Average speed on most Romanian roads appears to be about 70kph. There are some stretches of two-lane blacktop, but you’ll also find lots of potholed one-lane with tons of trucks, Dacia’s galore, and a rural cop with a radar gun in every town.

We stopped for lunch in Bran and had a quick look at the castle there, which clearly made a super-swinging pad for Queen Marie back in the 30’s, and then headed south towards Bucharest. Going was good enough until the ring road, which is congested bumpy single lane with several entirely uncontrolled intersections. A note for the EU suggestion box: a few stoplights would do wonders down here. We did some highly amusing romanian-style left-lane chicken passing moves, which only sometimes require pulling off onto the left shoulder to avoid oncoming trucks. Now we’re on the A2 (the only real highway in the country) heading to Vama Veche on the coast.

The contrast today was amazing - in the morning it was all horse carts and hand work on the fields (lots of scythes and pitchforks), and now its autobahn and mechanized agriculture, real steel for the bridges, and apparently functional infrastructure. Lovely mountain scenery up around Bran too. We opted to skip downtown Bucharest entirely, partly due to fact that this Swiss guy we spoke with described it with a single word: “chaos”.