Day 18 & 19 Food poisoning .....An alcohol free day ( AFD No.1) ...and then to the Danube

Day 18 & 19  Road runs out to the Black sea

2250 miles from Holme ( Lancs) in the van and the road has now physically run out as we travel east to our goal of the Black Sea....to get to the mouth of the River Danube we now need to take a 6 hour ferry journey due east through the Danube Delta to get to the open waters of the Black Sea. There are no real roads in the Delta, a few dirt tracks but it is a protected area and vast in size......so time to park up for a couple of days, pack a ruck sack and head off.by ferry, to the tiny fishing village at the mouth of the Danube for a couple of nights.

My memories of 3rd year geography lesson was of many fast moving small streams turning into a slow moving river that eventually spread so wide and got so slow that it then finally split into many channels ( the delta) before entering the sea...

A week after the heaviest rains eastern Europe has seen for many a year and in Tulcea.....the last town on the Danube in Romania before the river splits to make the 'Danube Delta' ......the Danube is brown, swollen, fast flooding and full of logs/trees/branches   plus, of course, plastic bottles. The river here is funneling all the rainwater from a week ago from Germany, Austria, Hungary. Serbia, Bulgaria etc and where we should be seeing it at its most docile.... it is quite the opposite. No wonder they prepare well for floods, check the caravans on stilts !!

 The last bridge that you can get over this river is 80 miles from the sea, every crossing after that is by boat........it is just that wide.....for the Thames that would mean that the first bridge across it would be somewhere near Swindon. Getting across the river at Oxford, Reading, Henley, London etc would all require a boat....

A dodgy piece of steak on the BBQ on Sunday night renders me pretty much useless for Monday so we travel on for a couple of hours then camp up early...we miss all the 'Vlad the Impaler' stuff and Bran ( Dracula) castle and take our first AFD ( Alcohol free day) .....On this occasion sickness drove this glorious effort but I am sure we might have had one, at some point, if illness hadn't prevailed.....well possibly

Camping in Romania hasn't really taken off yet....and I am not sure, for the next few years at least, that the economics and the domestic culture will let it do so.....the international camping website has just 39 campsites for Romania and there are no Romanian web sites for campsites. So its pretty bloody hard finding one, and when you do so they still cost you 1/3 to 1/2 of a hotel night. We selected one of the said 39, no sign posts, finally a badly painted picture of a caravan  on a telegraph pole, 2 miles of dirt track to a 10' high double doored gate with video coverage and a squawk box to the owner .... no answer on the intercom but a number to ring and a few minutes later the owner is removing bolts, undoing locks and swinging open the gates.......we are the only campers..again. They are lovely, welcoming and reassure us of security......barbed wire, dogs, security patrol etc......we are in bandit country, no doubt of that as we drove up to it, but the need for it all still feels a little OTT

Out of the mountains and on to Bucharest we pass through 200 miles of plain and undulating hills...all great farmland.....mostly tractors ( but small old ones) and only a rare horse and cart.....Many less villages and if you had been dropped into the area you could mistake yourself for being in mid America

Finally, back to Tulcea, 2 miles from the Ukraine border and it has a very much Eastern block feel...

This is close up of the outrageously unattractive flats that have been built on the 'Danube water front' as seen from the picture below.....there appears to be no 'planning control' whatsoever.....or if there is I am well out of my depth to understand its logic....There will be a many hundred year old church by which a concrete water tower will have been constructed in its grave yard, a 3 miles enclosed conveyor belt from factory to quarry suspended on rusting poles scarring beautiful alpine meadow........I could go on but maybe we did much the same in the 60's and 70's shoving up concrete Arndale centres, multi-storey car parks, high rise flats etc......all of which have come down or are on the way down......maybe its just a time thing linked as always with economy...

Day 18       Ciofrangeni  ( Ro)  to Rasnov ( Ro)       140 km            Total     3208 km

Day 19       Rasnov ( Ro)  to Tulcea ( Ro)                 446 km            Total     3654 km