My big passion are mountains and sports. I usualy travel by bike. I´m a geographer and come from Cluj, Romania.
I owe these mostly to my family. In Cluj, where I spent my childhood, I discovered with my family the passion for nature and travelling. Tarniţa lake in summer and Băişoara (ski resort) in winter where my favorite spots. I had my first experience with skiing in my fathers backpack. Then I started skiing on my own on the hills around the town and was swimming for the first time in Tarniţa. Since my brother gave me a bicycle and my parents allowed me to ride further then the town's surroundings, I started discovering the Carpathians by bike, cycling from the northern part of the country, Bucovina, down to the Danube gorges in the south. But after my mother bought me a world atlas, Romania´s borders were not any more the limits for my trips. So came that 1997 I already was cycling through the former yugoslavian republics.
In summer 1998 I finished the german department of "George Coşbuc" high school. Three months later, after an adventureous cyclotouristical expedition to Turkey an Northern Cyprus I was studying at the german departments of Geography and Journalism at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj.
After another amazing biketour in Scandinavia reaching Europe´s northernmost point, North Cape, fall of 1999 brought me with a scholarship to Tübingen, Germany. Finding exactly the area in geography which I was interested in, Geography of Developing Countries I decided to keep on studying there until finishing graduate studies. My regional focus lies in Latin America. This explains why I spent most of the time since 2002 in that region. First, I went with a field trip to Bolivia in september of 2002. After that I cycled or half a year through the Andes way south until southern Patagonia and back from northern Chile to Lima. It took me less than half a year to come back again, this time for studying a semester in Mendoza, Argentina and for an internship in Santiago de Chile at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). From september 2004 to march 2005 I was in Rio de Janeiro, where I studied at the Federal University, interned for a short while at the Consulate General of Romania and for three months at the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of UN-HABITAT.
Between may and december of 2006 I was in Arequipa, southern Peru for an internship at COPASA-GTZ, collecting data for my final thesis about disaster risk management. During the weekends I tried to escape to the mountains, doing some hiking on the snowcaped peaks of the Andes.
I graduated from university in november 2007.
This page is online for a couple of reasons. The first one is the promise made to the sponsors I had during my bike tours of advertising them this way. Then, I want this page to be a platform for supporting cyclotourism in Romania and in the other places I have visited, different ideas and organizations. As well, I would like www.stefanroman.com to serve as an information pool for other bikers, students and friends. Finaly, it is also a kind of personal foto-album, whenever I am far away from home and the loved ones, I look to some pictures and read my own stories.
I hope you will find what you are searching for on this page, if not, you might discover something new.
