Warning: some of the photos in this post were made with my phone – I was traveling light and didn’t take my DSLR. Alex took his, so I borrowed some photos from him. Thanks, dude!
We had a bold plan laid out: Saturday go from Azuga to Cheia, then Sunday from Cheia to Nehoiu. About 50 km each day through some less traveled mountains. All of this on foot.
Took an early train and at 8 am we were already marching through Azuga. The first 9 km were on an unpaved road along Azuga Valley. When the road turned left, we continued straight, climbing up a shepherd’s trail towards Steviei Peak in Neamtului Mountains. The trail had been recently used, so we had no problem following it until we reached the sheepfold. We were out of the forest by now and, since there were no more trails, we picked a bearing from the GPS and followed it.
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- Looking behind towards Azuga and the Bucegi Mountains
We continued along the ridge of the Neamtului Mountains. We weren’t making good progress – the tall thick grass was masking the uneven ground and we could barely run. As we were approaching Paltinu Peak, we turned right and descended towards Predelus Pass.
From there we continued into the Grohotis Mountains. These parts were well off the beaten path. Sometimes we would see a marking here or there, but most of the times we just relied on the GPS and tried to minimize the effort spent on bushwhacking.
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- View towards the Predelus Pass
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- Climbing Grohotis
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- Chilling
Somewhere on the ridge we met Horatiu and Lucian, who were on an epic bike ride in the area. We continued towards Cheia and finally started descending. The trail became pretty technical, sometimes taking the form of a rut masked from the sides by juniper. Then we kinda lost the trail, although we were following our GPS route exactly. It seems the tourist trail changed sometime in the last decades, as we could make out some old markings on the trees. After some more bushwhacking, we eventually made our way back to the marked trail and finally arrived in Cheia.
45 km passed and Alex was barely holding on. Still, we had the final climb to Cabana Silva, where we booked a room for the night. He pushed forward and finally made it. It took us over 13 hours to get there. Needless to say, there was no point in continuing the trip to Nehoiu on Sunday. It would have been impossible to catch the 4 pm train and we didn’t want to spend the night in the train station.
