Goodbye to a gorgeous gorge

Neil is adamant that a cat came in the window last night and slept on his legs. I’m thinking he must have been dreaming of home where we have two lovely cats – Toby and Ellie.

We planned to make an early escape, and told Dragiča last night before we turned in. When Neil gets up she is waiting, asking if he wants coffee. He has coffee then comes back to tell me that she was waiting for us to leave. She wants to go somewhere. I look out and she is pacing. We still have to pack everything up (all the washing is still out on the line after being ejected from our room) so it takes quite a while, with her pacing and impatient outside the room.

We finally get our bikes ready and packed, say our goodbyes, and and of course it is raining lightly. We see Bob, our boat captain, drive past in the street – we’ve been told he lives close by. He and his wife run accommodation out of their place. I wish we had stayed with them! Some other lucky and “rich” tourists will be out on his boat today I suppose.

We go back to the restaurant we had dinner at the first night for breakfast. At least it is dry, so we dawdle a bit over our lovely (blech) omelettes. It is still raining, so we head off to Kafe Bar Teuta to wait it out. Today’s route calls for a blue sky day, but that’s not happening for us.

So wait it out we do. A river cruise boat comes in and docks quite early and there is no great rush of people disembarking in the dreary weather. The local ladies, who had set up their stalls early, have tarps covering their wares and not much business. It is not a great day for anybody.

We sit and wait, and wait some more. Finally, around 10:30, the weather clears a little, and we set off.

First out of town is a loop, to get around and over a small river, then back onto the main road for a gorgeous ride, punctuated by the remainder of the tunnels. There are 21 tunnels along this road from Golubac to Kladovo (actually well before Kladovo), and we ride through all of them, bar one, which we skipped on our detour down to the museum two days ago. We bunch up tight (the two of us) with my working rear light, and Neil’s working front light, and hope that we don’t hit too much traffic while riding through. We do make it safely through all, but there are some moment of riding blind through the dark hoping that the traffic noise is not a large truck with a non-seeing driver at the wheel!

Along the way we see ‘our’ boat heading out. We wonder if ‘our’ park ranger is on board, and secretly hope not. The day has cleared fairly well, and we are seeing lovely views of the river we travelled along yesterday. It feels nice to do it this way – having seen the landmarks from the boat yesterday, and now revisiting as we cycle along. The gorge is just beautiful. I am full and pleased with the simple joys of life – being on my bike (with the road not too steep), a bit of sun, a lovely view and the wind through my helmet.

We stop several times along the way to admire the view, and at one point we see ‘our’ boat on its return trip. The captain waves. That was remarkable spotting on his part!

We get lovely views of all the landmarks we saw yesterday: Mraconia Monastery, the sculpture of Decebalus, but not the Tabula, which is of course well below us at the bottom of a steep cliff. There is one climb today  – on the profile it looks gigantic, but in reality is not really so bad. It has a max grade of about 6%, but the average would be much less, and I cruise up it with a heart rate of 150, which for me is barely getting out of bed! We hit the top, and then cruise downhill, and sadly say goodbye to our beautiful gorge. It has been a wonderful three days, Dragiča notwithstanding.

Now we ride along the river, keen to get to Kladovo. As we approach the dam, it becomes a bit of a hard slog, with wind in our faces. Neil in particular is feeling it. We just ride past the dam, which is the crossover point to Romania. We’ve decided to skip the Romanian side and push on into Bulgaria. We have nothing booked in Kladovo, but there are a few hotels, and we are hoping to get into what appears to be the ‘best’ of the hotels.

The route takes us off the main road for a short while, and we ride through the back blocks of a village just before Kladovo, then we turn back onto the highway, and make our way to the centre of the town. The first hotel we try (Aquastar Danube) is full up (they had already refused us a booking, but we thought we would try again) so we went up the road to the next place (Hotel Djerdap), which seemed a lot more Soviet and utilitarian. Anything would do. We are tired from our efforts today and just want a place to stop.

We head into town for dinner. There is a reasonably lively pedestrian street, where every place seems to serve the same: pizza. If we must, but surely there is something else? We do a lap of the street, and discover a nice looking Italian place, which seems to set itself apart from the other places.  (It would be great to find the name of this place and do a review because it was a fair stand out.)

I am ecstatic to be able to get pasta with tomato sauce. My needs have simplified somewhat on this trip. I am happy to have anything that is not fried cheese and chips. We share a lovely bottle of local wine, and chat with the waiter, who is friendly, helpful, and has no other customers to serve. Feeling happy and expansive after three great days we order a dessert wine to have with our waiter-recommended local dessert (which was a lot like a French vanilla slice). There was wine left over, so we gave it to our waiter to take home to his wife. All in all a pleasant evening and dinner. This restaurant (whatever the hell it was called) was a stand out amongst the clone pizza café offerings elsewhere on the strip.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 62.9km
• Climb: 376m
• Average speed: 19.1km/h
• Average temperature: 17C
• Moving time: 3:17:37
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at Hotel Djerdap in Kladavo with a very industrial looking Romanian town in the background.

Along the way today: