Down by the delta Romania has emerged on the A list of lush eco-destinations. Even the food's getting better, says Jeremy Seal. Sunday Times, 19/8/2007
We were somewhere near the tractor
town of Slobozia, headed for the Danube Delta, when Raz turned off the potholed
road to show me the Dallas Hotel. A
replica of Southfork Ranch stood in the middle of a vast potato plain dotted by
stooping farm workers, their rusting bicycles and – you so haven’t guessed it –
a half-size Eiffel
Tower.
Time was when zany Parisian landmarks and gone-to-seed TV-tribute hotels (the Ewing oil wells, judging by this particular Dallas, had long since run dry) might have been the highlights of a visit to Romania. No longer. Sibiu, showpiece medieval city of Transylvania’s German-Saxon population, is being tarted up as 2007’s European Capital of Culture while the Danube Delta is fast emerging as a major eco-destination flush with 300 bird varieties, 125 species of fish and some 5,000 square kilometers of backwater islands, isolated peasant villages and willow-lined channels to explore. What was once a vast watery blank where dissident minorities went into hiding saw the opening last year of the country’s first top-end wilderness lodge, Delta Nature Resort. All this and the perennial abundance of world-class timewarp picturesque – my very first view of the place was of a man cutting the waist-high grass alongside Bucharest’s airport runway with a scythe - and Romania feels like Europe’s most alluring adventure.
‘Of course they cut the grass,’ replied Razvan when he met me at Arrivals; how else were the airport workers to feed their animals? Chastened, I followed my driver-guide (and recent champion national skier) to the car. We drove east. That half-scale Eiffel had barely disappeared below the horizon when men appeared at the roadside hawking the huge whiskered river fish at their feet – carp, zander, perch and pike – with out-flung arms, fingers twitching to signal the freshest of catches. The severest spring floods for decades had pushed the delta beyond even its most extravagant contours. Egrets and ibises stalked the meadows. Water lapped at the whitewashed walls of cottages with reed thatches and turquoise window frames, and puddled around the mosques of the Turks, just one of numerous minorities who have washed up on Europe’s low-lying margins.
The delta took an ecological hammering under Ceaucescu – he had planned to drain it for agricultural use - but was designated a World Heritage Site in the 1990s. Visitor number remained sluggish, however, largely because the annual floods limited accommodation options to the serviceable but hardly luxurious ‘floating hotels’ or cabin boats; fine for specialist birders and anglers but no great draw for the wider market. With the opening last year of the five-star Delta Nature Resort, a plantation-style main lodge and thirty wood and stone guest cabins, it was as if the area had gone overnight from dowdy Broads to luxury Okavango. From my spacious combine of stylishly furnished summer house and fishing hut, with its double bedroom, bathroom, sitting room and private terrace, I looked out across Lake Somova to the forested banks of the Danube as I pondered that Romanian rarity; a first class international menu.
The resort had sidestepped the flood threat by locating on comparatively high ground, which put the Delta itself a good hour away by the hotel’s speedboat. No matter; among the backwater landscapes of drowned trees, reed beds and lily-draped lakes around Murighiol nested cormorants and terns, coots, pelicans and herons in extraordinary profusion. Patrolling crows swooped on unguarded nests to filch eggs which they bore away in their beaks. Snakes were wrapped among the willows. Fishy bubbles rose from the murky depths. Even the unsightly plastic bottles which shoaled among the willows – in some cases from as far away as Serbia and Hungary – were a stirring reminder of the Danube’s great European journey.
We put ashore on Uzlina Island where an old farmer with shock-blue eyes and blonde hair offered us a glass of home-made wine and cheese curds from beyond a rampart of water-lapped sandbags. Timoftei was a Lipovani, Orthodox fundamentalists who had sought sanctuary here from Russian persecution in the 18th century and found their niche as local boatmen. Hats for every season – brimmed reed-woven ones, trilbies, thick woollen ones with ear-flaps - hung from every hook in his simple waterside house. And on his shelf a faded photograph showed him meeting Ceaucescu, who had had a holiday house nearby.
