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A client travelled on our 'Romania's Danube Delta & Carpathian Mountains' holiday and submitted this entry to our writing competition.
Great White Pelicans, Danube Delta by Mihai Dancaescu
Our first evening moored out on the Delta. Frogs. Millions of them; neighbours from hell until the throbbing wall of sound recedes to white noise – the remarkable to the unremarked. A deep, honey-rose sunset bleeds into warm, inky night as we tuck into a robust feast of carp, washed down with equally robust craic, Cabernet and general hilarity, setting the tone for the rest of the trip.
Sometimes chugging, sometimes gliding we ease through narrow channels of tobacco-dark water, sieving high barricades of reeds for every muted warble, scanning the airy corridors above at every whirring wing – the forms themselves an unidentified blur of pixels to my untrained eyes. Andy and Dan, our ace guides, have no such problem – for every call or flit they instantly have a name. The green stillness and enclosing heat are wonderfully soporific and our quiet chatter is just beginning to fade into contemplative silence when a receiving line of elegant squacco herons ushers us out into a vast cloud-reflecting lake where all is light and distance. Leaning back gratefully into the cool breeze we quickly get down to business, picking up a fleet of stately pelicans tacking across an ocean of sky then two white-headed eagles, yellow beaks awesome even through the lens, lazily hooking the currents above busy flotillas of assorted ‘fudge’ ducks, garganey, pochard and red-necked grebe. Mid-range, perched cormorants with clumsy outspread wings turn sleek S-necked submariners and balletic whiskered terns skim, scissor and sift the swell. Closer still, amongst thick rafts of trailing weed, our ardent frog-songsters are now visible single notes in the greater chorus.
Forging onward we nudge into the next green tunnel and startle a kingfisher – an electric-blue shimmer against a bare, twiggy branch. A grass snake sinuously unzips the smooth sheen below. Small terrapins sunbathe on warm islands of rock. There’s so much to see, and so much to miss if you happen to be sipping coffee and selecting another biscuit … an excited cry of ‘Gill!’ has me leaping to the rail just in time to catch the chunky outline of a muskrat panic-paddling across our bow – everyone knows I’m more into mammals than birds so they’ve made sure I get the sighting: that’s the kind of group it is. As reedbeds segue into woodland we all manage to scope in on a dapper grey-headed woodpecker high in the crown of a dead poplar, follow rollers and cuckoos in restless flight, track elusive golden orioles with less success. From impenetrable tangles of bush thrush nightingales issue loud, fluid warnings to unseen rivals. Now we’re manoeuvring into the bank and playing dead – Dan has found a silent trio of fledgling tawny owls, creched with one parent, only metres from the boat: solemnly they return our adoring oohs! with bold, unflinching glares.
Occasionally on our travels we pass solitary fishermen or herdsmen, their cattle mowing the broad, raised wedges of pasture separating some channels, reminding us that this is also a working landscape. That fact is reinforced when we visit the island of Letea, accessible only by boat, where there are three ethnically very different communities living. The history is as fascinating as the sprawling village we stroll through: imagine all the cowboy films you’ve ever seen then transplant the ubiquitous dusty little unpaved town, minus Clint Eastwood, tumbleweed and assorted leering banditos, into eastern Romania. The houses are low, pastel-pretty clapperboard, basking in productive flower and vegetable gardens, and horses are everywhere – pulling two-wheeled carts, dozing against paddock fences or roaming surprisingly widely in hobbles and headcollars, even into the river! An elderly headscarfed lady and I embark on a goodwill attempt at conversation – she in something resembling Italian, I in something resembling French (French used to be the main foreign language taught in schools so there is a little method to my madness) but needless to say we fail, although not without smiles and laughter at the depth of our mutual incomprehension.
Our days spent quietly pottering around the Delta have a dreamy, laid-back ‘through the looking-glass’ quality and it’s easy to become blasé about the underlying ferocity with which life is recreating itself at this time of year. Stark evidence of this when we depart – a cataclysmic explosion of giant mayflies, boiling up out to the water on every side and launching into the air on a desperate, heroic mission to ensure the next generation before expiring or falling prey to a host of jostling predators. The period between emergence and death may be as little as half an hour … watching the drama unfold is an unnerving, sobering and intense experience, and one I will never forget – the term ‘carpe diem’ suddenly acquired a whole new level of resonance.