A Romanian adventure in a Skoda Yeti

It’s hard to buy a bad car nowadays. Unless you’re a particularly dedicated masochist, just about anything you buy will look decent, handle safely and come with a gamut of nice things as standard.

Why is this relevant? Because in a crowd of capable cars, standing out requires a car to be brimful of character, or exceptionally good at, well, everything.

The Skoda Yeti just happens to be both. It’s been a bit of a Top Gear hero since its arrival six years ago (Skoda Yeti review here), and familiarity has not bred contempt. If anything, the onslaught of dinky SUVs that’s followed since has only shed a stronger spotlight on Skoda’s less pretentious take on a burgeoning genre.

But we like to test things to their limits at TG. Settling on mutual office love for a car based on it fitting into our everyday lives is not enough. We wouldn’t award a 911 GT3 RS hero status if it was flaccid on track, and nor can we rubber-stamp the Yeti’s without first proving its rufty tufty claims aren’t merely that.

A 500-mile European road trip would give us the measure of most cars. And that’s what lies ahead. But with well over a third of Yetis sold wearing a ‘4x4’ badge, we’re ensuring at least the same proportion is spent away from the tarmac that most cars brush off. We’re heading for Romania’s Carpathian mountain ranges, and the Yeti’s toughest test yet.

The trip begins in Belgrade, which if you’re a keen geographer, will strike you as not in Romania. But beginning in Serbia allows us the chance to ease both ourselves and the Yeti into the journey, with an afternoon spent skirting our way along the river Danube and through the intensely picturesque Djerdap national park.

The Yeti is rather adept at this sort of thing, quiet and relaxing on the stretch of motorway from Belgrade airport – the last we’ll see of wide, bustling roads for a long time – and then amiable on the more rural roads that follow, hugging the Serbian cliff face and peeking across the Danube towards Romania. And the mountain ranges we’ll soon be scurrying through…

Crossing into Romania is done so across the Danube via the dam of a power plant, with some scrupulous border patrols awaiting us. But not before we’ve skirted around some ominously abandoned old cars. At least 20 of them, in fact.

A 2.0 TDI Yeti like ours might be modest in price, at around £23,800, but it feels like it could Top Trump all of these long-festooned cars put together.

And that’s despite our Yeti being about as wilfully unsporting as they come, linking a diesel engine to an automatic gearbox, wearing squidgy off-road tyres and a metallic colour you could describe politely as ‘sand’, but more honestly as ‘beige’.

Baile Herculane, the Romanian spa town picked for our first overnight stop, is the last we’ll see of civilisation for some time. And with the forest immediately ahead of us, it’s time to remove some air from the tyres, about our sole preparation for the off road obstacles that lie ahead, save for the unsubtly mounted spare wheel atop the roof.

An additional guard for the oil sump is the only other sop to the torturous route ahead; this is otherwise an AWD-equipped Yeti like you’ll find in your local showroom.

That means the VW group’s latest Haldex system apportioning power between the axles, and approach and departure angles little short of a Discovery Sport’s, but with a far smaller footprint to squeeze through gaps. Little wonder the wee Skoda is the vehicle of choice for mountain rescue teams in various corners of Europe.

Around a third of Romania is forestry, and it’s home to all manner of wild predators, not least Europe’s densest brown bear population. After a couple of hours scrabbling up and down tough tracks, laden with a mix of ragged rocks and troublesome tree roots (and a sheer drop to greet you should you wish to avoid either), it’s easy to wonder why the heck anyone would willingly live here.

And then the trees clear and we approach the Lake Iovanu head on. Its water is still and clear, and on a day as sunny as this, it mirrors the mountains it sits before perfectly. I reckon even lifelong Alpine residents might kill for a view like this. Who knew Romania was this pretty?

After an extended stop to use up an inconvenient proportion of my iPhone memory, it’s onwards and quite literally upwards, as we continue to ascend through forest tracks. The Yeti happily bobbles along with its DSG twin-clutch gearbox in Drive, the torque of its 2-litre turbodiesel engine ample enough to deem constant gear shuffling unnecessary.

The 2.0 TDI is here in its latest 148bhp, Euro 6-compliant tune, and before you ask, it’s not in the ‘dieselgate’ doghouse. And you’d be short-sighted to overlook it because of VW’s past misdemeanours.

Some very steep, slippy hills call for manual selection of first gear and some greedy throttle inputs, but it’s otherwise an effortless, fuss-free transmission, and while I’m vehemently not a member of the diesel fan club, I have to concede it’s spot on for this task.

The Yeti’s ground clearance – or lack thereof – is less perfect, though, and increasingly tough terrain yields audible graunches and scrapes on the sump guard. It’s serving its purpose, but it’s hard not to shudder every now and then if there’s an ounce of mechanical sympathy in your body.

It’s therefore light relief to break free of the forest, as the wonderfully twisty Transalpina Pass serves as a suddenly quite smooth transit road between off-piste antics. It’s the lesser-known cousin of the Transfagarasan Pass, but it’s arguably nicer to drive.