We drove west until the mountains - and the preposterous architecture – announced Transylvania. At Sinaia, the fin-de-siecle villas of this aristocratic mountain resort squatted in shabby landscaped gardens. The stuff of fairy tales and romances, these impossible confections of schloss, manse and manor sported ornate wooden balconies, steeply pitched tin-sheeted roofs sprouting rounded turrets, pyramidal towers topped by spheres, and huge chimney stacks whose vents were modeled as miniature houses. Pride of place went, however, to Peles Castle, late-19th century summer residence of King Carol I and his poet-queen, Carmen Sylva. Here were secret doors behind library bookcases, lavish wall paneling in ash and walnut, acres of oak parquet, Michelangelo copies in bronze, Murano glass chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors of Venetian crystal, Carrara marble door surrounds and Moorish suites. There were also exotic collections of Ottoman weapons which turned me cruel, or so I thought when I challenged the 160-room castle’s guide to summarise the style. ‘German Neo-Renaissance,’ he replied, without missing a beat. In the landscaped gardens, a brown bear padded restlessly against its chain while its gypsy owner pocketed a few lei from snapping tourists.
Transylvania’s high scenery, birch woods topped by pine-clad uplands still trimmed with snow, had left me itching to put on my walking boots. We set out along sunlit trails thick with primroses and crocuses into the Piatra Craiului national park, location for the 2003 Hollywood epic Cold Mountain. Jays flitted among the pines and we passed from shadowed gorges to village hillsides ringing with goatbells where the children were rake-spreading manure across the pastures. At Magura village’s pensiune, its walls of ornately patterned pine shingles, we stopped for a reviving meal; pork chops, herb-scented potatoes and wild mushrooms, all, as welcoming proprietor Adriana Moroie confirmed, grown within a stone’s throw of the house. It was a welcome break from the Romanian restaurant norm where only the names of the dishes - ‘vegetables dressed in corn flakes’, ‘sour giblet soup with turkey wings’ and ‘snack with mush’ – did anything to sustain me. The worst was the positively anaemic Dracula Soup – tomato? – which I encountered in the Sighisoara house where the original toothy count, Vlad the Impaler, was born.
We drove into the heartlands of Saxon Transylvania where the high-walled houses and churches, slit for defensive bowmen, bespoke an architecture betraying the signs of an ancient regional insecurity. The Saxons who settled the area from the 12th century found themselves on Europe’s frontline against Turks and Tatars. At the World Heritage Site of Biertan (German Birthalm), the village church was ringed with three concentric walls while the sacristy door deep within the church, for good Teutonic measure, was secured by nineteen separate bolts. None of which had saved the community from persecution under the Communists; a very old man, sitting in an apple orchard heavy with blossom, told me that he was one of the last remaining Saxons in Birthalm. The rest had begun new lives in Germany.
The world they left behind had hardly changed over the centuries. From the poppy-strewn meadows the domes of sweet-smelling haystacks rose around spindles, like candyfloss. Horse-drawn ploughs worked the fields. Gypsy drivers perched on stout carts beneath the low domes and wide brims of their squashed black bowlers while fetching red tassles hung from their horses’ heads. It was approaching Sibiu, with moated bastions and thickset towers enclosing a glorious medieval core of narrow lanes, cobbled squares and merchant houses beneath steep tiled roofs, that we came across the five shepherds. They were traditionally dressed in old moleskin breeches, waistcoats and high rounded hats. They and their numerous dogs worked the edges of the huge flock. Among the sheep, five hundred strong, were three donkeys laden with bedding, copper kettles, blackened pots and scythes. They were headed, they told us, to new pastures around the Fagaras Mountains. We watched them, a glimpse from quite another age, as they cleared the road and headed out across the sunset plain.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Regent Holidays (0870 499 0911; www.regent-holidays.co.uk) who offer tailor-made tours to Romania. A 7-day fly-drive tour including flights, car hire, B&B accommodation from £675 per person, or from £979 with private driver/guide. He was also a guest of Delta Nature Resort (0870 068 2798; www.deltaresort.com). Rooms from £100 per person per night B&B.
