Amazing read. Thanks for sharing.

certainly one of the best articles i've ever read about transfagarasan. you are a bit overly unkind to ceausescu though. mad, paranoid dictator certainly but his downfall came about because of the cruel austerity he imposed to pay back american loans (used to partially rebuild Bucharest). what finished him off was that he continued the austerity after those loans had been fully repaid (for which the romanian people deserve full credit). meanwhile, you underestimate the sheer chutzpah of building transfagarasan in the first place. romania was a communist bloc country after all, and building the road to escape a very possible invasion was a direct challenge to the russians. no fan of ceausescu - at all - but it's a more complex story than your average plundering tyrant.

Hi Andy, thanks for explaining that. I fear I've rather simplified things for the sake of this write-up, though perhaps only to focus more on the remarkable drive the route now represents. An 'ill-informed history', certainly!

Tom: awesome - like i said, one of the best transfagarasan articles i've read, for the entirely accurate atmosphere you conjure, cheers

Great article. Not sure about perching on that W.C. though!