AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EVENTS IN THIS SECTION ALL TOOK PLACE IN 1986
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW ALL THE COUNTRIES VISITED (EXCEPT TURKEY) ARE IN THE EU NOW (2024) – NO VISAS ARE REQUIRED
THE BULK OF THE TEXT IS AS I WROTE IT THEN – SLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE AID OF CLARITY

Sunday, July 27th, 1986

Distance travelled 246 kilometres

I spent a truly miserable night, being assailed by mosquitos as big as flies (well, they seemed that way in the near total darkness. Only the faint, distant luminescence of the Black Sea gave any light at all. I hardly slept a wink and I was heartily glad when if finally began to get light so that I could go on my way.

I must have been REALLY close to the border because I got there in about five minutes. About one hundred metres away, in the early light of dawn, Romania awaited me. I was not to know it would be approaching sunset before I was allowed to proceed down the Romanian road I could clearly see beyond the border post.

Leaving Bulgaria started predictably enough. The Officer took my Passport and gestured me to a bench outside, before disappearing for well over an hour …… Another officer, this time a Customs man, came and sat in a chair nearby and watched me like a hawk for the whole time he was gone. Then, when officer One eventually ambled back with my Passport, officer Two spent almost two long hours going through my luggage item by item and thread by thread. He laboriously examined everything individually, presumably to match it to its description – and then ticked it off on the list I had been given when I entered the country. I just had to sit and wait.

When he finally decided that I still had everything, he indicated that I could repack. I need not have hurried, because this was the cue for officer One to disappear, with my Passport, for another hour. He finally returned and waved me on. Up went the red and white pole that separated the two countries – and I passed into Romania.

Now, the Romanian guards had been leaning on that self same red and white pole watching for most of the process I just described, so I foolishly envisaged a quick entry. Silly boy !

As I half expected, an officer immediately disappeared with my Passport and, as I also expected, although it was completely in order and I had the correct Visa, it was over an hour before he returned.

Then, despite the fact that all of my belongings had been microscopically examined by the Bulgarians, literally in front of their very eyes, the Romanians felt compelled to do an even more thorough job. What they thought I might be concealing, I have no idea, some kind of microdot would have been needed, so thorough was their search. They even examined all of the seams of what little clothing I had with some kind of electronic scanner. They found the First Aid kit of the bike under the saddle, nobody else had (and I did not even know, before that moment, that I had one) and they also checked the tool-kit, spanner by spanner and the owners manual, page by page.

Believe it or not, the worst was, as they say, yet to come.

Having found nothing to incriminate me on the BMW, they gestured me into a nearby room and indicated that I should take off all my clothes – and I mean ALL of them. I leave it to your imagination as to what happened next, but it involved rubber gloves a mirror on a stick and a torch. I managed to refrain from blurting out what was in my mind because I think that actually saying “I would not smoke it, if it had been up there !” might have got me into trouble.

Still not satisfied, they then began to run seams of the clothes I had been wearing through their scanner. Then they meticulously searched all my pockets. Now came the real trouble. In the bottom of one pocket was my Mosquito Repeller. This was a tiny little plastic tube that held a single AAA battery and, when switched on, emitted an ultrasonic whine which was “supposed” to repel mosquitos. It did not work, as far as I had ever been able to tell and I had not bothered to turn it on the previous evening, even while I was being eaten alive.

To say that the guards went triumphantly bonkers would actually be to understate the case. This was it – I MUST be a spy ! If anyone had said to me that, at some point in my life I would be standing in a room in Romania, wearing only my underpants (which I had, at least, been allowed to put back on when they had been scanned) attempting to imitate a “repelled‘ mosquito, I would have laughed loud and long. But, this was my next move. Naturally enough, this totally failed to convince the officer and, leaving a guard, he took the repeller, left the room, locked the door behind himself and disappeared for over two hours. I put my clothes back on and sat on the table as there was no chair. The guard stood in the corner, regarding me with suspicion and fiddling with his AK-47 in a manner that suggested he would love to flick the switch to full-auto and try it out on me.

When you are sitting on a table in a stuffy, windowless, room, with no clock, no conversation and potential psychopath with an AK-47, time tends to drag a bit. So I have no real idea how long it was before the senior officer came back. Finally, the key rattled, the door opened and he stuffed my little repeller back into my hand. Then, without a word, he led me off to a currency exchange counter, pointed and stomped off.

