Killing Batteries

As promised, my “Best/Worst of Tuscany” and “What Happened?” lists.

Best/Worst of Tuscany

• Best drive: People, it’s all good, assuming you’re in the passenger seat. If not, count on pulling over a lot for photo sessions. No need to signal, just stomp on the brakes. The 12 Italians tailgating you will understand.
• Worst drive: Trying to get anywhere but Rome when leaving Siena (honorable mention, any drive within the Livorno city limits)
• Best view from a hotel room: Hands down, the Albergo Guastini in Pitigliano

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Speaking of syndromes, I personally suffer from a number of maladies (real or imagined depends entirely on the eye of the beholder), a large number of which were invented/identified by me, exclusively for me, and anyone else referencing them or suffering from them is required to cough up royalties.

I believe I’ve isolated yet another malady this week which may be one of my most mainstream, accessible cash-cow neuroses of all time; Sado-Masochistic, Econo-Traveler F*ck-Wit Syndrome (sadly, even when it comes to naming maladies, the art of brevity eludes me… but check out all those hyphens! I still got it!!!).

The theory is that Sado-Masochistic, Econo-Traveler F*ck-Wit Syndrome sufferers, whether voluntarily or not, seek out and inflict the most god-awful, sleepless, punishing travel arrangements on themselves under the auspices of saving time, money and/or maximizing convenience.

I’m a classic case. At the beginning of each trip, no matter what the length, scope or distance, I always tell myself I’m going to finally slow down, spend a little more money for comfort and basically consider my mental and physical well-being above all else. This trip was no different. I had 12 days to get myself from Iasi to Paris to San Francisco. A few lazy days in each place, day-travel only, in strictly non-ass pounding environments. Seems reasonable and carefully considered, no?

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Best big city:  Timisoara
Timisoara is how all big Romanian cities should and hopefully will be.  It’s trendy, cosmopolitan, full of great museums and sights of tourist interest, excellent restaurant/bars/clubs that were simply too numerous for me to note for the book and run by an organized, competent and proud civic community that knows how to put up conspicuous and clear street signs, makes it easy for people to do business and employs people who are capable of providing help rather than saying “I don’t know” and “It’s not my problem” then going back to reading their magazines like officials in most other cities.  I was sorry that I only had two days here and plan to go back as soon as time allows.

Best small city:  Curtea de Arges
I’ve already given these people props, but you can never get enough of a good thing.  The town is chilled, has more than its share of nice things to look at and no other place in all of Romania has such a high standard of accommodations at such low prices.  Again, I didn’t want to leave.

Best place to road trip:  Maramures
Don’t get me wrong, driving through the north of Romania in the winter is a certifiable mistake, but in the summer I imagine this would be absolutely lovely.  All those tiny villages are still very much living like they did 100 years ago.  Guys still walk down the road to work with a pitchfork over their shoulder (though these days sometimes there’s a cell phone in the other hand).  Old leaning houses are still the norm, with some very classy new houses springing up, being careful to stay true to the old architecture.  The old people stand out on the road at the end of the day to socialize.  Lots of moonshine is consumed and people are very religious and superstitious.  My car and I were blessed repeatedly by strangers as I motored through their towns.

Coolest looking city:  Arad
All that Hapsburg architecture is looking worn, but is still very nice.  Some renovation work is underway, but otherwise these buildings are foraging on, enduring every day use as apartments offices and restaurants.

Ugliest city:  Satu Mare
My predecessor(s) state this outright in the book, but nothing really prepares you for the ugliness of this place.  I’m considering putting in a small piece of text about identifying the ugliest buildings in the city as a form of distraction, as there is little else to do.

Another sloppy email submission. This is the last one I hope.

Things have ramped up in my effort to get through this trip without having to sleep in my car. I’ve been putting in 15 hour days and the late discovery of summer-only destinations that I cannot visit now will get me back to Iasi in about two days. Whew!

Needless to say I’m exhausted. I spent last night in a very crappy countryside motel to save money. Lots of eccentric drunks and mouth-breathing yokels that seem to stay up drinking in the bar day and night. Strangely, the bed was one of the best I’ve slept in on this leg of research, though the sheets were questionable so I slept in my clothes again. Heh, the joke’s on them really, all my clothes are so filthy that I probably did more damage to the sheets than vice versa.

