Our journey went up a gear today. We left the elegance and sophistication of Vienna and Western Europe behind and started to encounter a quite different world as we crossed into Eastern Europe. Our main task for today was to cross Hungary, the seventh country on our trip, for which we required a second vignette, this one easily purchased online.
What we immediately noticed about Hungary was how flat and empty it was. Where before lush, neatly proportioned fields had divided up the land, now it was totally open and scrubby, stretching for as far as the eye could see. This didn’t make for the most inspirational driving but the miles were easy and when we stopped for diesel a station attendant kindly wiped the copious amount of bug splats off our windscreen (they build up like popping raindrops over such long distances).
The land remained featureless as we arrived at the Romanian border where we had to queue to have our passports checked – the first border crossing wait of the trip. It was only a cursory glance and we were waved into Romania upon a smile, cruising down their brand new, traffic-free A1 motorway.
Up ahead could clearly be seen a mighty column of rain like a spinning cylinder of power. And we duly felt the force when we hit it. It came down in torrents, turning day to night and seriously reducing visibility. Everything disappeared in a blur of water and when it lifted it seemed like we had been suckled up and deposited in another world.
Coming off the motorway in pouring rain, we found potholed lanes serving as main roads and infrastructure that was a step beneath what we have come to know. We got lost on wooded backstreets on the outskirts of Timisoara but discovered our campsite eventually. We practically had it to ourselves, a large, unkempt patch of overgrown grass on boggy clay crawling with mosquitoes, ticks and a host of other creepy crawlies. Every time you took a step, grasshoppers bounded in every direction not unlike droplets from jumped in puddles of water. The humidity clung to us as did the mosquitoes and we got a jolt when freight trains bolted by, blaring their horns at a nearby railway crossing. But we arranged our kitchen gear, cooked up a meal and stoically settled down for the night, prepared for whatever Romania could throw at us tomorrow.
Team Yes We Khan 