Information: Romanian National Tourist Office (020 7224 3692; www.romaniatourism.com)
Reading: Romania (Rough Guides, £11.99)
Time was when zany Parisian landmarks and gone-to-seed TV-tribute hotels (the Ewing oil wells, judging by this particular Dallas, had long since run dry) might have been the highlights of a visit to Romania. No longer. Sibiu, showpiece medieval city of Transylvania’s German-Saxon population, is being tarted up as 2007’s European Capital of Culture while the Danube Delta is fast emerging as a major eco-destination flush with 300 bird varieties, 125 species of fish and some 5,000 square kilometers of backwater islands, isolated peasant villages and willow-lined channels to explore. What was once a vast watery blank where dissident minorities went into hiding saw the opening last year of the country’s first top-end wilderness lodge, Delta Nature Resort. All this and the perennial abundance of world-class timewarp picturesque – my very first view of the place was of a man cutting the waist-high grass alongside Bucharest’s airport runway with a scythe - and Romania feels like Europe’s most alluring adventure.
‘Of course they cut the grass,’ replied Razvan when he met me at Arrivals; how else were the airport workers to feed their animals? Chastened, I followed my driver-guide (and recent champion national skier) to the car. We drove east. That half-scale Eiffel had barely disappeared below the horizon when men appeared at the roadside hawking the huge whiskered river fish at their feet – carp, zander, perch and pike – with out-flung arms, fingers twitching to signal the freshest of catches. The severest spring floods for decades had pushed the delta beyond even its most extravagant contours. Egrets and ibises stalked the meadows. Water lapped at the whitewashed walls of cottages with reed thatches and turquoise window frames, and puddled around the mosques of the Turks, just one of numerous minorities who have washed up on Europe’s low-lying margins.
The delta took an ecological hammering under Ceaucescu – he had planned to drain it for agricultural use - but was designated a World Heritage Site in the 1990s. Visitor number remained sluggish, however, largely because the annual floods limited accommodation options to the serviceable but hardly luxurious ‘floating hotels’ or cabin boats; fine for specialist birders and anglers but no great draw for the wider market. With the opening last year of the five-star Delta Nature Resort, a plantation-style main lodge and thirty wood and stone guest cabins, it was as if the area had gone overnight from dowdy Broads to luxury Okavango. From my spacious combine of stylishly furnished summer house and fishing hut, with its double bedroom, bathroom, sitting room and private terrace, I looked out across Lake Somova to the forested banks of the Danube as I pondered that Romanian rarity; a first class international menu.
The resort had sidestepped the flood threat by locating on comparatively high ground, which put the Delta itself a good hour away by the hotel’s speedboat. No matter; among the backwater landscapes of drowned trees, reed beds and lily-draped lakes around Murighiol nested cormorants and terns, coots, pelicans and herons in extraordinary profusion. Patrolling crows swooped on unguarded nests to filch eggs which they bore away in their beaks. Snakes were wrapped among the willows. Fishy bubbles rose from the murky depths. Even the unsightly plastic bottles which shoaled among the willows – in some cases from as far away as Serbia and Hungary – were a stirring reminder of the Danube’s great European journey.
We put ashore on Uzlina Island where an old farmer with shock-blue eyes and blonde hair offered us a glass of home-made wine and cheese curds from beyond a rampart of water-lapped sandbags. Timoftei was a Lipovani, Orthodox fundamentalists who had sought sanctuary here from Russian persecution in the 18th century and found their niche as local boatmen. Hats for every season – brimmed reed-woven ones, trilbies, thick woollen ones with ear-flaps - hung from every hook in his simple waterside house. And on his shelf a faded photograph showed him meeting Ceaucescu, who had had a holiday house nearby.
