Halfway down the Danube

Up the Trans-Fagaras Highway

In which we finally ascend the Trans-Fagaras Highway.

As I blogged a while back, the TFH is this completely insane road that goes up and over a fairly sheer mountain range in the middle of the country for, really, no reason whatsoever. Ceausescu built it back in the 1970s. Officially it was to improve the defense of the country in case someone -- coughHungarianscough -- invaded from the west. But this was obvious nonsense. The highway is ridiculously vulnerable; it could be completely destroyed by a single bomb or shell. More to the point, it's closed eight months of the year anyhow. No, Old Nick built it because he wanted to, and because he could, and that's really all there is to it.

But anyway. If you approach the Trans-Fagaras from the north, you come at it along a little two-lane road that crosses a dusty plain at the foot of the mountains. Village, slow down, open plain, speed up, repeat every few kilometers.

Then you come to the foot of the mountains -- which is, like, abrupt; the mountains pretty much jump right out of the plains -- and you start doing switchbacks. Hairpin left, up up up up, hairpin right. Repeat. After a while you're in pine forest.

If this doesn't sound too exciting, well, it isn't really. Yet.

But go another few km, and you get higher, and you start getting these dropoffs on either side. Deep, sheer dropoffs that go down for hundreds of feet. The sort where you're looking down into the tops of trees. Tall trees. Far below you.

And the hairpins keep coming: back, forth. You go over bridges that arch high over loud streams full of white water. You go past places where the road runs along a sheer cliff face covered with what looks like heavy chicken wire, presumably in case of avalanches. Here and there you begin to notice spills of stone and gravel on the road where, presumably, the chicken wire failed. Some of these stones are not so small. This may make you a little thoughtful. Best not to dwell on it.

And then you start going through tunnels. The tunnels look like they were constructed very hastily out of, basically, cinderblock. Often they have water running over, around, or into them. There's usually more chicken wire involved too. This, too, might make you a little thoughtful. Again, best not to dwell.

At this point in our trip, things suddenly got a lot more interesting because we entered the clouds. We had seen low-hanging clouds around the mountains as we approached. Now we drove right up into them. Visibility immediately dropped to about two car lengths ahead, except when a random gust of wind caused fog to eddy and thicken. Then it dropped to just beyond our front bumper.

Also at around this point, the guardrail situation began to get a little alarming. Not that there weren't guardrails. There were. Some. But they were sort of randomly placed. More than once, as we crept upwards through the fog, we hit sudden hairpin turns that did not have guardrails; or that had guardrails, but placed several yards off to one side, so as not to get in the way of the sheer drop into the abyss; or that had once had guardrails, but now just had a couple of snapped-off guardrail posts.

Somewhere around here my forward speed dropped to a few kilometers per hour. Walking speed. Soon after this, people began passing me -- some flashing lights and honking as they zipped past us, in the moment before disappearing into the mist ahead.

And then we came out of the top of the cloud.

Posted by douglas at January 7, 2005 05:23 PM