A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  For fifteen miles the road continued with bridges and tunnels and the squeeze of verge-less carriageway. At last, we reached the outskirts of Drobeta-Turnu Severin and collapsed into the seats of a taverna, where we quenched our thirst and calmed our nerves with long, cold sugary drinks. In Drobeta we found a guesthouse that offered us a suite of rooms and a little balcony for the price of a standard room. The woman on the desk located a bicycle shop for Jamie and a hairdresser for me.

  The middle-aged man in the bicycle shop didn’t inspire confidence: he didn’t seem to know one end of a bicycle from the other, but he promised that the spoke would be repaired by the end of the next day. It was fortuitous we had planned in a rest day. We rescued the bicycle from the repair shop just before closing, repaired and ticketed. I still wasn’t convinced that the staff were competent mechanics – and my fears would later be justified. The boys in the bike shop back in Vukavor had done a decent job; Jamie’s mended spoke had lasted 300 miles. I wondered how far we’d get on this latest repair.

  Before leaving town, we consulted our bike book again. It warned us the next available accommodation after Drobeta- Turnu Severin was at Calafat, over eighty miles away. It seemed a stretch in the summer heat, but then, when checking the route on Google Maps, I spotted Pensiunea Gruia tucked between a lake and the Danube just outside a village of the same name. I found the website: photographs showed an Alpine-chic building of stone and wood in Danube sunsets and a swimming pool of clear-blue water surrounded by sun loungers. More than that, it was cheap. We’d aim for Gruia.

  At first, the way out of Drobeta was easy, the road smoothly surfaced and even. The character of the Romanian Danube valley changed again, spreading out across wide flat plains to meander in a stately manner through shrubland and cultivated fields. The road hugged the river until Batoţi where we took the 56B, which hung back from the Danube. After Ţigănaşi, Jamie ignored the bike book map and took us onto an island that lay between the main waterway and one of its branches. It was a pleasant diversion, but when we crossed back over a narrow bridge, the road turned into loose rubble so bad we were forced off our bikes to walk the unmade road back to the Danube bike route. On track again, we climbed a hill until we were high above the Danube, the river appearing from time to time as a flash of silver.

  In the village of Gruia, we found the road that dropped steeply off sandy cliffs to the lakes and wetlands of our guesthouse. I spotted a pink villa at the bottom that looked imposing enough to be a pensiunea. We pushed off and careered down the cliff, past a shelter painted with two antlered stags sharing a branch under a bright blue sky. Roma boys, gathered round its fountain, shouted greetings and waved as we flew past, our wheels still spinning furiously as we hit the watery plains.

  The pink villa was guarded by fierce-barking Alsatians, discouraging us from entering through the gate. I tried calling, but there was no reply. Beyond, the lane, cracked and pot-holed, disappeared into woods, with no indication there was a guesthouse on the other side. I looked at a clump of trees on raised ground and wondered about the possibility of wild camping, then saw some fishermen had already set up camp.

  It was an eerie place at the base of the cliff, with the wind moaning and the sound of waders drifting through the air. I thought I heard the call of a common tern somewhere beyond the clump of trees with the fishermen’s camp, the two-toned trill a familiar sound from Lough Neagh. My father and I had watched the terns with their long, forked tails, aptly nicknamed sea swallows, from one of the bird hides, raising our necks to follow the birds surf on a thermal above the Oxford Island peninsula, graceful and light of wing. They hovered over the water, as if weightless, before plunging for fish. We knew summer was on its way when they flew in from East Africa in April, taking up temporary residence on nameless Lough Neagh islands to raise their young; and that winter would soon be upon us when they departed in August.

  We cycled up and down the road looking for the pensiunea until Jamie insisted the house had to be on the other side of the trees. He was right. But when we reached the Alpine-style chalet, it didn’t look anything like the website pictures. The gate and fencing were broken, the pool drained and grubby, the plastic loungers cracked and its wooden sign peeling. Jamie and I scouted around but couldn’t find a way in. I went around the back to find a couple of men drinking beer on a wooden balcony, looking a little worse for wear. I called to them and they directed me round to the front of the building again, where at last we found the entrance.

