But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t! Neamtului Mountains feel a lot wilder than the neighbouring Baiului and aren’t very bike friendly. They can be hiked starting from Valea Doftanei. Otherwise, if you’re coming from Predeal or Azuga, it’s best you approach them trail running or biking.

I started from Predeal. Left the train station at 8 AM. The original plan was to bike the Neamtului Ridge, then get down on the other side and bike the Grohotis Ridge as well, descend in Traisteni and head for Comarnic. The first 15 km were on gravel roads – pretty good ones actually, the loggers would have nothing less.

Eventually, I had to leave the road for a little bit of crawling up a river bed. I was on an enduro race course, judging by the markings and some leftover tape that I used to pimp my bike. I think that tape is more useful on my bike than on a tree. After a short but steep push bike section, I was out of the forest and into the alpine area.

I had one small problem though: there was no visible road/trail/whatever for me to take. So I had to push my way through a field of tall grass, including stinging nettles. It was slow going, using my bike to flatten the nettles so they would pose less of a threat. After what felt like forever, I made it to the ridge road. Collected some more marking tape along the way.

I was hoping the ridge road would have been bikable. But it was either too steep, too rutty, too covered in tall grass or combinations of these. Long story short, I walked for most of the ridge. My plan for going up Grohotis as well was no longer feasible, so I decided to take on Baiului instead.

Neamtului Mountains are very grassy and are home to many sheepholds. Knowing this, I packed a pepper spray. Alone, with a bike, you can probably keep up to 3-4 dogs at bay. I didn’t have to use it though. The dogs here weren’t many and shepherds were always nearby. I remember a chat with one of them. After telling the dogs not to eat me (in Romanian it’s “Na la oi!”), the shepherd greeted me with the traditional “Got a smoke?”. I gave him my standard “I don’t smoke”. He pondered on my words for about five seconds before giving it another try: “Are you sure?”.

Neamtului and Baiului are connected by a ridge, which makes it convenient to go from one mountain to the other. You don’t have to go down a valley and ascend 1000 vertical meters again. With good gravel roads, the rest of the trip was a breeze.

Eventually, I was on the descend, approaching Comarnic. The usual route is though Secaria, then continuing on paved roads. I wanted something a little bit more offroady and saw some unpaved roads/trails/dotted lines on the GPS. I went into exploration mode. First it was a gravel road, then a trail. Somewhere around that time it started raining. I was maybe a couple of kilometers from DN1, just outside Comarnic. Still, it was raining pretty hard, so i put on my new 20.000 membrane jacket. This was a bit overkill, using a natural-calamity-proof jacket for a summer rain, but I wanted to try it out a little and see how it feels. Then the trail went through a patch of seabuckthorn (“catina” for the Romanians reading this and too lazy to google). Going with my jacket on through those thorny bushes wouldn’t have ended well, so… yes, I took the jacket off and went on pushing my bike through mud and thorns on pouring rain.

Made it on the other side with barely a few scratches. Put my jacket on again and continued down the trail just to get that feeling of low tire pressure. Indeed. Pouring rain, mud everywhere, me fixing a flat. The descent was challenging, with the tires sliding on both mud and wet grass.  As I made it to some gravel roads and my speed started picking up, pebbles and chunks of mud started flying through the air. Also added some cow dung to the mix, after biking over some unavoidable patches. Now that’s how you end a 9 hour bike ride!