Published in 2008, Mike Carter’s Uneasy Rider is an account by the author
of his six-month ride in 2006 on a large BMW R1200GS motorbike through 27
European countries, covering almost 20,000 miles and travelling as far as
eastern Turkey. The impetus for this
epic ride was Carter having reached the age of 42, ‘the nadir of a man’s life’
in his estimation, recently divorced and generally feeling at low ebb.
Despite neither owning nor being able to
ride a motorbike, he makes a drunken bet at work, which is sub-editor on the Observer, that he will spend six months
riding round Europe (if he had worked at the Guardian nobody would have noticed his absence). After some training this he eventually does,
cushioned financially by letting his London flat and writing progress reports
for his paper. Uneasy Rider is the book of the journey.
One of the chapters (‘What am I doing
here?’) recounts his time in Romania.
This was his second visit, the first a holiday in Bucharest five years
previously with his then-wife. He had
been suspicious of the locals, fearing they were going to rob him, that Romania
was ‘the end of civilisation’. His
trouble-free stay he attributed to luck.
This time, having arrived at ground level rather than by aeroplane, he can
see how mistaken his assumptions had been.
His first stop is Cluj-Napoca, where he
notices the prevalence of the Dracula theme: ‘the entire population of northern
Romania seemed to be working for Dracula plc,’ every town claiming a
connection, with the attendant souvenir business. The one major tourist spot in Cluj is a ‘big
statue of a man on a horse’, inviting comparisons in Carter’s mind between Cluj
and Nuneaton. We do not learn the
identity of the man on the horse (he is referring to the Matthias Corvinus
Monument), perhaps because too much hard information would break the whimsical
mood.
In a fish-out-of-water moment he goes to
a restaurant to find revellers wearing ‘traditional Romanian peasant costume’
and realises only when the bride enters that far from being ‘fancy dress
night’, as he initially thought, he has inadvertently crashed a wedding party. He leaves his champagne half-drunk and slips
away. Going into a bar called Diesel he
gets into conversation with the barman to find yet another person keen to leave
the country after Romania joins the EU.
In the nightclub downstairs he meets a ghastly Australian policeman on
the pull in Eastern Europe with his mates.
Then it is on to Sighișoara, with its
mediaeval citadel which Carter concedes is stunning. However, the main industry of the place seems
to be selling Dracula memorabilia and running Dracula tours. The house Vlad was born in was now the Casa
Dracula themed restaurant. He looks
around, chats to an envious car park attendant who would also like to take off
on a big motorbike, and that is it for Sighișoara.
Intending to pitch camp in the forest
and dine on vodka and garlic sausage (ho ho) he finds himself in a Roma village
‘somewhere in the sixteenth century’, presumably one of the abandoned Saxon
settlements, though we are not told so.
Apprehensive at being there in the dusk (gypsies!), with men carrying
old bolt-action rifles in evidence, he is met with warm hospitality. He is fed, drinks vodka, and plays football
with young boys.
Immediately afterwards he is riding
along the Transfagarasan, a biker’s dream of a road snaking over the Fagaras
Mountains. Here you feel Romania finally
comes alive for Carter as he climbs higher, an experience marred only by the
atrocious state of the road surface, with potholes so big people are fishing in
some (it sounds preposterous, but he mentions it again later so presumably it
was true). The views are fantastic,
complete with a golden eagle riding the thermals, but they are not enough to
stop him focusing on the bike and coming back down the mountain at high speed,
rather a waste of a fine experience. It
results in an attempted shake-down by a corrupt local policeman and a much
smaller fine at the police station.
Then it is on to Turkey. The chapters are all very abbreviated, with
only time for a few wry observations before moving on to the next place. It is a lightweight tour of the continent and
is short on analysis, so do not expect to find out much about the countries
visited, including Romania. This is more
about Carter and his machine than it is about the places he visits (the subtext
of the journey is to find himself after all).
