The first question, of course, is: why? Why Serbia? Why Romania?
Serbia seemed like a logical place to go ride our bikes. In summer 2017, we rode through parts of Croatia and Slovenia, and we talked about riding around more of the former Yugoslavia. With Emily and me, one of us just needs to suggest the idea and generally we will both start planning it as though it's already decided. For this bike trip, we talked about it as hypothetical for a while, then it just became real.
I've wanted to travel in the former Yugoslavia for a long time - since high school, when I met a Croatian family who were staying with my grandma. In describing a simple hand gesture, they introduced me to the concept of balkanization: they explained to me the significance of raising three fingers as a salute (Serbian) versus two fingers (Croatian). It was some kind of insult to the Croatians if someone raised three fingers, but it also was linked to Orthodoxy (Serbs are mostly Orthodox, who make the sign of the cross with three fingers; Croatians mostly Catholic, who make the cross with two fingers). Of course, because of the politics of the time, it was also linked to nationalism and violence and all kinds of terrible things.
I have made a few Serbian friends in my time, and that has led me to generalize about the intelligence and warmth of Serbs, though this is of course biased. My friend Danko (whom I met in Kyrgyzstan almost 20 years ago) once said that Serbs and English speakers had something in common: they used vulgarity freely. I thought this was as good a reason as any to feel simpatico with them. I also met Drasko, who now lives in Belgrade; Emily and I will get to see him for a few days at the start of our trip.
So Serbia seemed like a good fit. But when Emily and I started to look at places to bike around in Serbia, we kept running into its northern, non-Yugoslav and not-Slavic-at-all neighbor, Romania. Emily talked wistfully about hay fields in northern Romania that she'd read about in National Geographic. While I was initially unenthused about hay fields, I was really interested in the castles and the fortified churches and the creepy recent history of Ceaușescu and his totalitarian vision.
It was decided then: Serbia and Romania. We started to map out routes, to prioritize places. We asked questions of the internet: Would there be places to fix our bikes? Could we ride trains with our bikes? Could we avoid busy roads? We have found some answers to some of these questions for some of the trip. Good enough to get started.
Fig. 1 This is a map of Romania and its neighbors. It does not include all of Serbia, but does have where we will be riding.
We are biking ~40 miles per day, though we are not biking every day. We will bike from Belgrade along the Danube for four days (hard to see here, but going approximately east from Belgrade) to Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Then we will get on a train to Craiova, then get on a train to Sibiu (right up next to the big "Romania" on the map). We'll hang out in Sibiu for a few days, then head along the Făgăraș mountains east, then north to Sighișoara. Then keep heading north, to Târgu Mureș and to Bistrița, with a detour to an ancient oak forest. Then north again: almost to Ukraine, to the land of Maramureș. The land of anthropogenically biodiverse hay fields.We'll be in Maramureș for a few days, then we ride west to Baia Mare. There we will start our journey back to Belgrade by train, bus, hook, or crook. You may wonder: will we continue to include all the fancy letters, the "ț" and the "ș" that I included here? Answer: no. That will be way too difficult. We'll probably be blogging on our phones, so... we'll see how it goes.
