Danube Delta

Today was a relaxing day. I organized some things and went by speed boat to the Danube Delta, where I had a great time.

The nature was really amazing, I visited a lot of birds: like pelicans, ducks and many other through binoculars - so I hope you are fine with my words and agree that I couldn't share pictures from pelicans ;-(

Good individual tours could be booked here: http://www.egretamica.ro/

I even had time to go swimming in the Delta. It is really unbelievable, that we do have such great nature in Europe. So if you have the chance, go for visit the Delta. I would recommend to take some more time I did and do this trip with canoes, take your tent and a map of the delta and spend at least 3-4 days there.

Final kms on the Danube Track to Tulcea

After a very long sleep I started around 10am this morning and passed a very nice lake around 10kms after Harsova. The temperatures were not so high that morning, but there was still strong front wind.

After a while I passed an huge wind park, which was part wise still under construction. Enercon and ABB build it so far I could see - the wind park will provide 99 MW (google for it). Ok EU is offering sponsorship, but I assume in Romania they do not have the consumers for this amounts of Energy.

So some people will probably earn a shit hole of money.

Beside huge energy projects I saw some small ducks that day.

Beside Orthodox and Catholic churches, more and more mosques were in the small villages - and the people were living together in a friendly way.

I like this picture very much.

Yes and after 100km I reached Tulcea in the early afternoon, cause the wind direction changed after 1pm so cycling was not so challenging anymore.

Beside horse-carts, some old Dacias, some Renaults I could see many SUVs on the road. I guess that more and more Romanians are discovering sports, that means they have to transport their golf-clubs, tennis rackets, ... somehow and of course you couldn't do this in an ordinary car. Sport Utility Vehicles were build to transport the equipment!

But back to the story. Tulcea looked quite charming, had somehow an international flair ;-) And some nice old buildings as well.

Ok to be honest I am using Tulcea:

• as official final destination of the Danube Cycle Path to finalize the first part of the trip => Prost!
• to be close to the Ukrainian border,
• do a boat tour tomorrow to the Danube Delta

Beside old buildings I would like to introduce my new house bank to you. CEO is Mr. Duke (Graf) Dracula!

To say goodbye from my crow Jacob I decided to offer you a song called "Dead Wing" from Porcupine Tree.

F**** the police

Sad but true, my friend Jacob died after less than 24 hours. I think he was too weak and was maybe already lying too long next to the road before I picked it up - shame.

But live has to continue, even we are loosing good friends...

I started that morning in Olenita and had a clear destination in mind: Constanta, I wanted to reach it two days later, that's why I tried to speed up a bit, which was hard, cause of heavy winds from the front and extreme hot temperatures - anyway that day I reached my destination which was Fetesti.

But I will go a bit more in details now:

There were nice shallow lakes next to the road, where many fishermen tried their best to enhance their meals with some proteins.

These shallow lakes were connected with some kind of drains with one of the various arms of the Danube. In these drains you could always see cattle, which needed also to cool down a bit.

That day I was cycling almost 20kms with Peter, who lived in a small town close to Calarasi. He was visiting his brother-in-law to get 10 small chicken from him.
Peter does not have a proper job like most of the people living here - sometimes he works as a brick layer, when friends are building houses, or he tries to get jobs in Germany or Austria. These jobs help him to make sure he can buy wood in winter to heat up his house and buy something special for his family e.g. on x-mas or new-years eve.

In contrast to most unemployed people in West European countries, people like Peter have some animals like chicken, pigs and sheep at their places, and they are growing vegetables and fruits - so that they don't need to spend too much money on food.

He was amazingly friendly to me, after I invited him to a beer (I had a sugar water - cause it was around 10 am) he had to invite me afterwards for a sugar water as well.

Some kms before Calarasi, there were huge industrial ruins, which were from coal power plants. It was impressive to see these buildings - it might look that way when mankind left the planet.

Beside ruins there was a nice, wooden Catholic church next to the road. Peter was orthodox, like most of the people living in Romania, too.

When I took this picture, I honestly thought Romania is somehow like heaven. Horses and cows are on huge areas peaceful grassing - like in wild west movies and all kind of fruit is growing wild - at least in summer time it seems relaxed.

Another wild west picture - in the back you can again see one of the Danube arms.

A nice alley...

Not only me was suffering from the heavy front winds.

That guy had in contrast to me a very soft seat.

