Dead Dog Brain

The next day we ended up in Bucharest in the rush hour. Bucharest was big. Very big. And strange, with Communist blocks with shops underneath and massive roads all jam-packed.

We got lost for 2 hours 4o minutes. We rode down a one-way main road the wrong way, and it all went very wrong, with giant jeeps heading straight for us, beeping. We stopped, solely to curse. It started to rain.


We skidded through a dead dogs head. It squished and our front tyre went haywire, flying out to the side and we wobbled and wobbled and eventually came to a stop.


We reached the border crossing back into Bulgaria, and rode up to the ticket booth.


We discovered we only had 6Lev left. There was no-where to change money. The ticket cost 10Lev. The counter-lady was fairly unforthcoming, but she must have taken pity on us, because she gave us a ticket. We couldn’t read the ticket, and didn’t know where it was for, but it was a Ticket. Hallelujah. I very nearly crossed myself.


We got onto the floating car park in the rain, and the villagers surrounded us with buckets of leaves. There was land ahead. We congratulated ourselves, and I said ‘There’s Bulgaria, what else could go wrong now?’


Then we had a horrible dawning that we had only gone downstream and not across the river. We drove off the float and tried to determine which country we were in. A friendly ferry-man showed us a map- there was a sneaky bit of Romania on Bulgaria’s side of the river, and that’s where we were. And sure enough we went back and found Bulgaria, through a gate, and we were no longer in Romania. I swore loudly that I would never return.