Albania plus

I was woken by the cawing of a massive flock of Romanian starlings cartwheeling around the hotel roof. After marvelling again at my enormous and pleasantly lived-in Timișoara bedroom, I wandered down to breakfast. A dozen or so stereotypical eastern European workmen munched bread and drank coffee in stony, lumpy silence. The sky looked like rain and the temperature had dropped. Worse, the city square was deserted – no monks, thigh-slapping farmers or stylish coffee-sipping women to be seen. I was beginning to feel a bit depressed; it was time to turn back towards the west, to aim for the Channel and predictable England.

I rode towards Hungary across massive agricultural landscapes; the fields in this part of Romania are so big you could lose an English county in just one of them. Miles sped by between far-spaced fences as the arrow-straight road headed for the horizon. There were only a few bends, and no trees. It was also