Jones

Saturday was to be a short drive and then an afternoon lazing around. Apple confidently predicted 3:30h to Murighiol where we are stopping to see the Danube estuary. We made an earlyish start and expected to be landed by lunch.

Garmin immediately put its finger on the scales, engaged adventure routing and secretly added an hour to the trip. By the time we’d realised we were too far in so continued on the “scenic” route. Little did we know that Garmin was also being optimistic. Very optimistic., We arrived at Camping Delta at about 4pm. This part of Romania doesn’t see much tourists. It also seems that the locals don’t bother to eat out. We passed about three restaurants on the whole trip. The two best placed of them either didn’t exist or looked haunted so we nearly missed lunch. Luckily a top quality kebab came to the rescue – we’re fairly close to Greece after all.

All of the campsites in Murighiol are someone’s garden. They’re all priced the same and well reviewed. We picked based on the host offering a tour of the delta on his boat. The host seemed a little grumpy that we arrived at all. He “hadn’t been expecting us” and hence “hadn’t mowed the grass”. He proceeded to mow the huge lawn with the smallest mower he could find, banning me from filling water or plugging in in the meantime.

The gardening finally done, we booked the boat trip for 6.30am the next morning and set a 5:30 alarm. As we packed up, two Germans arrived and asked to join our trip before retiring to their roof tent. 6:20 rolled around and we were greeted by a friendlier version fo the host. Still a little sharp though. We all bundled into his Skoda – Flynn got shotgun sitting on top of me – and we drove round to the marina.

We were underway at dawn in time to see the sunrise over a bend in the St George branch of the Danube delta. There are three main branches. The northernmost; Killiski forms the border with Ukraine. Our St George branch is the southern and the middle Sulina branch is the smallest but has been deepened and straightened to act as the main shipping channel. We were on the water for about three hours. We sailed to the northern edge of Lake Isaac. The main goal of the trip was sighting the Dalmatian pelican – the second largest flying bird. It is also runner up in the largest bill competition at 45cm, slightly shorter than its Australian cousin.

We did see a couple of Dalmatian pelicans and hundreds of pink-backed pelicans along with dwarf and full sized cormorants, several kingfishers and some unusually brave egrets (again both sizes) and herons. Oh and a trio of red footed falcons. Ovid, the campsite owner cum boat driver cum safari guide had an amazing eye for spotting birds and a deft hand on the tiller for reversing to see them.

The hi-light of the trip (sorry, Dalmatian pelican) was seeing a pair of white tailed eagles catch a fish and then be chased off their kill by a golden coyote. Sadly this was too far in the distance to photograph but we did have Jane’s magic Swarovski binoculars. So we saw it and you can’t. You’ll have to trust me.

We were back at Jones by half nine and spent the rest of the day on maintenance, refilling our cash reserves and trying to give Flynn a swim. Sadly the lake near Delta camping was full of algae – we didn’t know if it was blue green or actually just green green but we didn’t risk it.

We met the campsite owner after our walk to pay and get a recommendation for dinner. He put us of our first (obvious) choice and sent us to the Pensione Bianca (actually yellow) down the road. It was definitely end of season in PB. The three staff had piled chairs on tables and were about to shut up shop when we arrived. Gladly they didn’t. Instead they served us pike roe emulsion then grilled sturgeon (J) and cat fish (R). I’m forever in search of super oily cat fish that you sometimes get round here. The catfish was good but Jane’s sturgeon won, like the Dalmatian pelican, the catfish took second place.