day 12, wednesday 11^th august 99

I don't get to bed until 4:00 a.m. after a night of heavy drinking with marvin, Bogdan the interpreter), Liam and the two women that run the place, Anna and Bianca. At around 5:30 there is a short, sharp thunderstorm. At around six, some cockerels start crowing and it gets steadily noisier from there on. I snooze and doze and finally get myself out of bed for 8:00.

Breakfast is at 9:00, when all except marvin and Crispin are up, and it's positively huge. It starts with scrambled eggs and bacon fat, but there is also a wide selection of cooked meats, salad, bread and so on. We can't even make an appreciable dent in it. The strong coffee goes down well, mind you.

After breakfast we debate what we're going to do for some time, during which period Sergio turns up. He advises us that the road to the EnduRoMania camp is mainly easily passable, with two exceptions - the places where part of the road was swept away in last month's storms and the bit that is unpaved - just gravel. Oh bother.

As the unpaved bit is only the last 2km, we decide to ride to that point and make an on-the-spot decision about whether to leave our bikes there or to ride up the last bit to Sergio's base. The road is, in its better parts, in very poor condition. It's made of large concrete slabs and they are cracked and worn, with huge potholes and gaps between them. We ride up in a fairly timid manner. Bogdan goes pillion on Andy the Pugh's bike and, frankly, is looking pretty worried by the time we get to the end of this road, even though he already knows what it's like. In two places the road runs round a bend in a small river. At the first of these the river has undermined the road and the concrete has cracked badly and sagged. At the second river bend there is a whole, enormous slab of concrete missing from our side of the road and we have to cross to the opposite lane to continue.

Shortly afterwards we come upon an area that is almost a foot deep in gravel, while the concrete surface just appears to end. The Trixie isn't made for this stuff and I start to get quite seriously worried. She goes through with only a bit of a rear end slide, but with a vast amount of front-end twitching.

Soon the road surface disappears again, for a much longer stretch, just as the road turns sharply and climbs. Lots of big stones and some gravel compacted onto the earth are all that remains for a road surface. I go over this very cautiously and get out of the second bend and onto the concrete again without incident. The last section without a surface (before the road just plain ends) is a steep incline with thick (as in 6" thick, minimum) gravel and stones all over it. Jeff, who is in front of me, has a huge rear-end slide and ends up sideways across the top of the slope. I momentarily entertain images of being crushed by the GSX as it rolls down the hill, but he doesn't bin it, re-orients her and heads off. Top man!

Finally, we arrive at the turning for the base camp. From here on it's all gravel and fuck-off big stones, including a stream to ford. Jeremy, marvin, Andy, Jim, Iain, Crispin and I decide to take our bikes up this essentially off-road section so that we can arrive properly at the EnduRoMania camp. For all but Jeremy, this is a triumph of machismo over sense. None of us bin it, even when we ford the 3 metre wide stream!

Liam, Kevin and Jeff are much more intelligent than us and park their bikes up to walk this last part of our journey. We lurk about meeting people for a bit and get offered the opportunity to see a video of another endurance trial. As we sit down to watch the video, the electricity goes off. So much for that, then. We go outside and Jeremy sets up his camera. Kevin has (deliberately?) forgotten his tripod and persuades one of the Enduro-nutters to take him to Ruska on the back of an enduro bike. If this isn't blagging of the first order, I don't know what is...

For some time marvin frets that we may be off the path of totality but finally decides that all will be well. Unfortunately, it has now seriously clouded over, reducing sight of the sun (through the welding filters Andy brought with him) to occasional glimpses. Bits of blue sky appear from time to time and we're all very exited to see the moon's first incursion across the face of the sun. Slowly but surely the sun is eaten away. The wind picks up, as though in sympathy, and it gets darker and colder.

Totality finally arrives shortly after 2 p.m. and lasts about 2 minutes. To me, it seems to last no more than a few seconds, but there is time for Jeremy and Kevin (returned, grinning, with his tripod) to each take a picture using a 90 second exposure.

The corona is incredible - a sight I hope never to forget. The colours, electric blue, red, yellow, orange, are complex and varied and seem to flicker about the moon as though it were on fire.

We are closer to the edge of the path of totality than we had first planned, so the show ends, and the light and warmth pick up swiftly. After the eclipse, once we've talked for a while, the cameras are packed away and we try to blag a try on an enduro bike, but it's a bit of a no go. I guess they dare not take the somewhat high risk that as novices we may well bin the bike(s) and damage their chances. Fair enough. With the notable exception of Sergio, no one is too bothered about chatting with us, so at about 3:20 we head back to the guest-house in Ruska.

Jeremy, Jim, Andy, Crispin and Liam go off to view the Danube - an apparently splendid sight only 50kms away. Kevin stays behind to repair his fairing, Iain and marvin are too tired to bother going and I decide to try to finish the araldite repair to my mirror I had begun (with Andy's help) that morning. I am also too tired to take this no doubt interesting side trip.

I make a cock-up of the mirror and decide to just laze around writing this journal and reading my book. I spend the afternoon reading and then chatting with Bianca for an hour or so. Considering her English comes mainly from books and films, it's not bad.

Kevin's bike has its front wheel out of alignment, so in the true spirit of makeshift repairs, he slackens off the lower yoke bolts and I kick the tyre until it looks straight. He road tests it. The bike goes in a straight line and brakes the same way. That'll do then, and he puts it all back together, using a cut up lemonade bottle as a guard for the headlight bulbs. Very impressive.

He also consults his maps and decides that he and Liam really have to vary their route to get back home in time. He decides to suggest to Liam that they leave our group tomorrow and head straight for Budapest. No doubt this is really just an excuse to get some heavy-duty totty ogling into their itinerary!

The others return while Iain and marvin are still snoozing. They've had a great time and were impressed by the Danube, although they noted it wasn't blue.

We're all tired and so the evening meal is rather more subdued than the previous night. Bogdan turns up late and joins us for the chatting after the meal bit. I sit up late talking to Bianca. Her view of the West is quite shocking. It's entirely based on novels (mostly love stories, it seems) and on the films they show on Romanian television. Her naiveté is quite astonishing. I try to tell her about some of the realities of living in the West - unemployment, violence, crime, drugs and so on, but after a while I realise that even as it is, its so much easier a life for us that nothing I can say would be constructive. She works up to 18 hours a day, six days a week and I dare not ask her how much her wages are.

Mileage: 118 (for those that went to the Danube)