  Inside, the house creaked like a shored-up schooner, its rooms encased in dark wood like the hull of a ship. There was no one around but us and the proprietors. The man and his wife prepared us drinks then offered a meal. They emerged from the kitchen with great bowls of beef-tomato salad, followed by chicken broth and plates of bony stew. We sat in the shadowy light of the narrow dining room listening to the clink of our cutlery and the windblown creak of floorboard. It felt as if we’d been abandoned on the Mary Celeste, the owners now having disappeared into the bowels of the house. Upstairs, our room was snug as a cabin, the wind wittering through gaps in the dark-wood panelling. The whole place felt haunted. I pulled open the door that led onto the balcony and watched the sun bleed into the Danube, lulled by the long, low call of a curlew.

  That night, I lay awake and listened to the building as it sighed and whispered as if in conversation with itself. Just before daylight, I heard movement: footsteps on the floorboards and the deep, low rumble of male voices. Were they the voices of the men we’d seen on the balcony earlier swigging beer? Perhaps they were fishermen, as elusive as their avian counterparts – the kingfishers that hid on the banks of rivers.

  Perhaps they were the ghosts of the Danube.

  3. Troubles in Dolj County

  Gruia will always stay with me. There are places on the journey – long stretches of empty road lined with crop or weedy shrubland – that have become blind spots in my memory, and there are others where the detail remains as sharp and defined as the day we cycled through. Gruia is one of them.

  As we pushed our bicycles up the cliffside in the bluish light of early morning, we could see a stick of a woman far below us, striding across the wetlands in a tangle of aprons and skirts whilst jabbing the ground with a crook. Her voice rang out across the valley as she berated an errant heifer, words tumbling out like staccato notes before being snatched away by the river breeze.

  I thought of my father with his wayward cattle, dancing around them with outstretched arms: ‘Huh-ah, huh-ah.’

  The further east we cycled through rural Romania, the greater the sense we were cycling into the past. Men in black with collarless shirts sat outside shops on half-broken plastic seats, leaning over their sticks. Girls crouched on grassy verges with gaggles of geese. Once, a couple of escapee horses galloped down the road towards us, their chains rattling behind them. We passed women walking the roads with hessian sacks overflowing with flowering herbs, and we saw youths on rusting bikes, sometimes loaded with kindling or farm machinery. Tractors and trailers and the hitherto perpetual white van were replaced by horses and carts – whole households out on the road along with the family dog.

  It reminded me of the Ireland I had grown up in, particularly the countryside where my father drove his grocery van. One of his customers was a bachelor farmer who lived in a tumbledown cottage along one of the high-hedged lanes beyond my town. We’d push through the overgrown garden to the open door of his cottage, the old boy calling us in, to stand among half-broken furniture. He smelt of wood-smoke and unwashed body and his trousers were held up with twine. My father liked to tell tales about the farmer, who was unbothered by society’s niceties. Once Johnny had taken a fallen tree trunk from his farmstead and trailed it through the door to the open fire. Too lazy to chop it up, he shoved it further into the grate as the fire devoured it. My father tittered with laughter as he told this story. Only later had I asked myself why the fire had not spread down the trunk and set the house on fire. Perhaps t
he wood was too wet. Unseasoned, there would have been more smoke than fire, which explained the pungent smell off Johnny – like an old smoked kipper.

  My father, who had begun to fade out through Serbia and Romania with the dying birdsong, returned to me again in this quiet hinterland of the Danube; a place where time seemed to have stopped. This part of Romania – despite Ceauşescu‘s efforts to obliterate country settlements and create an urban, industrialised country fitting of a communist state – echoed the simplicity of rural Ireland during my sixties’ childhood; a world my father had clung to with his little garage grocery shop and delivery van.

