Ride every hairpin of the Transfăgărășan to the top

The Transfăgărășan is a road over the Făgăraș mountains, and its north side is the part people come for: hairpin on hairpin up a bare green slope, each bend stacked above the last. Near the top it reaches Bâlea Lake, a glacier lake at 2,034 meters, and goes through a tunnel of almost nine hundred meters in the ridge.

The drive from Sibiu starts early, ahead of the summer traffic. Bears are often by the road on this stretch, the ones that have learned cars mean food, so the windows stay up and the minibus keeps rolling.

At the lake the road finally stops climbing, and the bends that took the morning are laid out down the slope below.

Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered the road after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as a way over the Carpathians an invader could not easily block. Soldiers built most of it between 1970 and 1974. The official toll is 40 dead; the men who worked on it put the number in the hundreds. The high section is open only from about late June until the autumn snow, and in 2009 Top Gear called it the best road in the world.