Day 30: Looking back at Bulgaria and Romania

If all goes according to plan tomorrow will be my last day in Bulgaria. So today is a good day to look back at my time in Bulgaria and Romania.

Why those two countries? I think they have some things in common. 

To start with a positive thing: The people were really nice and helpful everywhere although the communication was sometimes not easy. But often there was someone who worked as a migrant worker in Germany and could speak some german or someone at least spoke some english. I never had the feeling that I would not get help if anything went wrong. 

But in both countries I sometimes had the feeling that I'm cycling through areas devoid of live. In the rural areas often nobody was to be seen and the buildings were in various states of disrepair. Sometimes at the brink of collapsing.

In most of the cities the communist time buildings are still dominating the scenery, but you can also see them decaying. Without being replaced by something new. Often there are empty factories or unused buildings in the middle of the city. I don't think the pictures can really catch the vibe of these places. 

At times this felt almost post apocalyptic. People only using a tiny part of the available space and unable to fill the void looming over from a long lost past. The old building are still partly used but not maintained anymore.

So why is this? I guess there are many reasons. In Lom all hotels and restaurants at the river side were closed. Probably because of Covid-19. Also in 40° C nobody wants to go outside, so the streets will be empty. And lack of finances will prevent many modernisations from happening.

But apart from these reasons both countries also loose 0.75% of their population every year. Since 1990 both have lost about 20% of the population. At the same time urbanisation is progressing. This way the populations of rural regions and small cities is diminishing even faster.

Only Weliko Tarnowo and the touristic places like Constanta and Sibiu seemed to be really alive (and probably many of the big cities that profit from the urbanisation, but I haven't gone there).

Regarding cycling I guess my answer is: Don't do it if you expect a relaxed journey (or use cycle paths like the EuroVelo 6, they have picked some reasonable roads). If you can find roads without traffic you only have to deal with the potholes and rutting. The rut being sometimes so high, that you cannot drive the velomobile accross it without touching ground. The highest peak on a road was probably more than 30cm. Enough to get airborne if you do not watch out. 

It gets much worse when in a lot of traffic. Outside of a town nothing but cars/trucks is expected on the road. People are friendly but have no idea what kind of murderous machines they are driving. It is not uncommon for a 40t truck to overtake without changing lanes or an oncoming vehicle to overtake using your lane. Two times I decided to leave the road instead of facing oncoming traffic on my lane. Speed limits are purely put up as decoration for the roads. To repeat it: Almost nobody is aggressive or unfriendly and people use their brakes if there really is no room at all and they look out for you. It's just fast driving without any margin for errors. The cars also overtake each other in front of curves or hill tops where you cannot possibly see oncoming traffic.

The right hand side of the road is often detoriated the most. But because of cars overtaking without any distance (and oncoming cars driving on your side of the road) it requires a complete check of you surroundings before taking an evasive maneuver.  Which is often hard to do when a pothole suddenly appears in front of you. And if you decide to drive in the middle of the road people will still overtake you regardless of oncoming traffic. It will fit somehow.

So either you find a road without a lot of traffic or a two lane road. Two lane roads are more scary in the beginning, since they often look more like motorways than anything else, but actually the cars have a lane to overtake and in most cases really change lanes to do this (some do not even if the other lane is completely empty - for whatever reason).

Statistically the rate of traffic deaths per motor vehicle in Romania is five times higher than in Germany (and almost three times as high in Bulgaria). 

Perhaps this will get better when more cyclists are on the road and speeds are lowered. Given the amount of fotos and videos that have been taken of me and my bike (and this won't have been any different for the participants of thesuntrip) some people might get the idea that there are other modes of transport than by car (or at least look out for cyclists and other strange vehicles a bit more).