  We cycled on through this bucolic corner of Romania, with its linear villages of low-lying cottages, communal squares, fountains and little shops stocked with staples and a self-service coffee machine. These small settlements contrasted with the bigger towns, where Ceaușescu had torn down streets of cottages and replaced them with multi-storied blocks of brutal concrete. I could see they had been flung up in haste – the balconies now crumbling, the lines not quite straight. I’d read somewhere the individual flats had been built without kitchens in order to force the residents to eat communally in a large dining hall in the basement or ground floor. It was less to do with fostering a community spirit and more to do with Ceaușescu’s paranoia: the community dining rooms had spies; private kitchens allowed private conversations.

  Ceaușescu reconstructed towns and cities across the whole of Romania in the same fashion, wiping out entire communities of centuries-old houses to replace them with apartment blocks set around grid systems, the grey symmetry only broken up by the softer green of the public park. Each large town or city had an official state hotel, sometimes the only accommodation option. These Communist-era hotels still exist and continue to be run in the old Communist way. Prices and menus are set – and please don’t make individual requests; customer service is seen as something for soft-headed capitalists.

  Panoramic Hotel in Calafat was our first experience of one of these Communist state hotels. As we checked in, we were instructed to take the lift to the thirteenth floor. The metal box, barely big enough for two, shuddered its way past the first eleven floors then came to an abrupt stop somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth. We opened the door to a concrete wall and a gaping hole that dropped all the way back down to reception. Hastily, Jamie pressed the button for the thirteenth floor again. Nothing happened. He jabbed the button again and again. Still nothing. We waited for a few minutes then pressed the help button. Silence. We stood in the stuffy lift and wondered if we would die from suffocation or thirst. What an irony that would be after surviving the lorries across Eastern Europe. I could see the newspaper headline: Cyclists die in hotel lift after riding across Europe. The thought made me giggle, not without a hint of hysteria.

  Jamie tried the button again. There was no movement. In desperation, he pressed the ground floor button and the lift shot down at speed. Jamie and I emerged from the lift, back at our starting point, laughing hysterically and feeling shaken. Then we ran for the stairs. Who cared if we had multiple flights of steps to climb: we might be exhausted by the time we reached the top, but we’d still be alive.

  Our room hadn’t been renovated since the seventies. There was air-con, but no remote to switch it on. There was a fridge that didn’t work and a shower that gave us lukewarm water. The balcony had just enough space for the air-con condenser – but if you squeezed past, you could just make out the hotel’s claim to panoramic views of the Danube.

  That evening we ate in the hotel dining room with its long rows of tables and chairs of pink nylon tied with bows. We were the only guests. So, in the morning, we were surprised to see the dining hall busy. It could have been a scene from Monty Python. It was a set breakfast and the diners were handed trays with identical plates – with a cup of tea and coffee. This was Communist efficiency in the modern world. If some guests insisted on breakfast coffee while others only drank tea, then a tray of both beverages meant they could continue their conveyer belt system without having to talk to anyone. It was as comical as it was ingenious.

  So when I returned my coffee because it was cold, I caused pandemonium. The server frowned, nodded then promptly ignored me. I returned again. Finally, a hot cup of coffee arrived, just as I was swallowing the last mouthful of my breakfast. We left the Panoramic Hotel feeling bemused. Bizarrely, we’d enjoyed our time there – it was worth every leu of our money.

  *

  Our bike book was at it again – urging us to take the train from Calafat to Corabia over 100 miles away. Why write a bike book that discourages cyclists from riding their bikes? This time, it wasn’t to do with the weight of traffic (we were truly in the sticks) but rather the lack of accommodation between the two towns.

  Jamie and I still had our tents, which hadn’t seen a campsite since Austria. Hotels and guesthouses from Slovakia onwards were often cheaper than the Austrian and German campsites, and a comfortable bed at night after a long day on the bike was a temptation too great to resist. There had been no campsites along this part of the Danube anyway – and I still had an irrational fear of wild camping.

  Then Jamie found Zavāl Camping on Google Maps, about halfway to Corabia. It was the only campsite we’d spotted since Austria. There was little information on the place, other than the fact that there were a few ramshackle cabins. And while it looked to be set in an idyllic spot on the Jiu, with riverside swimming (which our bike book did mention), I discovered a couple of touring cyclist blogs that alluded to strange goings-on in the night: our campsite seemed to be a kind of camping brothel. Still, we would investigate.

