Slow boat down the Danube : TRAVEL

The Danube Delta is one of the last genuine wildernesses in Europe. Helena Drysdale chugged slowly through this labyrinth of watery paths teeming with rare birds and fish

OUR river cruiser, the Alliance was larger and more elegant than any of us had expected. Covered deck, berths for eight, a crew of three. Only a change of costume was needed to transform us into a boating party by Renoir. It was the style that was such a surprise in Romania; we were more used to hotels with peeling chipboard and rattley lifts and a mysterious absence of bath plugs.

Our plan was to spend three days and three nights exploring the Danube Delta. Instead of flowing into the Black Sea from one great mouth, the Danube ends by slowing up and dissolving - as if exhausted by its 1,777- mile journey through Europe. On reaching eastern Romania this great river disintegrates into almost 2,000 square miles of seeping reed beds. Rivulets and streams wander off at random, a labyrinth of watery paths. This is one of the last outposts of genuine wilderness left in Europe.

At midday the engine sputtered into life and we chugged out of Tulcea. The Delta began. Here the Danube splits into three main branches: the Chilia, the Sulina, and the Sfintu Gheorghe. The Chilia turns north into Ukraine where it enters the Black Sea through 45 mouths; the central channel of the Sulina discharges directly into the Black Sea through a 19th-century canal; and the Sf Gheorghe veers south, twisting and turning. We chose the central branch but would leave the boring canal for remoter lakes to the north, rejoining the canal only when it neared the sea itself.

We were two families: Dan and Mona and their teenage daughter (Romanian friends who had chartered the Alliance), and my husband, our 20-month- old daughter, Tallulah, and my mother-in-law. A passionate twitcher, my mother-in-law spent her days in the bows glued to binoculars. Almost at once a purple heron flopped out of the willows fringing the banks and heaved its way over the woods and beyond; a glossy ibis with a scimitar beak and twig-like legs struggled free of the trees and soared. There were swans, kingfishers, long-tailed ducks, divers, egrets, vast wheeling birds of prey that can only have been ospreys: our engine disturbed them, but that meant we got a perfect view as they were dislodged from their hideouts, before settling back in our wake.

Three hundred and ten species of bird live here, including 60 per cent of the world's small cormorants, but it is also a major breeding ground for migrants from Asia, Africa and northern Europe. Almost half the world's red-breasted geese winter in the Delta. But what we had come mainly to see were the pelicans. The Danube Delta is home to Europe's greatest reserve of dalmatian and white pelicans, and towards the afternoon we glimpsed them circling overhead, grand and slow. Later we paused beside a pelican colony, their great beaks seeming to smile as they bunched together.

Turning north into a narrower channel, where the air danced with willow fluff, Dan slotted his fishing rod together and prepared to enter his idea of heaven: four hours sitting in the dinghy with his line over the side. This was a rare holiday for Dan; as the manager of one of the few Romanian factories that have been privatised since the collapse of Communism, he works all hours. He needed the quiet, and also the limitless space of the Delta, of water and reeds and sky; back home the three of them live squeezed together in a two- room flat.

Dan didn't catch anything worth keeping, but there was no shortage in the river. A local fisherman drew alongside in his rowing boat and was handed a mug of tuica, plum brandy; in turn, we hauled aboard a vast whiskered catfish. Nello, the cook, held it aloft: it was more than five feet long and weighed 30 kilos. More tuica and a wad of local banknotes were lowered overboard.

The crew was full of tales about Danube catfish. There was the one about the man who was standing on shore until a catfish reared out of the river and snatched him from behind; there was the one about the 100-kilo catfish with teeth like saws. We ate grilled catfish steaks that night, and then (less deliciously) cold catfish steaks for breakfast. We bought trout, sturgeon, and a flat fish I didn't recognise, one unique to this river. Dan never could have too much fish.

Most of the 15,000 inhabitants of the Delta are fishermen or reed harvesters. Villages, like the curiously-named Mila 23 (23rd Mile), are strung along the channels: mud walls, reed thatch, blue-painted timber. We had to remind ourselves that this was Europe, not the pangalanes of Mada-gascar, nor the back waters of Kerala.

Ragged children with shocks of blonde hair gaped at Tallulah and tried to communicate in a Russian dialect; they were Lipovani, descendants of the Old Believers who left Russia in the 18th century to avoid persecution. Followers of the monk Philip, they came to the Delta after rejecting the priesthood, the sacraments, marriage and, above all, allegiance to the tsar. According to our Rough Guide, the Lipovani were "easy to recognise by long beards and on-shore garb of tall hats and black cloaks". Our Lipovani crew thought this hilarious; everyone we saw was hatless and clean-shaven - perhaps we were in the wrong part of the river.