I’m sore all time because of the car. I don’t pilot it as much as wrestle with it. There is no power steering of course, but the wheel is so tough that it take everything I’ve got to turn the wheel at a standstill (like for parking and avoiding potholes). Also, the clutch is Porsche-heavy, so my left leg is throbbing after extended driving through a city. This unintended exercise and my limited diet is starting to show . I always lose weight (and sanity) when I travel, but this has been pretty intense. At least my ribs will be out just in time for summer.

The car is burning through oil an alarming rate. I have to add two litres a week to keep it at safe levels. I’ll get this checked back in Iasi. Or just sell the piece of $hit and let the next schmuck deal with it like I did. It’s the Romanian Way.

The second worst road in Romania is between Oredea and Satu Mare, in the northwest. Unfortunately, I had to traverse this stretch after dark, which made avoiding the potholes nearly impossible. I mostly stuck with a lead ‘rabbit car’ and swerved when they did. I still banged up the wheel rims in a big way and now the front left tire has a slow leak.

Driving at night in general is a bad idea and I have to cease doing this. Dacia windscreens are set at such an angle that oncoming headlights and street lamps create maximum blinding glare. Also, the headlights are near-useless, only giving about 10 metres of visibility, meaning I don’t see potholes until I’m bouncing through them and road signs are impossible to read. If I don’t have a lead car to follow, I can barely see the lines of the road at night. Really got to stop driving at night. I hereby promise… unless I’m in a super hurry.

When next I write, I should be back at home in Iasi, resting and hopefully drunk as hell.

Another high speed email post from a Net Cafe. Excuse all format and spelling errors please.

No disasters lately. In fact the weather has been fantastic the past few days. The car is even acting better. It starts without hesitation in the mornings. I don’t even have to pop the hood and pump the primer anymore. The car thawing out has brought on all new little “personality quirks” that a better man might find charming. I, however, am about to kick some car ass. There’s a thingie loose in the dash somewhere. Whenever the car moves it starts to vibrate and squeak. By the time I reach 100KPH it sounds like a pigeon having an orgasm inside a bullhorn. Sometimes pounding on the dash (one of my favourite pastimes) makes it stop. Sometimes if I drive through a massive pothole it stops, but usually it torments me all day. Also, now when I roll down the window it makes a squealing sound that makes my soul hurt.

I drove on the most shameful stretch of road I’ve seen in all of Romania yesterday from Drobeta-Turnu Severin to Timisoara, highway E70 in the southwest. On the map, they have the nerve to mark it as a bold red line, the second best line there is, but in reality it is almost non-stop potholes, dips, sinkholes and crumbling road. The car took so much punishment that the muffler bounced its way out of the rubber ring and hook system that holds it in place. I had to tie it back on with wire until the next town. I also lost the bolt that holds the hood down. Still haven’t found anyone to sell me a new bolt yet.

The fender bender in Craiova is still smarting. Apparently, even when you have insurance in Romania you don’t really have insurance and the cop forced me to pay most of the damage to the other car out of my pocket, a whopping part of my budget. If I lived in Craiova we could have handled it differently, but everyone there knew I was leaving town and never coming back, so it was either an on-the-spot resolution or I was going to lose my license and get fined and probably thrown in some mental institution.

To balance my budget I have been staying in some real shitholes. Student rooms in university sports centres for like nine euros a night. I actually slept in my clothes last night the bed looked so dodgy. It’s not too much of a sacrifice. I spend all of seven to eight hours in my room at night and that’s it. Just show up, fall into bed, get up, sometimes shower and back on the road. That’s the plan.

Breakfast is included at each hotel (except the sports centres) and I am sure to eat a huge, filling dinner, otherwise I am living on bananas and Snickers’ all day, as they are the only clean and quick things I’ve found that can be eaten while moving at a steady trot. I supplement this with the occasional Burn (Euro-Red Bull rip off drink, do they have this in the States yet?) to keep me going.

That’s all for now. Gotta eat before I fall over.

I’m a snot factory.  My nose is running full steam on three shifts.  This is typical.  Not even 12 hours after I had bragged to Robert that I almost never get sick when I’m on the road, the cold reared up and now I’m in full suffering mode.  I’ll never learn not to tempt the Law of Jinxing.

Where to start.  Well, let’s get the bad out first and I’ll see if I can summon the strength to finish with the good after that.

