After completing the Mission Red Planet from Dubai to Italy I am right now on another adventure with Shell Advance and Ducati. This time it is Japan. The Great Japan Roadtrip started on 29th October 2012 from Tokyo and is now it its third week with just over 5000 kms done and some astounding experiences!

Please do check the website at http://www.thegreatjapanroadtrip.com

And selected photos at : http:///www.thegreatjapanroadtrip.com/japanroadtripphotos.html

The best way to stay updated on my rides and photos is my Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MotoGrapher.s?fref=ts

A couple of photos from the ride:

I decided to stay in the small ski village of Zdiar. It was one of the most beautiful hill villages that I stayed in the entire trip. Since it was the off season for skiing there were few tourists and I had difficultly in finding a restaurant ready to serve me food!

This was also one of the coldest places that I encountered in my ride. The temperature gauge on the MTS showed 11 degrees at a point.

Public transport system is all sorted, even though the tracks are always an hazard to the two wheelers:

The Heroe’s Square that was built in the 1900, when Hungary was still a part of the Austrian kingdom

Man with a Snake the symbol of War

• The female statue of Peace

This was perhaps a World War II gunner which I found along with it.

I tried out some archery as well:

Aerial view of Budapest:

The Hungarian National Gallery, was established in 1957 as the national art museum. It is located in Buda Castle in Budapest, Hungary. The collection, which can be found in the A, B, C and D buildings of Buda Castle, includes nearly a hundred thousand artefacts dating from the early mediaeval times until the present day. The Hungarian National Gallery is the largest collection of Hungarian arts with one hundred thousand artefacts, from the settlement of the Magyars until the present day.

It also featured some of the most marvelous sculptures I had ever seen

Fisherman’s Bastion,

The Halászbástya or Fisherman’s Bastion is a terrace in neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque style situated on the Buda bank of the Danube, on the Castle hill in Budapest, around Matthias Church. It was designed and built between 1895 and 1902 on the plans of Frigyes Schulek. Between 1947–48, the son of Frigyes Schulek, János Schulek, conducted the other restoration project after its near destruction during World War II.

From the towers and the terrace a panoramic view exists of Danube, Margaret Island, Pest to the east and the Gellért Hill.

Its seven towers represent the seven Magyar tribes that settled in the Carpathian Basin in 896.

The Bastion takes its name from the guild of fishermen that was responsible for defending this stretch of the city walls in the Middle Ages. It is a viewing terrace, with many stairs and walking paths.

During my course of travel I visited and spent a decent time in seven showrooms in different countries. Add Malaysia, India, Australia and US from my previous rides to that list to help you see the pattern.

The showrooms are inevitably dominated by a single color – Ducati Red, sprinkled with yellow, white and black Ducatis. The signboard has the classic Ducati white font on one side, mostly left, and the name of the dealership, mostly the name of the city, on the right.

During the Mission Red Planet all the showrooms were splattered with World Ducati Week livery. The whole world was preparing for the WDW it seemed!

In some showrooms there was a Ducati Caffe as well, which had nice white or red sofas to sit and read the latest issue of the Ducati Magazine on while sipping some nice, Ducati Coffee. The Ducati Magazine was another work of art. Fantastic paper quality and photos! Hopefully I will be seeing the Mission Red Planet being featured in the Ducati Magazine as well.

Then you have other stuff like Ducati coffee cup, coffee makers, coasters and almost anything that you can think of connecting various elements in the Caffe and the showroom. The Caffe is meant to be just a place to hang out with fellow Ducatistis and petrolheads, or when it is present along with a showroom and service center it can double up as a waiting lounge.

Undoubtedly the star of the show(room) these days was the fantastic Panigale, which inevitably enjoyed the prime spots.

Stick around a little bit more and there will be minor deviations visible from what perhaps seems like a standard template all across the showrooms. There will be personal touches from owners – like a custom deigned Ducati full wall creative in Sofia, Bulgaria or like the interiors which were heavily influenced by its owner in Ducati Istanbul. It becomes progressively clear that the dealers not only take personal stake, but deep interest in the showrooms as well, and treat them as their second home perhaps where guests, the Ducatistas, are of prime importance.

