Expedition to Letea
Up in the Delta
Cruising slowly along
Waterlilies, green frogs,
Eagles and birdsong.
Ambling in the Delta
In Petre's boat
(He's the one keeping us
All afloat.)
Herons, bittern, cygnets,
Kingfishers bright,
Ancient oak forest
Dabbed with sunlight.
Sand dunes surprising us,
Jolting horse and cart,
Blue thatched houses,
Each a work of art.
Of course the Delta deserved a second chance. We motored without mishap to the little village of Crisan where people walk or use bicycles. The priest has a motorbike and the mayor has a car, but otherwise you only hear the outboard motors of the numerous fishing boats or the taxi boats. Once a day, the big ship from the Tulcea--Sulina run (and back) stops to drop and collect passengers. They get off the boat lugging their wheeled suitcases full of the week's groceries.
We asked around for someone who would take us in a small boat through the little canals for some bird-watching and we had the outstanding good fortune to be directed to Petre Vasiliu, an ornithologist actually from Crisan who takes tourists out in his boat to various destinations in the Delta. He had planned a trip the next morning to Letea with two other couples, Claud and Marie-Elaine from France and Isabel and Sebastian from Germany, and we were invited to join them.
Almost from the first moment, we were entranced.
Johannes reports:
Our boat was an open type offering space for a maximum of 12 people, fitted with an amazingly quiet, very sophisticated 115hp outboard engine. But the star of this trip was Petre who enthusicatically dispensed his detailed knowledge of the innumerable species of birds and plants at every twist and turn of the outing.
Three miles towards Sulina we forked off to the north into the old Danube and a few miles further we forked off to the right into a much narrower canal. Every now and then Petre would stop the boat pointing out a bird he'd spotted with naked eye that often I couldn't see even through my binoculars. But most I saw, be it the three white-tailed eagles, several kingfishers, herons of various types and countless others. The river banks had turned into extensive reed beds often with carpets of water lilies in front and once on the narrower canal repeatedly we would turn for a few minutes into lake-like extensions. Petre's enthusiasm was contagious and each of us was skimming non-stop river, reeds, bushes and sky.
Then we reached the little isolated village of Letea, where Petre just drove the boat gently into the reeds and onto the soft shore. Easily we climbed out onto the dike where a young man waited with two horses and a blue cart. As skilfully as Petre had steered the boat, this young man now guided his horses with a word here or a touch of the reins there, spurring them into a gallop just before a little rise or a patch of soft sand. The simple cart with a bench along each side had no suspension and each bump jarred my back painfully. By taking some of my weight on my feet and hands I managed.
The stretched out village was beautiful, most roofs reed covered with carved wooden decorations at the gable tops or the ridge, the walls blue or green. But we just drove through and across flat land beyond, sparsely covered with grass, for another kilometer. Here we reached the guarded entrance into fenced-in forest that is under strict conservation apart from a small section for tourism purposes. In particularly severe floods this entire area for miles around, including the forest, is up to a meter under water. After the best part of another kilometer through poplar, ash and oak forest we stopped and walked a few hundred meters up a rise to an open area that stretched for miles, gently undulating dunes, some of it open sand but mostly covered in grass. On the way back to the cart we even spotted a few of the hundreds of wild horses roaming this forest.
In the boat again, we were given a last treat by forking off the old Danube into an enchanted little canal, its surface completely covered in green, at one point hundreds of frogs jumping on the fine-leaved plants. It was a fantastic magic day.