My snowballing sleep deprivation and the maniacal mindset of Romanian drivers contributed to my first car-on-car accident today.  I was crawling along in the parking lane searching for a street sign to get my bearings just after entering the south-western city of Craiova and some jackass comes flying out of an angled side street (in my blind spot) and decides to turn right in front of me.  Of course this is all my fault because I was coming out of a parking spot without signalling (this is semi true, however, I wasn’t moving into traffic, just moving straight along in the parking lane into an intersection).  But what possessed him to fly past and turn right, inches in front of a moving car?  Well, the same thing that drives all Romanians to drive like idiots all day, no sense of mortality.  Why must all driving be done at top speed, tires squealing, horn shrieking, even if they’re just driving 20 metres down the street or across a parking lot?  Why do they all drive with the assumption that everyone else is looking out for them and so they can execute the most plainly outlandish manoeuvres without any sense of consequence?

Earlier in the morning, leaving Targu Jiu there was some nasty fog.  Visibility was at 10-15 metres and that was only if the oncoming cars had their headlights on which, since this is Romania, many of them didn’t.  Did this give them pause?  Of course not!  They were passing and taking high speed turns straddling the white line like any normal day, literally flying off into unknown.  And it’s not like they were passing me to avoid going 60KPH for the next few hours.  They’d risk their lives and the lives of the people in oncoming cars just to pull over 30 seconds later in the next village a whopping 7 seconds earlier than if they’d just stayed behind me.  Pure idiocy.

Driving has been A LOT slower than I was planning.  It’s impossible to gage driving times in Romania.  If you have to go 100km, you can’t just say, ok, at 100KPH I’ll be there in an hour!  Oh no.  You have to factor in all the time you spend cooling it behind horse drawn carts and tractors waiting to pass (and being lined jumped in the passing lane by dickheads in Mercedes’ and BMWs) and having to slow down to a grovelling 50 KPH crawl every 2km as you pass through small villages, each of which has a police officer dedicatedly manning his little speed trap, the proceeds of which fund 100% of his station’s annual budget.  Some villages are daisy-chained together so you end up having to plod along at 50 for eight or ten kilometres.  All Romanian drivers flash their high-beams at oncoming car to warn of cops up ahead, so there’s almost never anyone to bust for speeding and those village cops are always pissed off about that.  You could be inching along, perfectly centred down the lane, seatbelt on and hands at two and ten, and they still stare a hole through you, searching for any reason to stop you.  I’ve been stopped twice now.  The first time they took one look at my passport and waved me along.  The second they asked for the car’s papers.  I thought I was sunk, as I still haven’t gotten my car re-certified for the road, but they just came back two minutes later, handed everything back to me and said goodbye.  I don’t know if I’m getting away because they don’t want to try to shake me down through the language barrier (I always do a great job of reverting to the worst possible, phrasebook Romanian when stopped, so there’s no potential for lengthy questioning, as none of these cops have been to university and thus don’t know a lick of English) or if they simply don’t know what to look for on these papers when faced with them.  It clearly says that my certification has been cancelled, so why they don’t toss me into the hoosegow is anybody’s guess.

I’m getting a lot of comments on how great my Romanian sounds from people I speak with at hotels and museums.  What I don’t tell them is that I use the same 20 or so phrases, interchanging 100 or so key words about rooms, breakfast included, renovations, entry prices, etc., all day long and so of course I sound good.  But it’s still nice to get the compliments.

My favourite city so far is Curtea de Arges.  Cool monastery, cool ruins and a bunch of great cheap accommodations options.

Favourite monastery is Turnul Monastery a new one that I was asked to visit for this book.  Well, more accurately it’s new to the book, the monastery has been around since a couple monks went up there to settle in the 15^th century, carving two little caves by hand to conduct worship.  Now there’s a small church and a huge, two-in-one church, one of which has brand new frescos from 1998, which is only interesting to see how little this art form has changed and how new frescos compare to the centuries old ones (remarkably similar, to those frescos that have been cleaned that is…).  A huge honourable mention goes to Horezu Monastery which is just so neat that I was crushed to learn they had closed the rooms they rent to travellers for the off-season and I had to move on to the expensive, crap rooms in Targu Jiu.

That’s all the poop that’s fit to print for now.  Assuming no more fender benders with dough heads speeding to church, I should be in the huge, pulsating city of Timisoara by tomorrow night.

I appologize in advance for the appearance and grammar and spelling mistakes. I’m emailing this entry in as I cannot figure out how to sign into the administrator site from someone else’s computer.