Stick around a bit more and your tour will be inevitably and intermittently interrupted by the arrival of a Ducati outside the showroom. The glass windows will vibrate under your palms as you peek outside to quickly assess what kind of Ducati and Ducatista he or she is. Maybe that will soon turn into a handshake and then into a friendship.

The showrooms and Caffes can quickly become your favorite place to meet more Ducatistas, and ultimately forcing you to buy one for yourself if you already don’t have one.

I was lucky to be under the aegis of such a powerful and passionate brand where I found friends despite the fact that the only common word that we both understood was Hello and Bye…

This time I was visiting the Fullgas showroom in Budapest, which was one of the best designed showrooms I had come across so far:

Me shooting the Red:

The showroom manager made me squiggle on a wall besides Paolo Pirozzi’s autograph.

For me I had found the best road in the world today, if you keep in mind the TransFagarasan was the best road declared by TopGear, which I did yesterday. Or did I?

Top Gear supposedly could not drive on the TransAlpina because it wasn’t fully asphalted until 2012. So right now it was all ready for me at least.

The TransAlpina is the DN67C (DN stands for Drumul Naţional which means National Road ). It runs, from South to North, Novaci to Parang towns in Romania. It is considered to be one of the most spectacular mountain roads of the Carpathian Mountains.

(From Wiki): It is said that the road was built under King Carol II and rebuilt during World War II by German troops and it is called The King’s Road by the locals. Also a story has it that Nicolae Ceauşescu had the Transfăgărăşan Road (DN7C), which I rode yesterday, built during the communist regime just to surpass the Transalpina. Whatever the case may be I was grinning as wide as I could under my helmet.

If you ask me these two roads are fine examples of some excellent handsome roads, but nobody can tag any road as the ‘best in the world’, if its more like ‘this is the best road that WE have been on so far!’. So with all due respects to Top Gear and it’s stalwarts I will stop crtitically evaluating and comparing these two roads and just get on with the photos.

The only thing which I was missing here is the snow like the TransFagarasan, but that is more a variable than a permanent feature, with snow this would have been even better!

For me the sight of this peak on the road with the road snaking down was worth more than anything else so far – it was photogenic as hell, rare as the unicorn:

It is amazing what just a show can do to a country’s tourism. In 2009, Top Gear aired an episode in which they take three supercars in search for the ‘World’s Best Driving Road’. The previous road, Stelvio Pass, was effectively trashed for the TransFagarasan as the new king of spectacular roads. The Stelvio was too ‘tight’ to get any serious driving pleasure, so instead they found another, an exotic and relatively unknown one, the Transfagarasan in Romania. In fact, even the Stelvio Pass was not famous before they went there.
However, it was lucky that this road was en route the Mission Red Planet roadtrip and the weather was looking good for the remaining three odd days in Romania.

Introduction to the Road

The road starts from the small village of Bascov (near town of Pitesi) and ends in Cârţişoara in Romania. In Google maps if you find directions between these two towns it will take you via Highway 7, the boring route. Pay attention and you will see a parallel and highly convoluted road running longitudinally – the DN7C. This, gentlemen, is the real deal – the TransFagarasan Road. 146 kms, out of which 90 kms is the stuff video games are made up of.

I approached the road from the southern end, from Pitesi. The road starts off as any other ‘normal’ road. Green, quite and narrow. Decent tarmac quality. Then it starts to build up. The turns start getting tighter, many of them decreasing radius. Then suddenly you take a turn and the landscape hits you. There you have a string of asphalt carelessly thrown over and middle of high mountains in the valley below. And then I remember what they said in Top Gear – it seems to be made up by stitching the best corners from all the race tracks of the world. And I seem to be agreeing with it.

One advantage of this road over the Stelvio was its remoteness and therefore the minimal traffic. When I went here were very vehicles, most notably a couple of people in a Citroen high end car who seemed to take photo in every corner. Obviously they were journalists like me, but it was highly unlikely they were going across ten countries…

Digging up the history of the road (pun intended), one can find that this road was built by the same man, the same dictator which I mentioned in my day before yesterday’s blog (Buchrester for a Day…)- Nicolae Ceaușescu in order to be ready to move armies and other stuff across the mountains in case of an invasion. This same man was responsible for so much sorrow as well. Funny and sad he didn’t get to ride a motorcycle and enjoy the very thing he created…

It will be utterly useless for me to try and do justice to this road by playing with words. I am a MotoGrapher and I will let my photos do the talking.

