Ninety seconds on Transfăgărășan
The closure everyone quotes applies to one section, between the waterfall and Piscu Negru, and not to the whole road. Outside the summer window the drive is still on, it is simply shorter and stops below the snow line.
A road built between 1970 and 1974 across the Făgăraș range on Ceaușescu's order after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, climbing to 2,042 metres through 830 metres of tunnel. It is normally open from late June to the end of October and closed by snow the rest of the year.
The driving time is three to four hours and almost nobody does it in three to four hours. Six or seven is realistic with stops, and a full day is the honest way to treat it, because the limit is forty for most of the length and the road is built out of hairpins. Traffic is the real difficulty and it is predictable. Before ten in the morning the road flows; between eleven and three on a summer weekend it does not, and the pressure gathers around the lake and the waterfall where the parking is. The last week of August is a public holiday and the worst week of the year to pick for it.
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