Ok, now back to the story, that evening I reached Fetesti how I planned to do. The next day would only a be 70km ride to Constanta. But it came different... As there is only one bridge how to cross the river, I obviously took the freeway (not the first time) - just one km on it, a police car with siren stopped me and told me some stupid stories. I had to accept it and drive 70 km further north to cross the river there - you can imagine how my motivation looked that day.

I decided, not to go to Constanta, but move instead further northern towards the Danube Delta and do a longer stop in Odessa Ukraine instead.

One last sentence on that: Riding on National Roads is much more dangerous than an freeways.

I have really no clue, for what these guys were drilling for - water definitely not, the Danube was only 500m away => maybe fracking?! so the people who like conspiracy theories are welcome to launch some rumors ;-)

When I saw that, it thought I would dream: there were really rice fields next to the road! At least the storchs were happy about it.

Beside rice fields, many huge sunflower fields, corn fields were there - so this area of Romania is extremely stamped by agriculture - from that point of view it is not astonishing, that no wild living animals, beside birds and frogs were present in this area.

I love the clouds here in the east...

The last picture of the day is addicted to the wasting of EU appropriation - there are two 10x5 m LED displays installed in Harsova to show e.g. soccer matches like now.

Ruse to Oltenita - from now on I am not travelling alone anymore...

Today's cycle trip became much shorter than expected. I started at 8am in Ruse and wanted to cycle until Calarasi - but thanks to the fu... wind, I only reached Oltentia.

But let's start from the beginning:

In the morning I passed the last bridge between Bulgaria and Romania before the Danube Delta. I mentioned it already some posts ago, that there is still an official border incl. border police installed between these two EU countries - seems somehow strange to me.

Here you can see what such a border effects, traffic ;-) luckily you can easy pass it when you are travelling with the bike.

Around 10 kms before Oltentia I saw a small crow lying on the ground. Obviously it had some problems with one leg and it couldn't fly. I cut that huge piece of mud from its legs and had a look at the wings, but couldn't find any serious injury.

That's why I wanted to leave it there where I found it.

In the moment I wanted to leave a lady came and tried to chase off the crow - then she took it in a rough way => I had no idea what she planned to do with it, so I took it with me.

I called he or she Jacob and found out, that he likes bananas, right now he is on the floor next to my bed on a towel and looking at me. I hope that he will survive and that I'll be able to let him free soon.

By the way, Steven Wilson has a song called the 'raven that refused to sing':

From Svishtov to Ruse => rock climbing in Basarbovo yeah!!!

Svishtov, where Rolf, John and I started yesterday was is a cozy small town with a nice pedestrian street and many restaurants and bars. In the center you have as well some old buildings from the medieval. Unluckily the place itself was not too busy, but which seems quite common for this area of Bulgaria.

In the morning before we started with our "small" 70 km trip to Ruse we took a last photo of us.

On the way to ruse it was pretty hot - as you can see even this friendly donkey was trying to get some wind with its tail.

After some 20 kms the road got very hilly and an horrible front wind was blowing in our head - I sometimes got the feeling that "god hates us all" cyclists at least during this day ;-) => by the way this is a song from slayer you can check out on YouTube if you want to... At least I want to share some kind of similar music to you:

L'Enfant Sauvage from Gojira:

One smaller climb was surrounded by pines - so the flora was already changing the closer we got to the Black Sea coast.

People were enjoying themselves in the shade, or drinking lots of beer and absinthe even around 11am. At this time we stopped at a small bar. The entire village was in the bar and enjoying their Saturday - somehow it seems to be a great life here, on the other hand not really, cause as mentioned on the last blog most of the people don't have a proper job!

10 kms away from Ruse I discovered Basarbovo. There you have beautiful limestone cliffs next to a small river.

On one side of the river there was a small chapel build into the rocks...

And as assumed there were some people doing rock climbing on the other side of the river. One group came from Romania and the other one from Ruse.
They were very friendly and asked me to join. So at least I had the possibility to do two routes before it started to rain.

The climbing spot was not too big, big in a very good condition - the grades were in between UIAA 5-9 but most of them around 6 and 7.

On the way to Ruse I was lucky again, cause I was not affected by the thunderstorm.

Ruse itself was different to any city I saw so far in Bulgaria. It had a very nice pedestrian street, renovated buildings, most of the people living there could speak English and people seemed to have, what people in the West call "proper jobs". People from the west would call Ruse also a nice city - in fact it is!

In the evening I went out to have dinner and got into a restaurant, where one person was celebrating his 60th anniversary. One guy with keyboards, who was looking very bored and a Bulgarian beauty with blond hair were doing traditional Bulgarian folk music. I really enjoyed it to watch these guys and the entire birthday party.