Gheorgheni is a cold, tough little town on a high basin in the heart of the Székely Land, and most riders meet it as the gateway to the Bicaz Gorge and the Red Lake. It sits at a little over eight hundred metres in the Giurgeu depression, a broad bowl ringed by the Giurgeu and Hășmaș mountains, and winters here are among the harshest in Romania, with frost pooling in the basin on still nights. The town is overwhelmingly Hungarian in language and culture, and you will see the signs in two scripts and hear Hungarian in the shops long before Romanian.
Its history is a patchwork. Székely frontier guards settled here in the Middle Ages, and in the seventeenth century Armenian merchants arrived and built a community of traders, leaving behind an Armenian Catholic church that still stands in the centre. The Szekler gates, carved wooden gateways with their small roofs and dovecots, show up in villages all around, and the town has an old-fashioned main square with a few cafes. It feels a long way from Bucharest in more than distance.
The ride east from Gheorgheni is the reason you are here. The road climbs gently out of the basin through spruce forest, then reaches the Red Lake, formed in the nineteenth century when a landslide dammed a valley and drowned the forest, so that the stumps of dead trees still stand up out of the water. Beyond the lake the road drops into the Bicaz Gorge, a narrow cleft between limestone walls hundreds of metres high, where the road twists through tight bends with the rock almost overhead and souvenir stalls squeezing the lane. It is spectacular and slow, and on summer weekends it is busy with cars and coaches. Morning is best, before the stalls open and the light reaches the bottom.
Heading north or south from Gheorgheni along the main road toward Toplița or Miercurea Ciuc, the riding is more relaxed, along the young Mureș river through open hay meadows and villages.
As a stop, Gheorgheni has fuel, supermarkets and cafes, and it is the last proper town before the gorge, so fill the tank and buy water here. Expect cooler air than the plains, and pack a warm layer for evenings even in July. Look for kürtőskalács, the cylinder-shaped sweet bread baked on a spit, which is sold all over the region.