A quite attractive, but remorselessly sullen, young woman relieved me of a lot of dollars (you had to change quite a large amount for every day you would be there, even though there was nothing to spend it on) and, of course, even more dollars for my fuel coupons.

That accomplished, I was finally allowed to go outside. The red and white barrier was lifted, in a somewhat grudging fashion, by the guard with the AK-47 and off into Romania I went. It was already late afternoon. The border crossing had taken a few minutes shy of twelve hours.

It seemed I had emerged into yet another “Security Zone”. I was on a winding, coastal road and the sea was visible. Not far from shore there were a what appeared to be warships of some kind and some kind of naval activities were in evidence. Almost inevitably, this meant I had to stop at a check-point on almost every crossroads and wait while my papers were checked and rechecked.

There was hardly any traffic at all but, strangely, there were a few motorcycles. These were almost exclusively two-strokes of the MZ brand, principally of 175 cc but with the odd 350 cc thrown in. At the time, you could get these in the UK, but “serious” bikers (and, OK, that included me !) were inclined to ridicule them for their ancient design and ridiculously long-travel suspension. On what was more their “home turf”, I quickly came to realise the virtues of that suspension system. The roads were simply dire and, as my own rear shocks had, by then, almost non-existent damping, every big bump (and there were plenty of those) induced an, at times, quite alarming pogo stick effect !

I came into Constanta by a long straight road (the Romans were there once …) that was, at least, slightly smoother. At almost the same second that I entered the city, I was stopped by the police, which was not a surprise, but for speeding, which was. I practically laughed as, at the time I was negotiating a complicated junction of somewhat prominent tram-lines and I was doing about twenty miles an hour. However, humour is not a requisite in the Romanian police and I was informed in what I thought was French, but was, in fact, Romanian, that I had been doing thirty kilometres an hour (18 MPH) in a twenty-five kilometres an hour (15 MPH) zone. The fine of two hundred Leu was payable in cash, on the spot. The policeman, by the way, did not appear to have any form of radar equipment, maybe just a supreme ability to guess …..

I set off slowly, despite my lighter wallet, only to be stopped again, for exactly the same offence, only a few minutes later. However stupid that may appear, I should point out that I was in the inside lane, going slower than the traffic in the outside lane and, as the policeman was clearly visible, I HAD adjusted my speed to fifteen MPH. It made no difference and I was promptly relieved of yet another two hundred Lev I was suddenly quite glad they had made me change so much cash at the border….

I crawled out of town in second gear, but even at tick-over I was in danger of committing further felonies. I wondered if I should just get off and push.

At the next town, Lumina, I pulled over to consult my map (the AA Road Atlas of Europe) because my plan, such as it was, included at least a look at the Danube Delta, which lay about eighty to ninety miles (140 – 150 km) to the north.

No sooner did I get off of the BMW than a crowd gathered a short distance away and watched me intently. Their interest centred both on the bike and on the map. You could have been forgiven for thinking that, perhaps, they had never seen either before. Retrospectively, I feel they probably had not.

At that moment, a youngish man approached, held a wad of Lev under my nose and hissed “Dollars ! Dollars !” Whether or not I might have obliged him, I shall never know because at that moment, the whole crowd, including the young man, simply vaporised like mist in the sunshine. A large, black car had pulled up down the street. Nothing happened, it just sat there – but all the street needed was some blowing tumbleweed to complete the analogy of total desertion.

I should perhaps, at this stage point out, that in Romania there were not many cars. Further, it seemed that all of the cars there were (well certainly 99%) were of a model called the Dacia 1310. This was a locally produced version of the French Renault 12 and seemed to come in four colours, red, yellow, green and blue. Black colour indicated a government vehicle. I assumed this probably meant trouble. The rapid disappearance of all of people certainly did. Nobody got out of the car and, having satisfied myself as to where I needed to go, whilst watching the car out of the corner of my eye, I set off again.

Predictably, the same black car soon appeared in my remaining mirror. It just held position, about two hundred metres behind me, speeding up, if I did and slowing down again when I did that. It was not really frightening, per-se, but it was perturbing.

Darkness fell so, near Baia, I pulled into one of well-equipped lay-byes that I passed. By this I actually mean that each lay-by was equipped with a well, from which a thirsty traveller could draw some good water, seemingly from far below (given how long it took to pump a cup full). I had not seen a hotel of any kind and I was about all in. I pulled out my poly-bag, sat on some softish grass under a tree, put my back against the trunk – and that was it.