The Transfăgărășan is ninety kilometres of road blasted over the highest mountains in Romania, and it was ordered out of fear. After Soviet tanks went into Czechoslovakia in 1968, Ceaușescu wanted a way for his army to cross the Făgăraș if Moscow came for him next. Soldiers cut it between 1970 and 1974 with six thousand tonnes of dynamite, and about forty of them died doing it. What they left is a chain of sixty hairpin bends climbing to 2,042 metres. From the north the road leaves the forest for raw granite and verges where snow survives the summer, then stacks its switchbacks up a mountain wall, each bend turning you onto a new drop. Nobody drives it in top gear.
At the summit it reaches Bâlea Lake, a glacial tarn in a bowl of rock, cold enough in August to shock your hand, with cloud spilling over the cirque walls. From a pullout near the top the road you have just driven is folded loop over loop down the mountainside. In the evening the low light slides along the coils and the whole descent goes amber before it fades to blue. Beyond the lake a tunnel runs through the ridge, and the southern arm drops through pine forest to Lake Vidraru, a reservoir behind a tall dam. On a crag above the water stand the ruins of Poenari, the stronghold Vlad the Impaler actually used, a thousand steps up the cliff. In October the beech forest on the lower slopes turns gold around you while the hairpins still run through it. The pass is barred by snow for most of the year. When it is, the top is reached by cable car, and on the frozen lake a hotel is cut out of the ice each winter, walls, beds and bar, and melts away in the spring. For a road built to move an army over these mountains, it spends more of the year shut than open.