Dosu forest lies above Buciumi, in the hills where Sălaj starts rising toward the Meseș range. It is a working woodland, not a showpiece: beech and oak, a few hornbeam, tracks cut by loggers, and a floor that smells strongly of leaf mould after rain. If you stop and kill the engine, the quiet is very complete. Wild boar and roe deer use these slopes, and the ground along the verges is often turned up by the former.
Buciumi itself is a village of under three thousand people, and the neighbours, Stârciu and Cizer, are smaller still. The nearest town of any size is Crasna, about thirteen kilometres away, which has the fuel and the shops. Treat the forest as somewhere you arrive with a full tank and a snack, because between the villages you will find little more than a standpipe, a bus shelter and occasionally a roadside crucifix hung with faded cloth.
The riding is the main reason to be here. The road climbs and drops in short pitches through the forest, with tight, shaded bends where moss and damp can linger well into the morning. Take them gently in the first hour. Once the sun gets through the canopy, the surface dries and the corners become fun, rhythmic and not at all frightening. Between the trees you catch glimpses of open pasture with haystacks built on tall poles, an old way of drying hay that you still see all across this part of Transylvania.
This is Hungarian and Romanian country mixed together, and you might hear both languages in the same village shop. Plum brandy is offered with disarming generosity, and you should decline politely if you are riding. Autumn is the season to come, when the forest turns gold and rust and the first mist sits in the valleys at dawn, though a clear spring morning, with new beech leaves the colour of lime, is almost as good. In winter these tracks ice over, so leave them alone.