  We arrived at the campsite mid-afternoon, hot and tired. The riverside site was filled with motorbikes and men in black leather striding around with tins of lager in their hands. I asked an expressionless girl if we could have a pitch for the night.

  ‘No place,’ she said in a flat, bored voice.

  We bought soft drinks at the bar and pondered our options. Tired, I was loath to cycle on. Some of the bikers came over to chat.

  ‘Yeah, you can stay. You’ll be safe with us.’

  ‘Look, I leave my money lying around without worrying,’ said another, and he flung his wallet on the bar with a flourish, as if to demonstrate his point. ‘No one will take your things – but it will be noisy. We’ll be partying all night, but if you pitch back there in the trees, it might not be too bad.’

  It was tempting to stay. Tiredness was overriding common sense. Then Jamie stepped in. ‘I think we should go on. I think we can find something further along the road in Bechet.’ Google Maps hadn’t indicated any accommodation in Bechet, and I dragged my bike back onto the road reluctantly, but I knew deep down that Jamie had made the right decision.

  For the first time, I thought we might have to wild camp. As we rode along the road that sliced through a forest, I peered into the trees, trying to imagine what it would be like to camp there, the ground uneven and covered in broken branches and low-lying vegetation. I could see mosquitoes circling the birch and ash. It wasn’t an enticing option.

  Then I heard that noise again: ping. It was worrying that the spokes on Jamie’s bike were breaking with increasing frequency – especially now we were cycling through this rural part of the Danube. And here we were just outside Bechet, a long way from the nearest town of Turnu Măgurele. What would be the chance of finding a bike shop here? Once more, Jamie unclipped the back brake and we rode into the village looking simultaneously for a bicycle shop and somewhere to sleep.

  We found accommodation almost straight away on the main road – a large, modern building with the letter ‘s’ squeezed in brackets between the ‘o’ and ‘t’, as if it couldn’t decide to be a hotel or a hostel.

  ‘We’re almost full,’ said the girl at the hotel-cum-hostel entrance. ‘We have a school party tonight, but we can squeeze both of you into a single room if you want. Let me show you the room and you can decide.’

  As expected, there wasn
’t a bicycle shop in Bechet, but the girl phoned a friend who arrived a short time later. He rummaged around a storehouse at the side of the hotel until he found a bike with a wheel the same size as Jamie’s. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can use a spoke from this old bike. Leave it with me. I’ll have your bike sorted in no time.’

  While he fixed the bike, the girl led us along corridors of Persian rugs and leafy plants to the single bedroom. It was still big enough for a double bed.

  ‘We can get you another mattress. Hold on.’ And her friend returned with a brand-new mattress, still wrapped in plastic.

  ‘Your bike’s fixed,’ he told us.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  That evening we feasted on a jug of the hotel’s homemade wine and a plate piled high with food. The family invited us to join them at their table to share a watermelon. Later, we discovered that somewhere between the storehouse and the hotel, Jamie’s water bottles had gone missing. ‘No worries,’ said the son, ‘We’ll check the CCTV footage,’ and he sat with Jamie, scouring through reams of CCTV footage for about an hour – all in vain. The mystery remained unresolved, but we didn’t mind: we had a bed for the night, a mended bike and a belly full of food and wine – and all for eighteen pounds. The following morning, as we cycled out of Bechet, I thought of Ingrid’s redstarts way back in the German vineyards, bringing good luck. The redstarts were evidently still with us.

  4. High-fives, Horse Carts and Touring Cyclists

  ‘Bună, bună!’

  ‘Alo!’

  ‘Salut!’

  ‘Servus!’

  ‘Ciao!’

  As we cycled from village to village across the Romanian plains, children lined the main streets, arms outstretched and palms held up in anticipation. When three tiny, sweet-looking girls almost knocked me off my bike with the force of their high-fives, I pointed to Jamie behind. I didn’t want to re-break my recently smashed wrist (held together with a metal rod and nine pins) in the backwaters of Romania and have our trip come to an abrupt end just short of the Black Sea.