Stretching more than 55 miles between the historic regions of Transylvania and Wallachia, it unfolds along a winding ribbon of pavement through Romania's Carpathian Mountains. It was originally built for military use in the early 1970s as a response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, as an effort by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to avoid a similar fate.
Today the 6,673-ft.-high mountain pass features long, S-shaped curves and plenty of tight hairpin turns, which keep traffic crawling along most of the time at speeds under 20 mph. That just means that drivers have plenty of time to take in the jaw-dropping scenery, from Balea Lake and Balea Waterfall near the highest point on the pass to the mountain peaks off in the distance -- all of which no doubt attracted the hosts of the BBC's "Top Gear," which traveled here in late 2009 to film it as one of the world's best driving roads.
