Cultural bike tour

Dear all,

As part of the Reenerländchen cultural bike tour project, I've been on the localisation of the Cultural Route Uila, Logic. These are two villages about 20 km away from Reen (the German name for Reghin, my hometown). They are part of the Reenerländchen Region, which comprises all the villages within aprox. 20 km around Reen.

So, what is so special about these villages? Why a bike tour there?

First, it needs to be mentioned that these villages are "at the end of the world" so to say, that is, they are very isolated. As other isolated villages in Romania, they lack most of the facilities of a civilized world. Thus, you might imagine that people there must feel miserable. However, what stroke me most while I was biking through these villages was that people looked happy. You could read in their eyes and on their faces their calm, their kindness and hospitality. I asked my friend if he thought people were happy and he confirmed my impression: people looked happy with their lives.

Another interesting thing was their perception of the distances. You must understand that these villages are not connected to any highways. Furthermore, although some people have cars, most of them have traps (Pferdewagen in German). Thus, when we asked them: what's the distance to another village, different people gave a similar answer..."that's far and you won't make it there because it has been raining in the last days and you will get stuck with your bikes". However, we took our chance and went by bike to the nearest village. Our GPS showed that there were about 12 km until there. Some areas on the route were more delicate to go through, but it was doable.
What I wanna stress is that for these people who live in isolated villages they're Europe is restricted to the village in which they are born.

Let me tell know something about the landscape so that you better understand the pictures. This area has the largest orchards in the country, mostly apples and cherries. It is a plane area, at 400m altitude.

So that you visualise the place, here are some pictures:

I hope you enjoyed them and will sometime in the future be interested in visiting these places.
For more information about the cultural bike tour project, visit Velocult website.