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Wednesday 16 April - Slobozia to Braila, 115 km.
Not a very interesting day. Long straight roads, huge endless fields, some ploughed and some with crops. Yellow fields of rape as far as the eye can see. At Braila a reception at the town hall, dinner at a restaurant 7 km away, and slept in a gym. Quite a good one, hot showers.
Thursday 17 April - Braila to Albota de Jos (Moldavia), 122 km.
Went through Galati, a very big prosperous town on the Danube, with huge docks with rows of cranes, and a shipyard. It is unfortunately downwind of a huge steel works - Mittal Steel Rumania. Passed the frontier into Moldavia, which took some time, and pedaled off with a police escort. The policemen refused a photo but I got one with a frontier guard.
Moldavia is nice - rolling countryside, very friendly population, pretty villages with the houses and fences brightly painted - favourite colours are blue and green. Most of the roofs are corrugated - maybe metal, maybe asbestor - but on new houses they are putting brightly coloured roofs, mauve, green, bright red and bright blue. There are not many cars but lots of donkey
carts and some ancient motorbike combinations. The roads are pretty poor, rough and uneven with huge potholes.
People tend to wear peasant type clothes, but schoolchildren are smartly dressed, a lot of the boys in suits. Lots of people sit outside their gates watching the world go by, and they gave us a warm welcome.
At the village of Albota de Jos we gave bicycles to 14 of the local children. Each bike was refurbished by a French school, and the schools hope to establish contact with the children in Moldavia.
The village put on a terrific show for us, the children danced in several styles and some of them sang very well. I took quite a lot of pictures today. We slept in a “youth camp” which was terrible - although the food was quite good.
Fridqy 18 April - Albota de Jos to Tatarbunary (Ukraine), 135 km
The frontier was impossibly slow - the post was quite small and processed five cyclists at a time, taking about 15 minutes each time. The countryside when we finally got moving was similar to yesterday’s - long rolling hills, huge fields and also very large vineyards.
We finally arrived after 8
pm at the gym where we were sleeping. It was a very old building with no showers - only a couple of washbasins on the ground floor, where we ate, and nothing upstairs, where we slept. Toilets were the other end of the yard and were unspeakably smelly.
Dinner was cooked by the organizers and was individual foil packed meals (meat of course). Fortunately I had made provision for this and I had a container of pasta salad plus a hard-boiled egg saved from breakfast, so I did OK.
Saturday 19 April - Tatarbunary to Odessa, 145 km
Police escort out of town, as usual. Got a photo with two Ukrainian policemen. Boring countryside, mostly flat with rolling hills. It was a bit windy today which made cycling more difficult.
Police escort into Odessa, where we had a very nice hotel - 15 floors, but with three lifts. The lifts refused to work if they were overloaded - and they were overloaded if they had more than three people in! Lovely view of a church from our hotel window. The restaurant was reached through the casino, which was a bit odd, but the food was really excellent.
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Tot: 0.061s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0237s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