But before let, let me tell you that when Top Gear came to Transfagarasan, they missed seeing the TransAlpina Highways, which was literally next door since it wasn’t asphalted by then. But as my good luck would have it, that road was just finished in 2012. And it was waiting for me tomorrow…

I have the third decade of my existence and like aliens, this creature also eluded me. No Alien, no Dracula, no Yeti no close encounters of the third kind whatsoever. Life has been boring. Unless of course you have a chance to visit the home of Dracula in Transylvania on one of the world’s most powerful and beautiful tourers. And what better color than Red to lure the gentleman out of his coffin even in broad daylight, or maybe not.

As we grow up we discover many of these things are of course not only myths and fabulous concoctions of an intelligent kid stuck in an adult’s body (ala Stan Lee, Bram Stoker, Jerry and Joe – the lots). Thanks to them there is a hope in this world that we can someday do something larger than life, beyond the set and accepted limits of physics and biology.

We also discover that these can be good marketing gimmicks. Even to attract ‘adults’ like me. In fact I was happy to make the village of Bran in Romania, the place where the Dracula’s Castle was a part of the Mission Red Planet, even if it meant getting the red liquid sucked out of me at dead of the night.

Bran’s economy is largely revolving around people like me, who come to get a sense of what Dracula must be like. Only we return back happy by just seeing masks and souvenirs at sale at the small street shops there. But it is an experience. And it is a real castle with a real history, with real people who were living in it. No doubt that. How much can your imagination and will twist that to suits your liking is unto oneself. And I did enjoy doing that to myself.

The morning started by visiting Ducati Bucharest for a small meet (or G2G- Get to Gether as well call it in India at xBhp). Post that I started riding towards Bran. The MultiStrada also received a quick checkup there.

After paying a nominal entry fee to the castle I went on a self guided tour, it was not a huge castle, but not small or boring either. Low ceilings, candle stands, bear rugs – the lot.

It was good visiting Dracula’s Castle and I will continue here what was perhaps started by an internet website more than a decade ago, market it more!

With Doru, he helped me get a SIM card for my phone which had working internet!

Dracula’s Castle at Bran…

Andrei met me at the hotel at 4 PM. We dicussed a little about the route that I can take in Romania. The decision was to include the famous Transfagarasan Road and Transalpina highways back to back in a couple of days. Then I would proceed north and enter Hungary.

After deciding the route we went outside to see a bit of Bucharest and its main city center.

On the way we saw what was a supermassive structure – the second largest building in the world and the world’s largest civilian building, most expensive administrative building and the heaviest building! And who would build such a building? Perhaps a man with a large ego –  Nicolae Ceaușescu. This man was a communist Romanian politician, and its last. (From WIKI ) : Ceauşescu’s second decade was characterized by an increasingly brutal and repressive regime—by some accounts, the most Stalinist regime in the Soviet bloc. It was also marked by an ubiquitous personality cult, nationalism and a deterioration in foreign relations with the Western powers as well as the Soviet Union. Ceauşescu’s government was overthrown in the December 1989 revolution, and he and his wife were executed following a televised and hastily organised two-hour court session.

But he left behind this building which is now commonly called the Casa Poporli or The House of the People (unlike House of Ceaușescu that was meant to be):

This dictatorship left a lot of scars on Romania, some of which are deeply disturbing but it couldn’t take away the hospitality of the people that I met and the beauty of the country which was unraveling in front of me.

We also saw the Arcul de Triumf (Triumphal Arch) which seemed uncanningly like our own India gate:

We also went to the Bucharest old city center which was a delight with its cobblestone streets and street performers complementing the great architecture.

Later on in the evening we went to a motorcycle café and restaurant where around 10 Romanian Ducatisti were waiting for me. The president of the Romania DOC – Bogdan, was also present there with his Diavel. A nice evening ensued with a delicious dinner sealing the day.

Tommorrow it will be Dracula’s Castle, time check what the hullalaballo is all about…

More photos:

Hey officer, why do you need such a fast bike, I am not a crazy rider, I only have 160 horses with me..

Andrei showing us the way around his city:

A wedding shoot in progress in the city

the Arcul de Triumf (Triumphal Arch)

The revolution square:

Bucharest Old City Center