In a nut, it’s been tough. Driving from Iasi to Bucharest took three hours longer than planned due to yet another snow storm that hit as I left town. It took me three hours to do the first 100km. Snow drifts were taller than the car and high winds were relocating those drifts back onto the highway faster than the plows could remove it. There were numerous car/buses/semis in the ditches. It was high tension driving all the way and the second worst all-around long distance drive of my entire life.

I don’t think I will ever be able to like Bucharest, no matter what the occassion or how I get into town. To start, signage is ridiculously bad. Sorry, if you want to find a hotel, a Pizza Hut or a Xerox place, there are signs carefully directing you every 30 metres or so. If you want to find, say, the main train station or the airport, too bad. Inconceivably, there isn’t a single sign for the train station anywhere in the city. There are two signs for the airport, but these don’t start until you are way out of the city, about 2km from the effing place by which time it’s a foregone conclusion that you’re on the right track. I was lost nearly every minute that i was in the car in Bucharest, even with two locals in the car to direct me. It’s just hell. Even something as simple as getting out of the city was made fantastically difficult. In a possible effort to lighten trafic on the main drags of the city, they post the signs directing you out of the city through a rat maze of back streets and unlikely alleys. They only put up a sign once every 12 blocks or so, meaning you have no way to know that you’re on the right track after following the last sign down a rutted street with abandoned cars.

Bucharest is like a Las Vegas casino, they make it so easy for you to get in, but impossible to leave, possibly in the hopes that you give up and spend more money at an over-priced, nasty hotel. I was in Bucharest to visit my co-author Robert. Robert gets to write about Bucharest in the book, thank the All Mighty. Though Robert won’t go as far as to say Buchrest rivals Prague or Budapest, he’s been able to find small, subjective things to like about the city. Even things that would piss normal people off, like militant waiters or dirty buildings that once may have looked nice. This is a skill that Roert has in abundance and I have not at all and I am very envious. We had dinner (with a few friends of mine) and breakfast, talking shop fast and furious the whole time. I learned quite a bit and was hungry for more, but I had to hit the road and, well, I suppose he has his work cut out for him finding things to like in that hellhole of a city.

I’ve slogged through a number of cities since, with varying degrees of success and frustration. The biggest disaster since the snow storm was when I had the honor to drive on one of the nicest highways in Romania. Straight, flat, pristine… Unfortunately, I was thrust onto it as soon as I left the border town I was visiting and was on my way before I could visit a gas station. I had a quarter tank of gas and I wanted to fill up before too long. As it turns out, this highway has no turn offs, no U-turn opportunities and no gas stations for over 100km. I was totally trapped. As I watched the gas needle dip lower and lower I squinted for any lights off in the distance (it was snowing and dark by this point).

Finally after 75km, I ran out of gas. I was in the middle of nowhere. I pulled out my emergency 2 litre bottle of gas, emptied it into the tank, struggled to re-start the car (Dacia engines do not like to be run dry and they will let you know about it the next time you try to start the car) and set out, praying for luck. Well, when you’re me and desperate, luck just isn’t part of the equation, ever. After another 20km, I was out of gas again. It was almost 8:00PM, snowing heavily and I was on a highway with no towns, turns or exits. I thought it was a mirage at first, but suddenly I was sure I saw lights in the distance. I grabbed the two litre bottle and hoofed it for the lights. Car swooped past me the entire time. I waved my arms and bottle to get people to stop, but no one stopped. I was passed by an ambulance and a police car among dozens of other vehicles. I was starting to get upset as I had screeched to a halt to pick up much less desperate hitchhikers a dozen times in recent weeks and here no one would stop for my sorry ass. After about 1km, I happened on an emergency contact point. One of those things where you press the button and a guy comes on and asks the nature of your emergency. Well I leaned on that button for five minutes and no one came to my aid. The thing was probably never connected to a receiving end in the first place. Soon after I gave up on the emergency booth, a guy stopped and picked me up and drove me the last kilometre to the gas station. Yes, after sweating it out for 100km, I ran out of gas 2km short of the gas station. Welcome to my life. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned lack of exits on this highway, the very nice man couldn’t drive me back to my car without being forced to drive another 100km before getting a chance to turn  round.

Long story short, I ran back to the car, BARELY got it started before killing the battery and got back into Bucharest two hours late.

It’s stuff like this that makes me wanna just quit this gig and retreat to a cave in the mountains and live a hermit’s life, surviving on nuts and berries and moonshine. Anyway, a good nights sleep and I was on my way again.

