Weather: ☀️⛅⛅🌧️⛅
Picnic: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, wraps while watching 2 men picking mushrooms)
Track: 🇷🇴 (1 out of 5, first part really nice track, last 5 kilometers there was almost no track, so 5 km bushwhacking on a ridgeline)
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺⛺ (4 out of 5, out of the forest, flat with beautiful mountain views)
Name of followed trail: E8… Or so we think..
We leave the alpine hotel at 8 accompanied by a dog. That little scruffy thing follows us for quite a few kilometers until we reach another herd of sheep with some big dogs. They see it as lunch and chase it. This works well for us, but we hope our little self proclaimed pet made it out alive! Mark now says we need another sacrificial dog for the next herd:)
We enjoy the beautiful views over the cloudy valleys, and the 4×4 track that we follow. We find a few springs, including a brand new one, which we gratefully use. The springs aren’t on the map, but we’re happy to find them!
The higher we get, the harder it gets to follow the trail. The track is overgrown and poorly marked, which makes us back track quite a few times. After lunch, while whatching 2 men pick mushrooms, we loose the track completely. We have a hard time finding it back in the dense and steep forest eventhough we are both very skilled and experienced navigators. We realise that, at this pace, with a track that has so much fallen trees that it is more of an obstacle course than it is a track, that we will not make our predicted stop for this night.
We do what we do best. Calculate, recalculate, set a reachable goal (get off the ridgeline and out off the forest) and push on.
This proves difficult since the ‘track’ along the sometimes rocky ridgeline is overgrown and full of fallen trees. It has some very scatchy descents and and ony a handfull of markings. We move at hardly 1 km per hour now, pushing through to make it down before dark. After 11 hours of hiking and only 20 kilometers done we get to our newly set goal. Relieved and exhausted, we pitch tent in the last light, cook food and agree that this was a bad situation. We also agree that stepping on a waspnest and getting stung multiple times in the last 300m didn’t help the situation… Now we at least know that Mark isn’t allergic to them. We can call that a positive I guess…🤔
In the tent we discuss what happened and what this means for the rest of our track. While it will never mean that we’ll let go of our goal to hike to Istanbul, it may very well mean that we’ll have to brake trail and quit on E8 in Romania. That’s not an easy decision to make. So we talk it through together. Pro’s, con’s, alternatives, etc. With a lot to think about, we go to sleep.