As this Cape Town adventure is still five months away (only five months??? Oh s*^#*!!), and recent preparation only comprises ordering a new starter motor for the TTR (an acknowledged weak point), here's a brief account of part of our previous trip to Istanbul by Ducati 900SS. A sort of reflection before heading off across the Bosphorus again.
Having only three weeks for that trip, we used the Ducati's fleetness of foot to make a fairly rapid traverse of Europe to reach Turkey. Rapid, that is, until arriving in Romania.
We spent the first night in Frankfurt, the next in Vienna and stopped in Budapest for a third. But reaching Bucharest in one day from there was too far, we needed an overnight stop about halfway, where there is very little on the map. It was the early days of the Internet but bingo! We struck lucky with a hostal in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, with a page in English on their website. We made a booking by email. On arrival we found a very pleasant-looking building set on steep wooded slopes in the village of Sovata, Transylvania. The Teleki Education Centre.

But we encountered an immediate problem, there was nowhere flat and level enough to stop and get off of the Ducati. We circled and shuffled around a bit like a fussy dog sniffing the ground restlessly looking for a place to lie down. There was tarmac, on a slope of about one-in-four, or soft mud that took my feet up to the ankles. We had to take care not to venture into some wet and weed-strewn dead-end from which it would be impossible to reverse a sports bike carrying two travellers and twenty-five tons of teenage-daughter-type luggage. The only possibility was to stop on the tarmac road outside the hostal, in the middle away from the steep camber, completely blocking it. But everywhere was deserted, not a sign of life, so that would probably be OK.
It took a while to find any sign of life inside the hostal. And longer to find someone who could understand us and summon the director. We heard his raised voice rejoicing something or other as he rushed into the tiny foyer, grabbed our hands and shook them vigorously. We were, he explained with much joy, his first ever guests who had booked through his brand-new website, and what's more, we were English!
"And tell me, is that a motorbike you arrived on?? Amazing!"

We removed all the luggage - what a relief! - and I climbed aboard the bike again to find somewhere to park. Immediately, the director was sitting on the pillion seat behind me.
"There!" he shouted. "Go up there, you can park at the back."
He pointed to a mud track that went up the side of the hostal, where the ground rose steeply, reaching the level of its third floor. It must have been one-in-two, with recent rainwater still trickling down it.
He shouted excitedly, "You can do it! There's space for the bike at the top!" bouncing up and down on the pillion. Well, I nosed up to the track, but there was no way this bike was going to get up there with a rather large director chappie on the pillion, or even without.
He was thoroughly crestfallen and disappointed. We found a tiny piece of level tarmac opposite the building that would do, and I thought maybe he would rustle up a motocross bike for our trip up to the backyard of his establishment. It wasn't to be, but he did rustle up something far better when we eventually departed.

Back inside, he explained that the hostal was full, but as we were his first internet guests, they'd moved people around to give us a nice room. And it certainly was nice.
But the place was deserted!
"Yes. They are all out. This is a teachers' hostal, where teachers come for holidays from all over Romania and neighbouring countries. They stay for free, and we arrange lots of activities for entertainment and for refresher-training."
"Here, we specialise in Natural History and Biology. I'll show you our classrooms, you're welcome to attend the classes if you want, but they will be in Romanian. Do you speak Romanian? No? Oh, what a pity! Never mind, there are plenty of other things to do here."
"The teachers here at the moment are from southern Romania, and from Serbia. You know, there are bad things happening there just now so they come here for a break. Many with their children. And all these different people - they get along together wonderfully........ it's just that the politicians ........."
At that point, he needed a rest from speaking English.
So he fed us, gave us a tour of the classrooms, and installed us in our room.
"How long will you stay?"
What a question! Should it be days or weeks? Although we only intended one day.
"Well, we're sort-of in a hurry. But, we'll let you know. Is that OK?"
"No problem. Stay as long as you like."
One night turned into three nights, particularly as we were invited by the teachers to join their Sunday barbeque up in the mountains.

