Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 6: The Danube Delta

Thursday 30 May (Ascension Day)
Not yet Ascension Day in the Orthodox calendar, of course, but I want to send greetings to our friends in the west. So I tweet an image of an icon of Christ Pantocrator that I’d taken in the Romanian art gallery yesterday.

How many people on the cruise have registered the significance of today? Or even remembered that it’s Thursday? The time dilation effect has now set in. Hours and days pass in a dreamy state of contentedness: water and forests and skies, food and drink, reading and conversation, forays onshore and back again, and good sleep. The Danube inculcates gentler rhythms than we are used to. It is deeply calming to watch the river, the trees and the clouds hour after hour. It has the capacity to make contemplatives out of us. This may not be a river of dramatic landscapes and eventful foreshores. In a sense, mile after mile goes by and nothing changes, nothing happens - and yet everything happens, everything is changing constantly. The flow of the river is the flow of time and the flow of life. “You cannot step into the same river twice” I quoted two weeks ago in Santiago in my pilgrimage Bible readings. When you are a voyager on the breast of a great river, you live the truth of that saying in a new way.

But today’s talk at breakfast is all about a disaster that has happened upstream at Budapest where we set off less than a week ago. A pleasure boat carrying South Korean tourists has gone down in the Danube with the loss of at least seven lives. It seems that the weather was stormy last night and the river, already inflated by heavy rain and snowmelt, was rough and turbulent with a powerful current running. Another boat appears to have collided with the pleasure craft. It’s a dreadful thing to have happened to people who like us were glad to be on the Danube and enjoying all that it had to offer. We know only too well, living where we do in a village that straddles the Tyne, that the mood of a river can rapidly turn ugly and put peoples’ lives at risk. I say a prayer for the victims and those who are still missing. It’s a sobering start to the day. 

Today we arrive at Tulcea, the furthest point of a our cruise and the Romanian gateway to the Danube Delta. This shabby, nondescript port whose dreary apartment blocks reach down to the river stands at the top of the dogleg the Danube makes as it reaches striking distance of the Black Sea. Instead of disgorging itself on the parallel it’s reached below Rousse, it decides to divert northwards - which is why a canal allowing shipping to cut off the corner made sense. Ceausescu completed it in the 1970s, putting prisoners to work including captive nobility, clergy, dissidents and others who had fallen foul of his regime. The cost was loss of life on a scale comparable to that sustained in the building of medieval cathedrals.

We spend the morning cruising in three smaller boats on the Delta - not dissimilar to the one that foundered on the Danube yesterday. We set out past a tangle of vessels in various states of seaworthiness. A few are bright and shiny like our cruise ship. Some have been afloat for decades and seen better days. And many are only half-afloat, rusting hulks that line the shores and speak of the glory days of shipping on this final stretch of the Danube before the canal was completed. The rotting wrecks are evocative, as the crumbling relics of any human enterprise always are, and my camera enjoys photographing them. 

Before long we have left the soiled port of Tulcea behind. Now the riverscape is beautiful and absorbing, and very green. It is hot for the time of day. The Delta is a world heritage site for its wetlands and wild life, this “vast whispering labyrinth where the Danube falls to pieces” as Patrick Leigh Fermor describes it. The Danube, we learn, splits into three channels or Bratuls beyond Tulcea: the St George, the Sulina and the Chilia. The Delta is a surprisingly recent natural phenomenon - maybe as much as half this vast area was formed in the Christian Era. It's growing at an amazing rate, about 40 metres of coastline are added every day.

We follow the Sulina to begin with. Soon we divert off into a narrower side-channel where we experience the beauty of this remarkable environment. Birch trees and wild vines are everywhere, interspersed with fields of reeds. It’s impossible to tell where the water ends and the land begins - if it does. Occasionally we pass a fishermen’s bothy built of mud and thatched with reeds. The water is the colour of milky tea thanks to the sediments brought down from the hills and which end up being deposited in, and therefore enlarging, the Delta year by year. As we learned last time we cruised this river, the Danube is hardly ever “blue” whatever the Viennese waltz (and the title of this blog) may pretend.

What brings people from all over the world to these 6000 square kilometres of wetlands is the wildlife. We see egrets, cormorants, pelicans, cranes, herons, rollers, black woodpeckers, a kingfisher and an eagle. We hear a cuckoo somewhere in the trees. And a fine sculpture of an owl carved in wood outside one of the fishermen’s bothies where he keeps guard over a vineyard improbably planted on a strip of what is indisputably dry land a full half metre above river level. And the swallows, wheeling playfully round our boat - “look how happy the swallows are” says our guide, “which can only mean that the air is very good today”. Dragonflies play on the surface of the water while frogs croak out of unseen depths of undergrowth. It’s a lovely experience to glide among these bayous that are so rich in life.

But we also see signs of how this environment is being eroded by our own species. There are plastic water bottles floating in the sluggish water or washed up on the riverbanks. Speedboats race past creating a backwash that disturbs the stability of these delicate ecosystems and erodes the banks of the creeks, especially when the water is as high as it is this spring. There are indications that pollutants are present in the water even though the aqueous environment is strictly regulated. This is a UNESCO biosphere reserve and world heritage site, but it isn’t always treated with respect.

At the furthest reach of the outing we join the Bratul Chilia and pass a border post. Across the water we set eyes on the  Ukraine. Another country to add to the list! It looks very like Romania. Danubia is largely one landscape from Hungary to the Black Sea. The river people who sail these waters see themselves as a family that transcends nationality. And yet on the other side of this country a war is going on, or at least a conflict that ought to trouble every European. I mean of course the Russian occupation of the Crimea about which we haven’t heard so much of late, and yet still poses the real risk of destabilising Europe’s eastern frontier. It’s another question mark by the rhetoric of “75 years of peace in Europe”. We don’t land in the Ukraine, but we pick up its mobile phone signal, which almost counts as having our passports stamped, doesn’t it?

Too soon this delightful excursion is over. Someone on the cruise is overheard to say, “well that was pretty boring, wasn’t it?” It's extraordinary that someone could be so indifferent to the beauty of this magical world and the intelligence with which our guide has helped us enjoy it. Maybe for her it’s just been one of the longeurs you have to endure on a cruise in order to fill the time between breakfast and lunch?

Back on board, we set out on our return journey back upstream, the long haul that will take us towards Budapest and the west. I feel a tinge of regret at leaving behind this Danubian ultima thule. But tomorrow we shall be at the Black Sea. I sit on deck in the afternoon. Cumulus is towering up in the sky. By early evening there is an ominous yellow light over the river, and thunder, and a stiff wind stirring up the water. It is time to go under cover.

Later, we look outside and notice that the ship is passing a fair-sized city. A lot of ships are to be seen. It turns out to be Galati, a major port and trading centre in eastern Romania. North of here, in the west of Ukraine, lies the land known as Galicia. Curious to think that I was in the Spanish Galicia at the other end of Europe last week. And that St Paul wrote a letter to the Galatians in Asia Minor. The root meaning appears to be "fortress".

There is dancing in the ship's lounge. But we go back inside the cabin and watch a TV documentary about Ceausescu.