The Rules of the Road

"Let's take the paved road. It's got to be better." That was our decision at the crossroads to Simnic and Loamnes. One led six kilometers on unimproved dirt to the main road. The other, it was paved, so it had to be better. We bounced happily along through towns of brightly painted houses; it was good to see that Romania did in fact have some color. We waved to some old men sitting on benches outside their homes and enjoyed the ride through corn fields and trees - until - suddenly - the road disappeared. It became something else, something less than road. Obstacle course comes close to a description, but even that doesn't portray the true essence of what we rumbled over.

Romanian roads are no place for logic. 'Paved is better' had no business in our vocabulary; we know this now. Our thinking now is slightly different. If a wheel goes in, it must be able to come back out. If the steering wheel is fully turned to the right, it can instantly be fully turned to the left. If the front-end alignment is thrown off by one wheel-eating hole, it can be corrected by the next. We're learning to stretch rational thought to the outer limits in order to manoeuvre through this country. And this extended thought got us out of a traffic ticket.

We were pulled over we assume for passing a truck in town. (Passing is essential to driving in Romanian if you have any hope of getting anywhere and/or of not being asphyxiated by diesel soot.) We simply told the policeman in plain English (which he had already pointed out he didn't understand) that the roads were terrible, we didn't see any way a car could possibly survive these conditions and, no, we didn't understand what documents he wanted us to produce. (Never a good idea to readily hand over any documents you might never see again until a substantial amount of money is presented). He stared at us, we shrugged our shoulders at him and he waved us on. Just try that in America.

Once out of that ordeal, we continued our colorful exploration of Romania's off-the-beaten path roads. We passed more brightly painted houses in blues, oranges and reds; morning glories winding up doorways; ornate molding work. Driving as slowly as we did, we were able to get a very good look at these small towns. In almost all of them two rows of houses snake along the road. Beside each is a wall-like gate for cars or carts to pull through and a door in that gate for people. Each gate butts up to the next house and thus give the affect of a walled city. Dirt side roads, that branch from either end of the main street, are also walled. In one town we saw an ornate multi-turreted building topped by large blue and gold domes; but, other than passing this domed anomaly, we felt as if we were driving through open-topped tunnels. It was very different from any area we have driven through in Eastern Europe.

Eventually we swung onto a main road; still bumpy but with fewer missing chunks and that meant we could up the speedometer needle to 60 km/hr. We headed Northeast discussing what we had seen and periodically testing each other's knowledge of the open road. "What do you do when you see a mine-field of potholes ahead?" "Right full rudder and pull down the sails." Correct!