Halfway down the Danube

The Trans-Fagaras Highway (1)

We drove over the Trans-Fagaras Highway, way back in August. We posted one picture and then said that a more detailed post would have to wait "a few hours".

Three months later: let's talk a little about the Trans-Fagaras Highway.

The TFH was another one of Ceausescu's big, insane projects. While it's not as big as the Palace of the People, the Calarasi steel works, or the Danube-Black Sea Canal, there's a sense in which it surpasses them all: it's probably the most purely and completely insane.

The canal made some sort of sense. The Calarasi steel works at least made steel. Even the Palace of the People, though it will never be worth the titanic cost of its construction or the mayhem it caused, serves some function today.

But the TFH is purely and completely useless.

It's a highway that goes -- I am in no way exaggerating -- from nowhere, to nowhere. And in order to do this, it goes straight up the side of a fairly large mountain. It cost an estimated $50 million to build, and at least 30 people died during the construction. Many more have died in accidents -- it's not safe, at all. And it's closed more than half of the year, from September to May.

So what's it like?

Well... start with the mountains. We all know what Romania looks like, right? An oval, slightly flattened, with the Carpathian mountains cutting across the country in a backwards "L".

So, the bottom of that "L" is a mountain range, going from east to west. Not counting some foothills and whatnot, it's about 200 miles long. And that mountain range has only three good passes in it: two south of Brasov (going to Ploesti and Pitesti, respectively), and then the spectacular valley of the Olt, south of Sibiu.

Between the Brasov-Pitesti pass and the Olt valley, there's no natural pass through the mountains. That's the Fagaras range. It's about 50 miles/80 km long, and it's just a solid wall of stone. It rises about 2200 meters to its long, snaky crest, punctuated only by the occasional dramatic peak rising even higher. The southern side of this wall is somewhat eroded and slopes away... I won't say gently, but reasonably. The north face, however, is damn near vertical.

About a third of the way from the Olt Valley to Brasov, though, there's a spot where the north face falls into some confusion. The mountain wall kinks, just a little. It's still almost vertical, but a tangle of small streams have carved deep valleys, making a weird knot of chasms and ridges. So you could, if you were willing to spend a lot of money, run a road up there.

There wouldn't be any reason to do that, of course. Yah, the mountains are an obstacle, but it's not like you can't go around. North of the mountains, between Sibiu and Brasov, is... well, nothing much. Farm country; the dusty southern edge of the Transylvanian Plateau. Some corn, some cows, some sheep. No large towns. South of the mountains is... well, nothing at all. Some forest, and a big hydroelectric reservoir.

But still, at that one point, you could build a road. It would switch back and forth and back and forth, and there would be bridges every few hundred meters -- really scary bridges, with sheer drops on one side and, like, much bigger empty air terrifying sheer drops on the other -- and then those would alternate with tunnels and with alarming-looking cuts where thousands of tons of rock were very crudely blasted out of the mountain. It would skip from ridge, over chasm, and to ridge again like a mountain goat, zigging and zagging as it rose towards the crest. It would be expensive and it would be dangerous and it would be completely pointless, but you could do it.

If you had a country at your disposal, and no restrictions but your own sovereign whim.

(More in a bit.)

Posted by douglas at November 25, 2004 12:40 PM