Weather: ☁️☁️🌥️🌥️🌧️
Lunch: 🥪🥪🥪 (3 out 5, wraps in a field next to the track)
Track: 🇷🇴🇹🇩 (2 out of 5, nice track until after Dochia hut, then hard to find and tough, overgrown track, and finally a roadwalk to Tulghes)
Hotel: 🛏️🛏️🛏️ (3 out of 5, nice room, good food)
Name of followed trail: ‘chickenrun’ day 1 of 5, partly E8
We leave around 8.30, after a very good breakfast. The trail is good and the weather is dry but cold. The trail goes up 650m of elevation in 4 kilometers, so it’s quite the climb up. We pass a few great viewpoints, but there is nothing to be seen because we’re in the clouds again.
We skip the mountain top because of the lack of a view and continue to the hut. Sometimes the trees and grass are white with ice, our first sub-zero temperatures have come. Minus 1,4 Celsius, the man from the weatherstation on the ridge tells us 🙂.
After 5 kilometers (and a little over 2 hours of hiking), we have a warm drink at the Dochia hut. From there, we go down from the mountains, towards the road section of today.
The trail becomes less visible after the carpark, and it disappears completely a while later. We have a hard time finding the markers in the forest sometimes and then we find a trail to follow, that disappears again… For us, this is another confirmation that we made the right decision.
In an open section we make our way through the high grasses, thistles and weeds. We find the intersection where we leave E8 behind, just by using my watch, because the 2 4×4 tracks are both too overgrown to see. A fitting goodbye I guess…
Our, now unmarked, track becomes more visible after a while, though still hard to walk on, due to nature trying to take over the track. At a junction we get to a normal gravel road. We have our lunch here. The hard part of the day is done. Too bad we didn’t get to see the nice views at the top, but you can’t have it all. The rest of the day is easy walking. Along the way we see many professions we don’t see often at home. The foresters at work in cutting and moving the trees, and the woodworkers crafting tree trunks into a house. A beautiful craft to watch. We have a short chat with the woodworkers. They are prou6of their work too.
We enter the bilingual part of Romania. In this region, there is a large Hungarian population, from the time that this area was part of the Austria-Hungarian empire. Not of any use for us, because our Romanian is a lot better than our Hungarian 😅!
In Tulghes, we find our hotel, where we get a good meal and a good shower, before we go to bed.