We organise guided mountain biking tours in South-East Transylvania, Central Romania, in the Carpathian Mountains surrounding the medieval city of Brașov (Bucegi, Piatra Craiului, Ciucaș, Postăvaru, Piatra Mare, Baiului, Grohotișului, Neamțului, etc).
We have several programs you can choose from: one week, medium, advanced or expert level, all- inclusive or guiding-only tours. We have a few fixed dates open tours that you can join, but we also run them on demand, for specific group sizes and dates.
There’s a comprehensive form on the contact page. Use it if you want us to help you plan a custom mountain biking holiday in Romania. We’ll reply swiftly.
THE BIKING
The best way to discover Romania’s mountains is on a bike, pedaling up and down the mountain trails, through lush forests and flowery pastures, deep in the mountain gorges or up on the ridges. The Romanian mountains aren’t particularly big, but the views are simply stunning and their diversity is one of a kind.
Like most of the bikers in the world, we prefer riding on trails. Up and down. We think that the pleasure of the descent is full when you’ve worked hard your way up. Our tours aren’t easy, they are quite demanding physically and technically, both on the uphill and the downhill. But the feeling of true accomplishment at the end of each day is, quite honestly, something special.
Going mountain biking in the Romanian mountains on your own is always a valid option. If time is on your side, if you like exploring and discovering places, than go for it. However, you should know that the specific mountain biking trail signaling or mapping is very poor, if non-existent. You’ll need to do a lot of research before any ride and most likely you won’t be able to find the best trails available. We’ve been searching, testing, exploring, enjoying the trails around Bucegi, Piatra Craiului, Postăvaru, Baiului, Cindrel Mountains for more than fifteen years. We’d love to share all that experience with you.
Mountain guiding is a demanding job and we are doing it with full responsibility. We are licensed mountain guides since 1998 and members of the RMGA (Romanian Mountain Guides Association). It’s not just a job, but also our passion, so we are doing it with enthusiasm and openness. Read through the testimonials various people were kind enough to provide for mountainguide.ro after experiencing Romania and you’ll see that, apart from the mountain activities, we also bring to the table an essential side ingredient for a great time and a good holiday: a pleasant company.
It goes both ways: the people we guide into the Romanian mountains are open minded, genuinely interested in finding more about the places and the people they are visiting, eager to share their life experiences with us. Along the years they were Americans, Canadians, Germans, French, British, Dutch, Austrian, Italians, Swiss, Swedes, Danish, Belgians, Israeli, Russians, Lithuanians, etc. It was a genuine joy meeting all the people in this ever growing list.
Our tours are about having a great time mountain biking, and some. At the end of the biking day you want to share all the excitement with your friends along a pint of beer, a glass of wine or a shot of the local brandy, sitting around a nicely laid table, enjoying the local food. That’s precisely what we’ll provide for you.
The “Romanian cuisine” is quite basic and somewhat heavy on the stomach, populated with dishes not really tailored for a high-class restaurant but perfectly suited for a hungry, energy-deprived mountain biker. The local history and geography shaped it to be easy to produce, high in proteins, sharing influences from both the byzantine world and the Austria-Hungary empire. If there is a place where the Romanian dishes are to be tried, it’s where they are still produced and eaten for day-to-day needs: in the countryside.
After a full working day of mountain biking you won’t be counting the calories piled up in a plate full of “ciorbă”, “sarmale”, “tocăniţă”, “bulz”, etc. The locals here need very consistent food in order to put up with the exhausting daily activities, like cutting the grass with a scythe or piling up the hay with a fork. Pedalling up and down the trails is equally demanding. You’ll appreciate how most of the ingredients are produced locally, with the cheese coming from a sheepfold like the one you just visited up the mountains, the poultry farmed in the backyard, the local brandy distilled from fruits growing around the house.
“Come here before Romania joins the European Union”. That was the advice of an Englishman living in the North of Romania in the early 2000s to the tourists willing to visit our country. Apart from his traditional British euro-skepticism, his point was that in Romania one could still find a way of life that was lost in the Western Europe.
Romania joined the European Union in 2007 but the reasoning is still valid. In the rural areas you can still see people working the hay the old way, with a scythe and a fork, with horse drawn carts, with sheepfolds where the cheese is still done as in the medieval ages. Most of the households are involved in what officials from Bucharest or Brussels call “subsistence agriculture”. The vast majority of mountains remain free of cable cars, ski slopes, ski resorts, railway tunnels or motorway bridges. Going out into the Romanian mountains still feels like half-way between travelling in time and escaping into the wild.
If all this sounds interesting to you and you want to find out more about our tours, please write us at contact(at)mountainguide.ro or at contact(at)mtbtours.ro. You can also use the form in the contact page.