Top Gear – Transfagaran Pass

The following day was the Transfagaran pass. A drive that all Top Gear fans will remember as their favourite driving road in Europe. The little blue van made it up and down in one piece although not quite rally style with the tail out on every corner and slick over taking manoeuvres. Off the south side of the Fagaras, avoiding the bolts of lightning, child sized potholes and flooded roads we started to loop back round to head north. We planned a scenic drive back towards Alba Iulia with the hope of getting a climbing book and climbing in the Turzii gorge. No luck in this town, no sports shops or bookshops let alone a gear shop. Still the town had a cool walled centre with some huge monasteries and old government buildings. On towards the gorge anyway with the hope of finding some climbers or asking at the chata at the start of the gorge if there are some easy routes to find or topos we could borrow for the day.

The camping area at the gorge was a let down. It had been described nicely but was dirty and had turned into a huge family gathering area who blasted out music until 2am and started again at 6.45 the next morning. After parking up and realising that our information point at the chata had been closed for 2 years we headed into the gorge with minimal kit in case we spotted some easy routes to play on. In the gorge on the first crag we bumped into a few climbers and asked them if they had a guide book we could look at and take a few photos of. One guy said he had one back at the chata and ran back to get it for us. When he came back he explained that we could keep the book as we would never have found it as it was a limited print of 500 and not sold!

After chatting to the guy it turns out he wrote the guide book and was giving us this copy to keep. A nice souvenir from a truly honest and super helpful local climber. He told us where to head for some easier routes and that he was off to climb on the other side and his 2 friends were off further up the gorge too, all part of the local mountain rescue team.

We headed off and a few bridges and a river crossing later we found the route called Lisa that we had been looking for and it happened to be one of the easiest routes in the book anyway which we needed after such a long time out of climbing. The route looked a little difficult as far as route finding and a mixture of old and new bolts and pegs. A couple of American climbers came past and showed us the other 2 routes along side it so we decided to give Lisa a try, 40 minutes of faffing later I had to abandon the route as I just could not find a way across a smooth slab to what looked like a muddy crack line. Not what we wanted to be climbing to get our confidence back up. As I rappelled back down, Lisa who had belayed me from below had spotted Nicolae, the guide author, aid climbing an 80m wall on the opposite side of the gorge. He had mentioned that he was writing an updated book so we guessed he was checking routes or looking for new lines but he was flying up and down his fixed lines. Sadly “the lets get stuck into some climbing day” had been a let down as far as the climbing, to really enjoy the area you needed to be climbing 7’s and 8’s in sport and trad, with us unable to complete the easiest routes we were disappointed but now more motivated to get back into it all and start training and climbing together to be able to get the most out of next years Canadian adventures.

So this drew a close to Romania. The weather had been a little unkind to us, the roads even worse making the distances we travelled a little stressful and twice as long as expected but a great country, well worth exploring with a little more time and super friendly people always trying to help. We headed back to Oradea, which was out entry point knowing we could get Lisa stamped back out of the country. After a less than thorough search at the border by Romanian customs which consisted of them poking in a few bags and asking us if we had alcohol or cigarettes we got stamped out and headed on to Hungary. Farewell Romania, and we hope to come back one day.