Halfway down the Danube

To the Delta

There are two ways to drive from Bucharest to the Danube Delta.

Bucharest sits about 40 miles or 70 km north of the Danube, which runs from west to east. About 100 miles east of Bucharest, though, the Danube suddenly turns north. It runs north-northeast for another hundred miles or so. Then it turns east, splits into five channels, and flows into the Danube as a huge, swampy delta.

So, to get from Bucharest to the Delta, you can drive east, parallel to the Danube, until you cross it (there's a bridge), and then swing north and come to the Delta from below. Or, you can drive east, and then north, and then east again, crossing the Danube further north, just below the "neck" of the Delta. That's the way we drove up.

This route takes you out the A2 Autostrada, Romania's newest and proudest highway. Okay, it's almost Romania's only highway -- the stretch west of Bucharest barely counts -- but let's not be snide; the A2 is a wonderful stretch of road. It's broad, it's smooth, and it runs straight as a ruler across the flat green country east of Bucharest. You just don't appreciate good highways until you've lived for a while without them.

After you leave the Autostrada, you take a bad two-lane road through the city of Slobozia. Slobozia is notable mostly for looking exactly as you'd expect it to. I mean, there's a huge fertilizer factory just outside of town. And when you reach the town limits, you're greeted by the Hotel Paradis... a Communist-era block that's visibly in a state of advanced decay, with letters missing from its sign. "Ho el Par dis S oboz a", like.

(Bizarre Slobozia fact: in the mid-1990s, someone built a replica of the South Fork Ranch from the TV show "Dallas" near Slobozia. It was supposed to be a theme park. "Dallas" was shown in Romania under Communism, and was very popular. So... so, well, I'm not sure how the logic went. But the ranch/park was not a great success. It's what most Romanians seem to know about Slobozia, though.)

North of Slobozia, there's a long flat run across the Campea Baraganului, the Plains of Baragan. This is the region where I nearly got snowed in last year. It's a sinister name in recent Romanian history, because this was where the Communists deported thousands of internal exiles. In a Romanian version of the great forced resettlements of the Soviet Union, "unreliable" families from the south and west were shipped across the country and dumped on this flat, featureless plain, to live or die as best they could. Today a Ford Galaxy, with a couple of small children nodding off to "Finding Nemo" in the back, can cross the Plains of Baragan in an hour.

North of Baragan we come to Braila, on the Danube. Braila, an ugly but lively town, sprawls for miles along the river. There's no bridge -- the lower Danube is vast, and there are only three bridges in 250 miles -- but several car ferries go back and forth. We just missed one, but another left 20 minutes later.

While we were waiting, a storm came walking across the river towards us. We could see it coming from miles away, curtains of rain beneath a great dark fortress of cloud. As we drove onto the ferry, fat drops began to make leopard spots on the deck, while lightning snaked down to snap at the far shore.

It would take more than a little damp to keep Alan inside the car, though. A jacket, a hat, and he was trotting around in the rain: ducking between the cars, peering over the side of the boat.

"Lamp!" he suddenly said. "Lamps!"

"Lamps?" Whatever was he talking about?

"Lamps," he insisted. And sure enough, there were two lambs taking shelter under the pilot deck.

A bit further along, I noticed a car with a cardboard box full of ducklings in the back. When I lifted Alan up to look at them, the driver immediately reached into the box, grabbed one duckling, and held the frantically peeping morsel out the window for a delighted Alan to oh-so-carefully touch.

By the time we reached the other shore, the storm had passed on. Thunder rumbled behind us, but the sun was shining again as we drove into Dobrogea, the land at the bottom of the Danube.

Posted by douglas at May 30, 2005 11:33 PM