CRUISING ON THE DANUBE

 As some of you know, I’m ambivalent about cruises. The first I ever had - a gulet tour of the archeological sites of the west coast of Turkey - was brilliant. The next - a large  cruise ship excursion to some Pacific islands - didn’t appeal to me at all. The third - an expedition-scale trip up the north west of coast of Australia - was a fantastic way to see generally inaccessible parts of the country. So, when Susan suggested a cruise of the Danube, I said yes while nurturing secret concerns about whether it was really my type of travel.

And the result? 

Travelling down the Danube is smooth like silk with barely a ripple in the water, albeit water that’s at very low levels due to another hot summer. We travelled from Budapest to Bucharest through Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania with the river regularly acting as a border between countries. The landscape for the most part is underwhelming. The occasional village; a family having a picnic on a sandy spot by the water; low trees and bushes; rare water birds; a holiday home or two made out of containers on stilts; a distant church steeple. There was really only one stunning piece of countryside where the boat moves through some gorges to the Iron Gate Lochs, the result of a dam being built in the 1960s to make that part of the river safer for boats and to provide hydro-electricity to Serbia and Romania.

The boat - Avalon Illumination - was comfortable with panoramic windows to open up for the water breeze, staff doing a very good job at effective emotional labour, a sun deck, and good quality food and wine. In fact, too much food and wine. Susan and I tried to resist but I fear that even our daily excursions didn’t enable us to walk off our indulgence.

The fellow passengers varied from Trump-lovers to Aussie climate-change deniers but there were some delightful people in amongst the mix. We were adopted on Day 1 by 85 year old upstate New Yorker Wendy. This was her 9th Avalon tour and so she became our instant expert on the nature of river cruises and we in turn, provided her with the company that a solo traveller sometimes needs. Her energy and her openness put me to shame as I secretly whinged about the Trumpers and tentatively staggered up the docking ramps with my walking stick.

The countries we travelled through are wrought with trauma and not just the oppression of the Austro-Hungarian or the Ottoman Empires in days gone by. Borders have shifted and people have become refugees overnight. Wars leave scars. Governments cause grief. People disappear - into prison, mass graves, concentration camps. It’s hard to capture the worlds our guides come from but let me tell you some stories of the places we passed through.

In the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, almost everyone behaved badly at some point. Serbia and Montenegro attacked Croatia. Croatia attacked Bosnia Herzegovina then Serbia did even more damage. Bosnians forced Serbs out of villages and vice versa. I’d seen the impact of the war on places like Sarajevo a few years ago and I was curious to see if the war stories were still being told. Our first excursion was in a small Croatian town called Vukovar. I knew there had been a massacre by Serb militia in the hospital there but I wasn’t aware that the town had suffered a long siege with locals pooling their savings to buy guns to defend themselves against the Serbs and the remanent Yugoslav army. At the time, it was the most protracted European battle since WW2 and our guide had fled as a child with her family and she still suffered PTSD. She was a lawyer, deeply cynical about her government and The Hague justice system, and did tours on the weekends to help overcome her trauma by telling the story of her small town. The next day we were in Novi Sad, a Serb town only 80 kilometres away (Melbourne-Geelong = 74km; Perth-Mandurah = 70km) . There, our guides were much more restrained in speaking about the Serb role in the war but their focus was on the damage down by the NATO bombing which took place in their town and in Belgrade in an attempt to halt the war. About the same number of people were killed by the bombings as were massacred in Vukovar but which death is worse? When someone deliberately shoots you because of your ethnicity/religion or when you are accidentally killed in a process designed to stop more killing? Vukovar’s main street still had buildings unrestored after the war whereas Novi Sad’s main street had its colourful 19th century buildings and open plazas in tact.

Our next stop was Belgrade, the political source of much of the 1990s drama. Like many of the cities to come, it was a mixture of attractive 19th century buildings, ugly communist factories and housing, and new developments. As well as a walk through the city, we did a Yugo driving tour. Yugos were the cars that most locals drove, and ours - with no seat belts, power steering or right wing mirror - was made in 1979. Our driver, a delightful young woman, drove like a maniac, nearly collecting buses and pedestrians as we raced through the city. The starting point of the tour was a site which had housed an international trade fair in the 1930s and then became the only concentration camp, Sajmiste, in a capital city during World War 2. The Germans held the old part of the city and the Croatian Ustase the other side of the river, working together to get rid of Jews and Roma and political/ethnic enemies. Apparently, the very existence of this place isn’t know to many people in Belgrade because Tito’s Communist regime wanted to sweep all the “bad” stuff under the carpet to order to create the new socialist regime.