We moored for the night in Crisan, the main "tourist" spot in the region. There was a run-down hotel and some huts for hire, and that evening a boatload of Romanian tourists was disgorged for a barbecue before roaring off into the night, but that was all.

Leaving Nello babysitting, we hired a rowing boat and glided silently through smaller streams, into the hidden recesses of the interior. Water lilies parted over teeming water life, and frogs burst abruptly into a chorus of croaks. Now we were on their level, and it was a relief to escape the Alliance's motor. When we went ashore, a fox shot away. Horses, flocks of geese, and sheep with bells round their necks grazed on drained farmland, beside the saw-tooth line of cut and drying reeds. In the distance we could see the grass-hopper legs of a dredger, working ceaselessly to keep the waterways clear. A night heron lurked under a willow; it was still there an hour later, staring at fish.

The cabin had been transformed into a dormitory, the seats now berths with Tallulah in her travel cot between. It was hot and airless, but we couldn't open the hatch because of the mosquitoes; we stank all the time of Autan.

The next day we visited the Padurea Caraorman oak forest. Dan felt we needed something more diverting than waterways. We lurched into the dunes in our taxi - a tractor. A lamb, waiting patiently to be sacrificed for lunch, lay at our feet; for Tallulah "big fish" and "poor lamb" are now synonymous with Romania. My mother-in-law (aged 64) gamely hung on to the side, while Tallulah, despite being nearly decapitated by the jolts, fell asleep in the backpack. Then the tractor broke down. We waited for help in the sultry heat of the forest while the mosquitoes descended. A golden oriole flashed through the undergrowth; wild boar and wolves were said to live here but, like the bearded Lipovani, they were lying low. The sand was slippery and scorching underfoot. Dan said that in winter, when the wind whipped south from Siberia, the entire landscape changed. Some hills were flattened, others grew.

That evening we reached Sulina, the Delta's only town, developed on the site of the Byzantine port of Sellina. A few rusting hulls lined the bank; otherwise there was little sign of its former prosperity. Between the 10th and 15th centuries Genoese, Venetians, Arabs and Greeks traded here with the native population, and pirates preyed on Black Sea shipping. This continued into the era of Turk-ish domination until the 19th century. Then decline set in. Now, little shipping comes through, and neither road nor rail stretch this far. The only access is by boat. We wandered decaying streets. Every bar was lit and the music loud, desperate, as if the only escape from boredom - and from the place itself - was through drink. We found Nello sinking beer with tuica chasers. The musicians were Romanian but the music was eastern. A young man in pointy shoes danced alone, a sinuous, hip-swaying dance, his eyes glazed.

It was as if over its 1,777 miles the Danube had picked up and carried with it the detritus of civilisation, fragments of history and peoples, which had silted up in Sulina.

Here the river ended. We roared out of its mouth but found that the Black Sea was just sea, like any other. Then we turned and headed back upstream for Tulcea, and home.

! Helena Drysdale's book, `Looking for Gheorghe: Love and Death in Romania', is published by Sinclair Stevenson on 27 February at £16.99

RIVER-BOATING IN ROMANIA

Getting there: Tours into the Danube Delta begin from Tulcea. As the Delta is a UNESCO Reservation of the Biosphere, a permit is required, with supplementary charges for boating and fishing. Boating is limited to seven fixed routes, which change from year to year. Independent travellers in Romania should contact Delta Hotel, Strada Isaccei 2, Tulcea (040) 517420, where the manager arranges permits and trips. Staff at Hotel Tulcea, Strada Pacii 2 (040) 512443 also help.

Visits to the Delta are more expensively but more easily organised this end. The following agencies offer tours: Naturetrek, Chautara Bighton, Nr Alresford, Hants SO24 9RB (01962 733051). Two tours per year, February for red-breasted geese and other wintering birds, August for breeding and migratory birds. Prices: £990 inc for 8 days in February, or 10 days in August.

Wexas, 45 Brompton Rd, London SW3 1DE (071-581 4130). From £495 a week including return flights to Bucharest plus £39.58 annual membership fee. Call 071-589 3315 for further details.

For a working conservation holiday in the Delta: The British Trust for Con-servation Volunteers, 36 St Mary's St, Wallingford, Oxon OX10 OEU (01491 839766).

Further information: The Romanian National Tourist Office, 83a Marylebone High Street, London W1M 3DE (071-224 3692)

Recommended reading: The Hiking Guide to Romania (Bradt £10.95) by Tim Burford; Danube by Claudio Magris (Collins Harvill £7.95); Out of Romania by Dan Antal (Faber & Faber £14.99). A new Rough Guide will be published in June.