Zăvoi lies in the valley of the Bistra, a river running east to west between the Poiana Ruscă mountains to the north and the Țarcu range to the south, and for most riders it is a waypoint on one of the best roads in western Romania: the old route from Caransebeș in the Banat over the Iron Gate of Transylvania to Hațeg and the Roman capital of Dacia at Sarmizegetusa. The Romans used this corridor too. The road between their fort at Tibiscum, near Caransebeș, and the colony of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa passed through the valley, and Agnaviae was a station along it, where travellers and couriers stopped to rest. Today little remains above ground, but the line of the valley is unchanged.
Oțelu Roșu, the small town just down the road, has a name that means red steel, after the steelworks that dominated its economy for more than a century. Under the Habsburgs it was called Ferdinandsberg. The mill has had a hard time since the end of communism, and the town has the slightly worn look of many former industrial centres, but it has fuel, shops and simple places to eat.
The riding is the main reward here. Heading east from Zăvoi, the road follows the Bistra and then climbs to the Iron Gate of Transylvania, a low pass of about seven hundred metres where a monument marks a battle against the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. The road is well graded, with flowing curves through beech forest and meadows, and on the far side it drops into the Hațeg basin, one of the most beautiful valleys in the country, ringed by the Retezat mountains. Traffic is generally light, though logging trucks and the occasional bus need watching on the bends.
The wetlands at Balta Neagră near Zăvoi are a quiet place where the river meadows are still mown by hand, home to frogs, storks and dragonflies on summer afternoons. If you want to go higher, the Muntele Mic ski area above Borlova has a road climbing to around fifteen hundred metres with sweeping views over the Banat. Weather in the valley can be warm and sticky in summer; in the mountains, thunderstorms build quickly in the afternoon.