Weather: 🌧️☁️🌧️☁️🌧️
Lunch: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, wraps and tea in a hut…)
Track: 🇷🇴🇷🇴🇷🇴🇷🇴 (4 out of 5, at least..the parts we could see we’re very beautiful 😅)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️ (2 out of 5, basic pension)
Name of followed trail: E8
When we wake up it’s still cloudy unfortunately. Visibility is slightly better than yesterday though.
We have a great day of hiking, on a beautiful track, but we mainly see clouds. I definitely think it would have been a 5 or even 6 star track if we could have seen anything other than our direct surroundings… It felt like walking in a bubble, that kept moving along with us. It did make me look at the plant life more, and it helped at some steep, exposed places where I couldn’t really see how deep it was..😅
We started with a track up to Gargalau peak and continue on the ridgeline. It’s beautiful but tough hiking. We first hike 12 km to the refugiul sub Ineu. This takes about 5 hours, eventhough we feel like we’re making good progress. Because we can’t see far ahead, it seems to take forever! Some parts require some scrambling. Luckily Mark is better at that than I am and ge helps me get across these small parts. The rest is wide enough…😅
In the clouds it’s damp and cold. Sometimes it rains a bit and we even get a bit of hail close to the hut. The ground is wet too, so my feet are really wet and cold. What a change in weather since we walked into Ieud in about 30° a few days ago!
In the hut we have a cup of tea and our wraps. After that we continue another 10 kilometers to pasul Rotunda. This trail takes us down along a beautiful set of lakes, formed by the Lala river that springs here. At lake Lala Mica there is a campsite where we otherwise would have camped yesterday. It’s a beautiful spot and it even has some other hikers here, but I’m glad we stayed at the Gargalau hut!
We go down on quite a rough trail with lots of big boulders and then up to a ridge again. From there it’s easy hiking along a wide 4×4 road to the pass. The pass is little more than a road and 2 houses/ pensions in the forest.
We find the pension where we wanted to stay closed, but luckily the neighboring pension is open. Maria, the hostess, shows us our room with wood stove, where we can warm up and dry our clothes.
We have a semi-hot shower an make a phonecall to Marks mum on her birthday. Quite surprised to have a phone connection here!
Unfortunately the pension doesn’t do dinner or breakfast, so due to our unexpected extra day, we have a strange meal of wraps, nuts and Cup-a-soup, and we use our Crème Olé dessert for breakfast….🤔😅
After dinner we use the surprise 4G internet connection to put our previous blogs online and go to sleep quickly after that. What a day! The hiking has been good, in beautiful surroundings. Yet we agree that we made a wise choice indeed by changing our plans yesterday.