of where the switch used to be. To turn the lights off simply pull out the blue wire. To turn them on, just push the wire back in. Genius.
The rain is now fairly torrential and with no street lights or cats eyes it's all a matter of guessing where the road is! Plan is to try and make the Bulgarian border before we sleep but it's all getting a tad dangerous now so may end up parking until first light. Safe to say we won't miss Romania, a lot has changed since Dracula's time!
Moral: Medium
Current thought: Someone got a serious bribe to let Romania in the EU.
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