The Fagaras Mountains in the Southern Carpathians with their jagged main ridge look like the blade of a robber's knife and seem to be just the right destination for us. The peaks rise up to 2500 metres into the sky. We wind our way up the steep pass road. There is supposed to be a cable car here that will take us up to the Balea glacier lake. Tourist shacks cling to the monstrous concrete structure of the cable car station like favelas to a Brazilian city. You can buy plastic guns, lambskins, cheap jewellery and Rambo knives here, but we look in vain for provisions for the next few days, for tomatoes, apples and bread. What the heck - we take a coffee break at the gondola station! A waiter reluctantly brings us a thin coffee and, after some insistence, a piece of cake. The dark years of communism seem to have crept in here.
The next few days are spent scrambling. With the bike hunched over in the vertrider grip, we climb through the Fagaras mountains. The few hikers we encounter shake their heads in incomprehension. We shake our heads too - again and again, while the sweat burns in our eyes. What are we doing here? Climbing! We scramble up - and down again. Driving is rarely an option. The slopes are far too steep. We climb the rocky ridges on all fours, only to slide down again on all fours on the other side. Stephan rumbles down the last hundred metres on his bike to a mountain lake and is jubilant with happiness. It is the brief, bright happiness of a desperate man.
The full report on the Carpathian adventure is available as a PDF download below.
Downloads:
Dimitri Lehner
Editor
