Romania will become part of the European bike tours and authorities estimate that this eco-friendly, “green” type of tourism will bring to the East-European country tourists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Romania will become part of the European bike tours and authorities estimate that this eco-friendly, “green” type of tourism will bring to the East-European country tourists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. “This is planned to happen in cooperation with the other European nations along the River Danube,” said Ioana Nan, director for the Romanian tourism office in Germany. “There is a draft for a Government decision deciding the approved routes for bike-tourism,” said Lucia Morariu, deputy minister for tourism. This niche in the tourism industry could develop unhampered by Romania's notorious lack of modern transportation infrastructure, as it uses rouged terrain and unpaved roads just as well. The plan to develop bike-tourism in Romania is to start as part of the program “Danube Delta landscape, 2007-2009”, promoted by the Friends of Nature Association, based in Vienna, jointly with GTZ. The Romanian section of the tour will start at the Iron Gates gorges – now the Iron Gates power plant. The only difficult section of the track is envisaged to lay between the cities of Orsova and Turnu Serverin, according to Wienfried Senker, GTZ representative and program coordinator. Then the tour will go on on the Bulgarian bank of the River Danube, to move back on the Romanian bank of the river at Giurgiu city, down to the Delta. The bike-route is already in place in Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria, so “it would be great if the plan would go on for making Romania also part of the tour, as the tracks are accessible, but not yet marked with internationally recognizable signs,” Senker said. Some 437,000 German tourists arrived in Romania in 2007, which