Letea, Danube Delta, Romania
After yesterday’s fog nothing looked good and the feeling was that we better leave than risking another day of dense fog. But luckily the fog cleared in the evening and the morning, still a little bit foggy, looked way better.
We departed after a quick breakfast in our Perla Hotel, on the shore of the Danube, to Letea Forest and the its famous sand dunes that we have seen already three summers ago. We dressed better against the cold after the previous day and we start winding on the large and narrow Delta canals toward Letea Village. After about one hour we reached the village just when one of the villagers was unloading the reed from his boat. This is a typical delta landscape and activity and we could not be luckier than landing at this perfect moment. We pointed all cameras toward him, making him the the local star for a moment and maybe for longer than that if we end up making the film about the Delta. We watch him unload an entire boat and further we asked him to go and cut more reed and he obliged. So more filming and more reed unloading, it ended right in time to jump in the carriage prepared with one horse named Mugurel, that brought us to Letea Forest in about 2 hours from the village. The forest is protected and is really a treasure. It looks antique with old and tall trees whose shapes devoid of leaves are better profiled on the winter sky. Mugurel acted up several times, impressed by its comrades, the semi wild horses that are roaming the forest that were saved in the last moment sometimes this year of slaughter by a concerted action by media and some NGOs. The horses are all around the forest, more than 1000 of them. They are partially owned by villagers, but many of them were never owned, being born after the last counting. Sometimes they were looking curiously at us but many times were running away scared that we came to lasso them. Mugurel paced through the road’s pot holes, avoiding trees and finally took us out of the mysterious forest of shapes close to the tallest sand dune, that we were not able to see in our previous visit. The trip was really worth it because the view from this dune is astonishing, similar if we preserve the right scale with views from South West messas and canyons. It is an impressive location that gives you a circular panorama worth of any effort to get there.
We could not stay too long because in the winter the days are short and after another 2 hour drive by carriage we got back to the canal, parked Mugurel with his master, got in our boat ready for another session of cold and got back to Sulina for a well deserved dinner.
I just want to mention that the food in Romania is unique in the sense that I call it ” food for people” in comparison with “food for tourists” that is wide spread in Europe. Extremely delicious, diverse and well cooked the dishes’ size can satisfy somebody who did not eat for an entire week. These are not special dishes cooked for mass tourism but dishes eaten by the REAL people of the city or village. Anywhere we went in Romania we experience this but be aware, no alfa-afa sprouts type things are served here. Be ready for a very hearty meal!
The next morning we woke at 5:30am and packed to catch the fast boat to Tulcea. The previous evening we did all the payments for the hotel, food and our trip in the Delta and managed our media shot in the 3 days. We got to the boat in time happy that in 90 minutes we would be in Tulcea and the boat left in time around 6:50am. But after it stopped in Crisan to pick up some other passengers, we noticed that it stopped twice and we did not know why because there were no villages. Finally it stopped again and remained there because the load was to big and it cannot get up on water to create the air bag underneath. We were dozing in the boat and at one point I got bored and decided to go on the shore, take a walk and shoot a little bit more. But when I wanted to get out I noticed that we were right in the middle of the Danube….. and no swimming in December. Meanwhile another slower boat that left Sulina soon after us passed without stopping to the dismay of the locals because they had a bad engine and they did not want to be in the same predicament. So we waited for about two-three hours in the middle of the river till another boat came from Tulcea and picked us up.
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