Time runs faster than the waters, and we had scarcely a week left to reach the Black Sea. But we had lost track of days and hours — useful only to those who have a program, obligations, the serious folk. For us, on the road for weeks, time and distance ceased to exist. Sometimes we crossed half a country in a day, sometimes we walked slowly with our feet in the water, hurling our backpacks onto the beach to plunge into the Danube. What mattered was not so much arriving as following it to the end.
After the Iron Gates, it spreads out, wide and assured beneath the fishermen’s boats, between fields and plains, sometimes dotted with low hills that give it shade, and along large, slightly faded port towns. From Romania into Bulgaria, back into Romania. Vidin, Ruse, Tutrakan, Silistra, Telesti, Harsova. Old ports that were once military and commercial strongholds in distant times, still bearing a nostalgia for a grandeur from who knows when. Communist blocks and brutalist buildings sit beside colorful pediments with worn stucco decorations and Roman ruins. The quays form promenades where people dream, smoke cigarette after cigarette while watching the river, and cool off a little in the evening of this stifling summer. Often work is scarce and many head for the capital or Germany, returning only for a few days of holiday.
Personal collection D. C.
The river experience and its people
Walking and hitchhiking, slower and more spontaneous than bike or car, put us at the level of people, open to their curiosity and generosity. Our odd look, half-vagrant, half-Tintin, bumps against everyday conventions that make everyone attend relentlessly to their own affairs. So everyone offers a smile, advice, sometimes a meal or a lift. So many strangers whose language we do not understand but whose welcome comforts us immensely, and who sometimes, in the middle of the great empty plains, quite literally save us, appearing strangely in a village without a bus or that night when we had no bread. Thus, in Aidemir (Bulgaria) a family gave us lodging, sharing a wild card game and a large dish of moussaka. The next day, back in Romania, we found ourselves in the middle of a Gypsy baptism celebration, dancing and singing after the Orthodox ceremony. From providence to mishap, from encounters to invitations, we lived the river and its people.
Eastern Romania. The Danube left the Bulgarian border and split into two arms that embrace beautiful natural parks, rejoin, then separate again. In Cernavoda we left the road to walk with the current. We met four companions of fortune and misfortune in a canoe, with whom we shared food and drink. Germans and Bulgarians, they laughed loudly, washed their clothes in the clear water and left with warm farewells. Harry, in his fifties with a feather in his hat, told of his journeys in the delta and the Black Sea, which he had traced by canoe. You could read a life of wandering on his tanned face and in words that mixed many tongues and memories. We continued — they in their canoe, we barefoot on the sand, crossing grazing herds. We then left the river to seek a nearby monastery. The trees were silver like olive trees, glinting in the sun. The path was covered with yellow and violet flowers coloring those strange heaths of thistles and dunes, where each step sent up swarms of grasshoppers and darting little frogs. We rejoiced in this profusion of life and felt its tremors.
Personal collection D. C.
The unbreakable rapport between travelers and truckers
Hitchhiking is a sport — yes, it’s exercise — of hope. It lets us swallow kilometers close to our river and make a thousand acquaintances. But what patience is required to wait, under the scorching joyful sun, for a car finally to stop. Then it must be heading the right way. Each car raises immense hope that falls when you watch it drive off. You smile the best you can, make bets to pass the time, wave to truckers from all countries. There is an unbreakable rapport between travelers and truckers, nomads like us, and they greet us with loud horns. Some even take us with them, offering a panoramic view of the highway. Many drivers who stop and help were once hitchhikers themselves. Nikola gave us a long lift; he too goes to the Black Sea and praised its calm, silence and birds. He is a writer, and one of his short stories is about hitchhiking. Further on, Florin took us gladly — he used to thumb a ride at that very spot as a student. He dropped us at the port of Tulcea, the last town before reaching the delta by boat.
The large boat, cheerful inside with felt-red upholstery, left the port. The only way to finally reach Sulina, our end point, is no longer beside the river but carried by the Danube itself, watching the two banks where fishermen’s huts and a few hotels nestle. We never tired of the view, and the wind on the wet deck carried the scent of the river and of freedom. Resting on that tongue of land between the blue waters of the Danube and the Black Sea, Sulina came into view. For a long time it was much more than this sleepy little port at the edge of Europe. Since an 1856 treaty that internationalized Danube navigation, it became one of the maritime gateways of the continent. A free port, Sulina saw sailors, traders and adventurers of all nations pass through, covered with consulates, churches and merchant houses. Greeks, British, Italians, Armenians and Jews formed a cosmopolitan city born of its position at kilometer zero of the Danube and the stage for Europolis, a masterpiece of Romanian literature.
“Usually, no one comes this far”
But it wasn’t really for this port that we had crossed Europe for a month along the blue paths that the Danube offered. We continued a few kilometers toward the meeting point of the river and the Black Sea, walking on the beach where the tide deposits its dark silt. The sea stretches to infinity and the distant horizon is born where the sky plunges into it offshore, in the clouds. What immense joy to reach that gray plain, calm yet restless with foam. Odessa is not far, and the echoes of war are not either. We received a drone alert the night before. Constantinople too, somewhere in the distance. And all of this delighted us — the drama that surrounds these places seems to stir long memories and ancient balances. We walked on a narrow strip of land whipped by waves, ground of black rocks and thousands of shells. There, a weather station, then a tiny chapel. “The location of this station is very important,” the keeper George explained. “Here we analyze everything: wind, temperature, the sea, etc.,” then smiled: “Usually, no one comes this far. Except those who want to find no one, and they are often nice people!” Nearby we met other lovers of that immensity of blue, the sound of waves and the flight of cormorants. They opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of our odyssey, and suddenly, before the magnificent twilight, we felt like lifelong friends.
At the end of the rugged rocks and the reeds torn by gusts, the river embraces the Black Sea and their waters meet as the river pours its current into the salty waves. With it go so many of our adventures, encounters and dreams. The moon shone on the glittering expanse, far to the East and the Orient, while we said goodbye to the Danube.
Personal collection D. C.
