Our first target of the day was Bats Cave. Instead, we missed the entry to the monastery (the cave is in a monastery?) and ended up in Bistrita Gorge, where we discovered Bears Cave.

Returning to the monastery, we found out that access to the Bats Cave is only permitted to groups of at least 10. The cave, housing 2 small churches, is administered by the nuns at Bistrita Monastery.

Since we’ve already seen some bats, we moved on towards Women’s Cave. This cave used to shelter women and children during battles, in the Medieval Ages, hence the name. I didn’t visit it now, since I have seen it before, but I’ll leave you with some archive photos.

The cave is close to Novaci, the southern end of the Transalpina road. We started the climb, but shortly ran into a roadblock. The Transalpina was closed for a stage in the National Coastal Racing Championship. Damn – we’ll have to wait 4 hours. Cool – we’ll see some racing.

5 hours, some rain, one traffic jam and some pissed-off people later, we were on our way to Ranca, a mountain resort on the southern side of the Transalpina. Ranca looks under construction, with incomplete buildings laid out in a chaotic fashion (.. like most Romanian resorts). There is only one paved road, there are few (improvised) parking spaces, one (maybe two?) convenience store and a lot of overpriced guest houses. But we had no choice but to stay here, the next human inhabited place was a long way ahead, on the other side of the Parang Mountains.

In the evening, we walked a little in the .. ahem.. “resort” (searching for some pizza) and we found a shepherd, cooking a pot of sheep stew for a restaurant. The recepy is old and simple: chop a sheep, add fat if the sheep is skinny, cook.