Each communist regime was different. Tito was seen - particularly by the West - as the ‘good’ communist whereas Ceausescu in Romania was viewed as a mad autocrat (more about Romania in the next newsletter). However, in every country we visited, there was talk of communist nostalgia. For better or for worse, there was a generation after WW2 which benefited from communism. Many of these countries were agrarian and many had been in poverty under Ottoman rule for hundreds of years. In the new world, people had access to free education, to affordable housing, to jobs. For example, 85% of Romanians own their homes (albeit sometimes small, and run down). The post 1989 transition was often challenging and now it’s more expensive to buy houses and harder to get jobs. The population of countries dropped by an extraordinary amount (for example the current population of Bulgaria is 6.5 million but it used to be 9 million) during this period as people fled both the post-Communist chaos and in search of employment.

Every day, we stopped in a town or village and went for an adventure. Some adventures we resisted - such as climbing up hundreds of uneven stairs to the fortress of Kaleto in Belogradchik. Some adventures we found ourselves - such as in the cobbled streets with actual artisans in the old capital of Bulgaria, Veliko Tarnovo. There was the coppersmith, the carver, the ceramicist, the painter, and the scarf weaver whose mother made rugs - one of which we couldn’t resist. 

The most impressive castle on the Danube was the Goulbac Fortress which wasn’t ever conquered but it was sold to the Ottomans for 12,000 crowns when the Hungarians refused to pay the Serb who’d been guarding it for them. 

The most beautiful Orthodox Church was in Arbanasi in Bulgaria. The Ottomans allowed the locals to build churches but only on condition that they were modest and smaller than the mosques. In response, the people filled them with extraordinary frescoes. The most completely over the top church was the Temple of Saint Sava, a Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade, built in the 1980s and one of the largest churches in the world. Gold mosaics everywhere. 

What’s really curious in terms of religion is that Bosnia, further from Turkey than Bulgaria or Romania, still has a large Muslim population whether as the other countries don’t. Partly it’s to do with the split Christian practice between East and West in Bosnia at the time of the invasion of the Ottomans and partly because of the Muslims that were forced out of the other countries when independence was gained in the 19th century. It was interesting that one of our Serbian guides made the comment that the Bosnian Muslims came from traitor heritage - that their families had converted for gain hundreds of years ago and that was still seen as a stain.

Language is another fascinating issue in this part of the world. I initially assumed that Simona, our Cruise Director, was Italian because of her accent but she is Romanian. The country was conquered by the Romans in 101-6 AD and the language stayed written and sounding like Latin/Italian. On the other hand, many of the Balkan languages are the same in sound but some are written in Cyrillic (e.g. Serbian and Bulgarian) and others in Latin text (Croatian). 

I appreciate that for many people, the point of going on a cruise is to relax, enjoy the food and wine, and (perhaps) see a little of some new countries. I, on the other hand, want to know more and more and more and even if I can’t clamber up hills at the moment there’s still a deep fascination about visiting new countries and meeting their people. The difference between a cruise and a land tour is that with the former, you meet a different local guide every day and on the latter, you get to engage with one guide at a much deeper level. I would have to say I learnt more about history and culture on my Bosnian tour in 2023 than on this one but I wouldn’t have been able to touch on the stories of 5 countries in such a short time without the skill of the captain guiding us down the river. However it is still fairy floss tourism. A brief sensation of knowingness (and sweetness) but that’s all.

Photos:

1. Heading to the Iron Gate Lochs

2. Susan and Wendy doing some wine tasting

3. Novi Sad, Serbia

4. Ann & a Yugo, Belgrade, Serbia

5. Weaving in Veliko Tarnova, Bulgaria

6. Goulbac Fortress, Serbia

7. Church of the Nativity, Arbanasi, Bulgaria

8. Temple of St Sava, Belgrade, Serbia

PS Our delightful Romanian Cruise Director shared this poem with us and although the boat in question is clearly bigger than our neat little river cruiser, it does capture the key challenges of boat tourism:

The Curse of Cruising
I wake up in the morning to a lovely cup of tea
With my hubby standing next to me smiling down on me
“Have a biscuit with it. Put shoes upon your feet.
Let’s hurry down to breakfast,
It must be time to eat.”

There’s shuffleboard and other games and sitting in the sun
Talks and quizzes, singing too and other lots of fun.
I chat to people I don’t know – so many still to meet
But gosh! Where has the morning gone?
It must be time to eat.

After lunch we sit around doing not a lot
Then hubby says, “A cup of tea? Let’s look at what they’ve got.
Those sandwiches and cakes look nice. Just give yourself a treat.
It’s two whole hours since we had lunch.
It must be time to eat.”

Then I feel all guilty so I rush off to the gym
and leap and prance and jump and dance and stretch out every limb.
Then shower and change and preen and pat and check that all is neat
A quick drink in the bar and then
It must be time to eat.

Later there are shows and jokes and songs for her and him
Then I stagger to my cabin ‘cos I’m full up to the brim.
But what’s that on my pillow so tempting and so sweet?
Ooooh! A little square of chocolate!
It must be time to eat.

I know what’s going to happen when I’m home and on the scales
And the arrow whizzes upward and I’m thinking of beached whales
And my clothes no longer fit me and the edges will not meet
It's just the curse of cruising
It must be time to eat.