Sunday, September 16, 2012
We wake up early and head down to breakfast before finishing our packing. We hoard food for the trip and say our goodbyes. Arriving before 9am our driver Mikael, a tall skinny young kid, waits outside with a black Mercedes instead of the promised Renault something-or-other. We do not complain, of course. Turns out he drove Richard, Patrick and Raymond to Transylvania. Mindboggling connections in Romania.The highway is very good and we make great time through a flat, fairly uninteresting landscape. We doze. When I wake up there are rolling hills and people by the wayside selling whole fish dangling from their hands, and then others with bags of fresh walnuts. By the time we realize the latter (Mikael doesn't know the word for walnuts and googles a picture for me on his iPhone, haha) we don't see anymore vendors. We do find a family gathering the fruits by the wayside and they give us some - but we still need to find a way to crack them.
We reach Tulcea an hour before our 2.30pm transport 1 hour down the Sulina canal to our resort. We find shelter on the terrasse of the Hotel Delta **** - the Hotel Delta *** is the other half of the building....
The weather has been sunny and warm, but now we notice grey clouds moving in, the wind is picking up, and lightning streaks across the sky, immediately followed by thunder - I don't even have time to count 1,, then 'boom!'. If there's one thing I really hate it's being on the water with lightning.....
I'm texting back and forth with the resort, and they assure us we'll be in a covered boat and don't seem worried about the weather. Suddenly a small motor boat, 21ft, with red and white seats and a flapping 'toldo' pulls up, driven by a guy with a white kerchief tied on his head and carrying 4 bedraggled passengers, one of whom picks her way up the gangway in high-heeled sneakers. She's quite pretty and assures us, when we ask, that the resort is very nice, but that it was cold. With that info we get our bags and board the boat, ahead of a Romanian couple, who speak a tiny bit of French. Carrying my pillow - the one that has protected my hip so far - I grab the best seat and get comfortable. It has stopped raining and the sky is looking brighter.
We still have to wait for a young Spanish couple that arrives with a huge suitcase, and then the driver whooshes us off in what we'll later learn in the "ultrafast luxury boat" - the pride of the resort.
We are received with champagne served on a "hotel boat" anchored up in front of the resort, then walk past a pond with a lot of quiet frogs (not a huge frog fan...) on to our assigned spacious room overlooking the canal running behind the resort and the marshes beyond. We have to order our lunch/dinner waaaay in advance and set a time for our meal - how long can it take to cook a fish? I wonder about the huge pieces of wood I can see in the kitchen entrance. But we get ourselves some big mugs of draught Heineken and go sit in the sunshine - it's so quiet and the air is super-fresh.
Dinner is perhaps unremarkable, I get brined carp wirh polenta and Oswaldo a better choice, perch-pike with mushrooms in a sour sauce (I am quoting here). We share a bottle of white wine and enjoy the dessert, pancake with jam. Then off to our room for a good night's sleep.
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