Romania: Highlights of Transylvania

Fourteen nights in a six-country loop from Vienna, the fly-in version of the operator’s longer Transylvanian tour. Bikes are rented in Vienna.

A luxury hotel and bike collection open it, then Veszprem in Hungary by way of two national parks, and a crossing of the Danube into Romania with a night at Timisoara. Corvin Castle follows, a fifteenth-century Gothic fortress of towers and galleries, with the inland sand dunes nearby that sit five hundred miles from any coast.

The Transalpina is next, the Devil’s Path, which at around 2,100 metres is the highest road in Romania and runs along the ridge of the Carpathians with almost nothing on either side of it. Bran Castle follows, the fortress on a rock above a pass that is marketed on its association with Vlad the Impaler and with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though Stoker never came to Romania and built his description out of reading. The building holds the attention regardless.

The Transylvanian mountains come next, home to roughly a third of Europe’s wild bears, then Krakow in Poland, with the old town or the seven-hundred-year-old salt mine beneath it, where miners carved chapels, chandeliers and a full cathedral out of rock salt over the centuries. The route returns to Vienna for the bike drop and the flight home. The price is quoted per rider. Flying in rather than riding down removes a week of transit for not a great deal more money, so this is the practical version for anyone with a fortnight rather than a month.