And with squidgy off-road tyres running lower pressure than normal, it’s actually jolly good fun. The Yeti has a surprisingly adept chassis, but with its rubber yielding restricted grip on the road, it’s just plain fun, squealing through corners like a hire car on holiday.

Numerous miles pass, our surroundings switching from flora-packed nature to some bleak and abandoned looking mines. With fat tyres and underbody protection, the only thing stopping us from having a punt around one is the rather severe looking security tower.

I decide our increasingly mud-caked Yeti will blend into the bleak surroundings well, and head in. While Romania has plentiful coal to provide the bulk of its energy needs, its mines have faced trouble of late. High running costs have closed numerous sites down in recent years.

It’s an eerie place to be, then, and one I retreat from quickly when figures start moving around in the ominous watchtower.

Maudlin sightseeing ticked off, we navigate back up into the hills, heading for a secluded night stop in the ski resort of Sugag. It’s too hot for snow, but climbing so high is further test of the Yeti’s mettle.

An intense gloaming has filled the sky and rain is falling by the bucketload, making the Yeti’s task yet harder. The grassy hills we’re climbing are quickly churning to mud, with little more friction than if we were knees-deep in of ski season.

With mist filtering through the trees that surround us, there’s more than a few Jurassic Park vibes. There may be bears, but I’m sure velociraptors are conspicuous by their absence. So it's time to use the severely depleted grip levels to, um, act like a bit of an arse.

With the traction control slackened and the Yeti manually prodded into its lowliest gears, it will cut some childish slides at tiny speeds. And there's no fear of helplessly skidding towards a tree trunk, as its clever Haldex AWD system is rather good at apportioning power to get you back in a straight line.

It’s a gleeful way to overcome the most sodden conditions of the trip so far. And the reward for reaching the top - around 8,000 feet up - is bright, early evening sunshine and an even better view than this morning, with a jaw-dropping vista of the Sureanu Mountains.

Its beauty is at odds with the treacherously rocky path beneath, but it’s ample excuse to slow right down to walking pace to better take in the scenery, while the sump guard takes another noble pummelling. Must. Stop. Wincing...

It's tempting to sit and stare as the sun sets, but given we’re atop a hill in the middle of the wilderness, doing so would lead us to completing our crawl to the hotel in the pitch black. Within seconds of my wishful thinking, fate (well, a particularly nasty rock) teaches me a lesson, and the Tyre Pressure Warning light ominously dings. It’s a delayed reaction; one of the rear tyres is already flatter than any pancake I’ve eaten.

I’d like to say I rolled up my sleeves, knelt in the mud and got the tools out. But a Skoda support team - perhaps sensing my inability to get the job done before nighttime - sweep in and swap the stricken tyre for the rooftop spare swiftly. It gives me the perfect chance to observe their 8,000-feet-high work with surely one of the most stunning backdrops in Europe behind. Let's call it getting a puncture, TG style.

The next morning, its our final stint, heading for our metaphorical finish line, at similar altitude elsewhere. First we must drop down the other side of the ginormous hill we ascended last night, with fresh caution now the lovely, fresh spare tyre on the roof has been replaced by the rubber cruelly ripped to shreds yesterday.

Caution is also necessary to negotiate the 2,300 sheep on the road ahead of us. And nope, that’s not a mistyping: our very Romanian traffic jam comprises all of those sheep, four donkeys (for goods transport) and two dogs (for bear protection), all of them at the behest of some very weathered looking shepherds.

It’s our final but most characterful obstacle before heading to our grand finale. It would, after all, be rude to travel through Romania without visiting the Transfagarasan, a road you probably know from TG telly a few years ago.

We wind our way to its starting point via all manner of roads, finally heading back to civilisation via a stretch of motorway before peeling off through a number of villages.

And good news! There are Dacias everywhere; this is their country of origin, don’t forget, though the vast majority are 1980s relics that make the Sandero look like a supercar.

Seeing so many is a good reminder of how far Skoda has come: it too peddled hardy, value cars like these a couple of decades ago. Its stock has risen considerably since, however.

Can a Yeti really entertain on one of Europe’s very best roads, though? The short answer is yes.

Yeah, it would have been more fun with a petrol engine, manual gearbox, and a centre of gravity not influenced by a wheel strapped to the roof.

But as we wend our way around the Transfagarasan’s hairpins, encountering and then overtaking dawdling tourists (it’s Saturday afternoon and there are rather a lot of them hanging out of smoky Dacias at 17mph), it’s hard not feel mildly ridiculous, laughing at the incongruity of it all. Especially as mud is splattered on everything but the pains of glass vital to our visibility.

As I park at the side of the road, clambering out to get the money shot you see above, I realise I’m genuinely sad to have to hand the wee Yeti back. Mud, rocks, hills and streams have been beaten with little drama, and yet I’ve just had a genuinely good giggle bombing up a mountain pass more suited to a burly hot hatch or lithe little sports car.

By the time the Yeti is replaced, it will be over eight years old. And you can forgive Skoda some dithering: its successor has a genuine, plucky little hero to succeed.