An old but substantial Romanian coach arrived early in the morning after an equally substantial Romanian breakfast. The underbelly of this coach was like a Tardis, as an unbelievable amount of luggage was thrown into it. Box upon box of provisions, crate upon crate of beer and liquor, massive bbq grills, numerous jerry cans and strange machinery of some sort or other.
With much groaning and labouring the coach departed up the hill out of the village. The tarmac soon ended and we were on a steep forest dirt-track that over the coming miles became narrower and narrower through denser and denser forest. Until eventually no further progress could be made.
Everyone alighted and queued at the hatch of the Tardis cargo-hold, to be handed whatever they were capable of carrying.
There were some particularly hefty chaps amongst our party, who were handed the jerry cans and the strange machinery swathed in oily rags. And off we all set, on foot, up hill through the forest, about forty of us. Caroline and I teamed up with one or two teachers who spoke some English.

Eventually we could make no further progress through the dense confusion of standing trees, and fallen trees blown over in all sorts of directions and angles. Walkers were spreading out all over the place, keeping in touch with each other by means of a Romanian version of yodelling, looking for ways through the melee. But there were none.
Our English-speaking companions explained that there had been a hurricane across these mountains many months earlier.
"Like the one you had in England a few years ago. No one clears the roads and paths, only groups like us when we come up into the mountains. So now, we come up here each week to clear some more path and today, if we're lucky, we hope to make a path all the way to the open meadows at the top where we always used to have our barbeques. So now the fun begins."
At that, the hefty chaps with the strange machinery on their backs revealed themselves. Under all the oily rags were truly industrial-sized chain saws. Their colleagues who had been hauling the jerry cans provided the petrol.

After about fifteen minutes of intense noise and sawing, our path was no longer blocked by a mess of fallen trees, but by a thick fog of impenetrable two-stroke smoke. No wind blew through this thick forest today to clear it, so everyone had a tea-and-alcohol break while we waited for it to drift away so that the forward direction could once again be identified, and further progress made with the chainsaw gang.
And so it went on for a few hours. Fifteen minutes of intense noise, fifteen minutes of intense drinking during which the spectators, like Caroline and I, helped to clear the sawn timber to one side.
We climbed up the slopes closer to the sky, more light penetrated the forest canopy, progress quickened, excited shouts of success echoed back towards us, and we broke out into a huge expanse of open, green and wild meadow-land with the most magnificent views you can imagine of the Carpathian mountains and lakes.

The mountain scenery, a little obscured by lingering chainsaw smoke.

It was barbeque time, and those jerry cans that didn't hold petrol were emptied in short order as all the beer was quickly distributed, while massive slabs of pork fat sizzled on the grills. Not much meat, but bricks of fat, maybe two inches thick, that grilled down to the Romanian equivalent of crackling, feeding flames that leapt high into the sky. "This is our wonderful barbeque delicacy!" our English-speaking guides explained.
"It makes all the work worthwhile..... well, this and the beer!"

Many cooks make good crackling.

Unfortunately the party couldn't continue for very long. The trek here had taken quite a while and we needed to find the coach again before nightfall. Bouncing and jolting back down the hillside, a raucous singsong filled its cosy interior. One of the teachers took up a baton and a position next to the driver and vigorously conducted the entire coach in fine style, even bringing in soprano and tenor virtuosos for magnificent solo pieces. "This is Hungarian..... this is in Romanian...... this is a very popular Serbian folksong," our hosts explained....... "You must know the words to this one! Everybody does!"
Caroline and I pondered the offer of "you can stay as long as you like." But Istanbul beckoned with fewer and fewer days left, so we had to tear ourselves away.

And then we experienced even more of the sort of serendipity that occurs when you get yourself out of Europe, or at least to its far reaches.
We loaded the twenty-five tons of teenage stuff back onto the Ducati, taking care that no chainsaws had accidentally got into our luggage. The director asked where we were headed to next.
"Bucharest."
His eyes lit up.
"Where are you staying?"
"Don't know, we'll find somewhere when we get there."
His eyes lit up some more. "Hold on."
He grabbed the phone, spun the dial and launched into an animated conversation in Hungarian.
"There! The guest room at the Hungarian Embassy is free, I just booked it for you. Here's a little map, and I'll write down the name of the manager. Ring the bell when you get there and he'll look after you. There's a garage for your bike. I always stay there when I visit Bucharest. I'm Hungarian you see, like lots of people living in this part of Romania."
So that was Bucharest fixed!
Next stop after that? Somewhere on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, and then Istanbul. So don't spare the horses, driver, after our unexpectedly extended stay in Sovata.

If anyone out there wants to enjoy a stay at this place, find it on the web at http://www.tok.ro/toksite/english/engintro.htm
But take care the Director doesn't leap straight onto the back of your bike before you've fitted the knobblies!