After only four days, I’ve gone through one cold, three nights of fitful sleep in overpriced, loud dodgy hotels, zero decent meals and 17 hissy fits. The good news is that tonight I am in a nice small town with cheap, wonderful accommodations and restaurants with sweet people and a good bed. I plan to sleep for 13 hours then head for the REAL Dracula’s castle at Poienari at dawn.

More updates as to my misery in a few days.

By the way, if you’re still wondering, I wouldn’t give up all this nightmarish stuff for a confortable, well-paying job back at the bank for anything. At least I can still say that, though ask me again in June.

I made it back from Dobrogea (Black Sea coast) in one piece.  The car only broke once and cost me US$35 to fix, but it set me back by four hours while they dismantled half the engine just to rewire a few bits. I managed to get out of Iasi just hours before yet another massive snow storm shut down all roads for the second time in three days. Despite very warm temps all weekend, we’re still half-buried here.

My trip was made infinitely easier by the good people at Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve Authority and the Information and Ecological Education Centre (www.deltaturism.ro) both in Tulcea, the gateway to the Danube Delta region, and the Info Litoral Tourist Information Centre (www.infolitoral.ro) in Constanta.

I’m gonna be home for about eight days, writing and spending a lot of time dealing with various car issues (it was very apparent on the open road that my brand new, rear brakes are at about 0% effectiveness), before I head down to Bucharest to meet Robert and then onward from there to attack the south, west and northern parts or Romania all in one go.

After meticulous planning and making firm appointments in three cities I went to bed early last night planning to drive out of town at 6:30am this morning, heading for southeast Romania. Seeing how hard I had worked and prepared, God decided to screw me and dropped four inches of snow on northeastern Romania last night. Since snow plows are expensive, when it snows like this in Romania they simply close the roads, so I am trapped in Iasi for another day.

This is just the latest in an unholy series of events perpetrated by the Almighty, the elements and Romanian bureaucracy to thwart any chance of me hitting my deadlines in June. I’ve sent a letter to my editor for comment on my deteriorating productivity and to inquire about any payment penalties that Lonely Planet invokes if an author drives his car into a gorge out of frustration.

As the temperatures will be above freezing all day, the snow should melt significantly and I should be able to leave tomorrow, pushing everything back a day and forcing me to do the bulk of my research in the large and busy city of Constanta on Sunday, when none of the travel resources that I will be needing will be open for business. I may actually have to delay the trip until Monday, putting me a whopping 2 weeks behind my original schedule.

So this is what utter doom feels like. A scintillating mix of anxiety, panic, hopelessness, mental fatigue and indigestion. Fascinating.

I’m hitting the road tomorrow at 6:00am, heading for the southeast portion of Romania, which includes the Danube Delta region and the cities along the Black Sea. I’ve been to one of the cities before, Constanta.  It’s the gateway city to the Black Sea beaches.  Unfortunately, this isn’t much to my advantage.  I was there last August and I was more than a little preoccupied by the largest concentration of gorgeous, topless women that I’ve ever witnessed, including my all-time best dreams and the collected efforts of the Girls Gone Wild Corporation. Sadly, now it’s March and I’ll be lucky if I see wrist.

This is going to be quick and easy. Being off-season means I’ll have the run of the place.  Unfortunately, it also probably means that a lot of the hotels, resorts and water-sport centres will be boarded up and abandoned.  However, I’ve got appointments at two travel agencies that are renowned for their love of helping tourists and I am confident that they’ll be able to fill any information gaps that I run across.

Meanwhile, I’ve adjusted and honed my information gathering techniques, relying less on full notes, slowly and laboriously tapped into my Palm Pilot, and leaning more on taking notes via digital photos and oral recordings on my MP3 player.  That’s right ladies, I’m all geek, all the time.  Send a self-addressed stamped envelop for an autographed photo of me wearing nothing but my nerd devices.  Did I mention that my Palm Pilot is ten inches long?  But I digress…

I’ll still type in practicalities information directly into the Palm (where MS Word for Palm allows me to edit directly onto the final document, saving me loads of tedious write-up time later), but aside from that, the clumsy time it takes to navigate those huge documents on that tiny screen and all the typos from using their ill-designed keyboard and script input makes lengthy note-taking an ordeal that I’m trying to avoid.

I plan to be out for four nights.  Then back here for a week, then off to meet Robert in Bucharest and start my long-haul trip in the south, west and north.