We drove west until the mountains - and the preposterous architecture – announced Transylvania. At Sinaia, the fin-de-siecle villas of this aristocratic mountain resort squatted in shabby landscaped gardens. The stuff of fairy tales and romances, these impossible confections of schloss, manse and manor sported ornate wooden balconies, steeply pitched tin-sheeted roofs sprouting rounded turrets, pyramidal towers topped by spheres, and huge chimney stacks whose vents were modeled as miniature houses. Pride of place went, however, to Peles Castle, late-19th century summer residence of King Carol I and his poet-queen, Carmen Sylva. Here were secret doors behind library bookcases, lavish wall paneling in ash and walnut, acres of oak parquet, Michelangelo copies in bronze, Murano glass chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors of Venetian crystal, Carrara marble door surrounds and Moorish suites. There were also exotic collections of Ottoman weapons which turned me cruel, or so I thought when I challenged the 160-room castle’s guide to summarise the style. ‘German Neo-Renaissance,’ he replied, without missing a beat. In the landscaped gardens, a brown bear padded restlessly against its chain while its gypsy owner pocketed a few lei from snapping tourists.
Transylvania’s high scenery, birch woods topped by pine-clad uplands still trimmed with snow, had left me itching to put on my walking boots. We set out along sunlit trails thick with primroses and crocuses into the Piatra Craiului national park, location for the 2003 Hollywood epic Cold Mountain. Jays flitted among the pines and we passed from shadowed gorges to village hillsides ringing with goatbells where the children were rake-spreading manure across the pastures. At Magura village’s pensiune, its walls of ornately patterned pine shingles, we stopped for a reviving meal; pork chops, herb-scented potatoes and wild mushrooms, all, as welcoming proprietor Adriana Moroie confirmed, grown within a stone’s throw of the house. It was a welcome break from the Romanian restaurant norm where only the names of the dishes - ‘vegetables dressed in corn flakes’, ‘sour giblet soup with turkey wings’ and ‘snack with mush’ – did anything to sustain me. The worst was the positively anaemic Dracula Soup – tomato? – which I encountered in the Sighisoara house where the original toothy count, Vlad the Impaler, was born.
We drove into the heartlands of Saxon Transylvania where the high-walled houses and churches, slit for defensive bowmen, bespoke an architecture betraying the signs of an ancient regional insecurity. The Saxons who settled the area from the 12th century found themselves on Europe’s frontline against Turks and Tatars. At the World Heritage Site of Biertan (German Birthalm), the village church was ringed with three concentric walls while the sacristy door deep within the church, for good Teutonic measure, was secured by nineteen separate bolts. None of which had saved the community from persecution under the Communists; a very old man, sitting in an apple orchard heavy with blossom, told me that he was one of the last remaining Saxons in Birthalm. The rest had begun new lives in Germany.
The world they left behind had hardly changed over the centuries. From the poppy-strewn meadows the domes of sweet-smelling haystacks rose around spindles, like candyfloss. Horse-drawn ploughs worked the fields. Gypsy drivers perched on stout carts beneath the low domes and wide brims of their squashed black bowlers while fetching red tassles hung from their horses’ heads. It was approaching Sibiu, with moated bastions and thickset towers enclosing a glorious medieval core of narrow lanes, cobbled squares and merchant houses beneath steep tiled roofs, that we came across the five shepherds. They were traditionally dressed in old moleskin breeches, waistcoats and high rounded hats. They and their numerous dogs worked the edges of the huge flock. Among the sheep, five hundred strong, were three donkeys laden with bedding, copper kettles, blackened pots and scythes. They were headed, they told us, to new pastures around the Fagaras Mountains. We watched them, a glimpse from quite another age, as they cleared the road and headed out across the sunset plain.
Jeremy Seal was a guest of Regent Holidays (0870 499 0911; www.regent-holidays.co.uk) who offer tailor-made tours to Romania. A 7-day fly-drive tour including flights, car hire, B&B accommodation from £675 per person, or from £979 with private driver/guide. He was also a guest of Delta Nature Resort (0870 068 2798; www.deltaresort.com). Rooms from £100 per person per night B&B.
Information: Romanian National Tourist Office (020 7224 3692; www.romaniatourism.com)
Reading: Romania (Rough Guides, £11.99)
