Old World Europe
Budapest to Bucharest. There’s a nice ring to this itinerary, a river cruise book-ended by rhyming cities. We’re headed downstream from Hungary to Romania, from the Blue Danube to the Black Sea.
Our week-long cruise on Tauck’s rivership Swiss Emerald starts with a good look around hilly Buda and flat Pest. Contrasts are name of the game here: Budapest’s dining options, for instance, range from veal paprikash to Burger à la King, with the accompanying music veering from Franz Liszt to goulash Johnny Cash. Oddly, never The Blue Danube waltz.
Meanwhile, Hapsburg-era palaces rub their elegant shoulders with neo-brutal Soviet Hangover architecture. Heroes Square sits at the end of Andrassy, one of the long, Haussmann-style boulevards that dissect this grand city. Our guide proclaims a list of famous Hungarians: 22 saints, 13 Nobel laureates, two Belas (Lugosi and Bartok), Rubik (of the cube), Biro (of the ballpoint), Estée Lauder and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
In a semicircle around Heroes Square stand 14 bronzes of Hungary’s greatest warriors, kings and bishops, but nowhere a Zsa Zsa, pen, cube or lipstick.
“They don’t make ’em like the used to,” quips a fellow passenger when we visit the compact and beautiful Budapest Opera House. Local boy Liszt said it better, calling the 1884 building “this little jewel box”. It becomes even more so when, as a surprise for us, a costumed tenor and soprano appear on a balcony to serenade us with duets from Don Giovanni and La Traviata. Time to go with the flow. Our sleek, 110-metre rivership turns downstream on its 1,350-kilometre journey south and east through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. But first, a shocking revelation. The Blue Danube is brown at Budapest. Perhaps this is something in the eye of the beholder. Allegedly, the river looks blue when you’re in love, green if it’s a one-sided affair, grey when the passion has ebbed – and black when it’s all over. Brown doesn’t rate a mention on this love litmus test.
One morning we go ashore at rural Solt to catch a spectacular show at a sort of Paprika Western theme farm. A team of Hungarian Puszta cowboys performs daredevil stunts for us, culminating in a rider standing balanced atop the haunches of his two thundering steeds while driving them and three lead horses at furious speed around the arena – “horse surfing” describes it best.
My fellow passengers (some 120) are mostly American, while the crew is Dutch, Romanian and Indonesian. Each night we dine like gourmands. I then retire to my ensuite cabin where the floor-to-ceiling windows slide open and I can watch the en
dless river, just metres away. A full moon rises as banks as dark as the Black Forest slide past. There’s also a flat-screen satellite TV that allows me to just turn off all the news from the disaster world we’ve left briefly behind. Tomorrow is another dawn, another country, Croatia. We tour ashore at Vukovar, a pretty 10th-century town that was befouled by ethnic cleansing during the 1990s Balkan War. Walls pockmarked with bullet holes contrast with today’s easygoing ambience. Cruising overnight, come morning we dock in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. Our politically incorrect (and thus great fun) guide, Lilly, cracks joke about the neighbourhood delusions of grandeur: “Everybody in the Balkans remembers mostly when their side was great – even if the last time was in the 14th century.”
Every few nights Tauck arranges for a new troupe of folk dancers to entertain us in the dining room. The performances are vigorous and authentic but one blasé New Yorker muses, “Their leaps and hoots seem pretty much the same to me. Main difference from country to country is the embroidery.”
We approach the once dreaded Iron Gate of Romania. On the northern bank are Romania and the wild Carpathian Mountains; to our right is Serbia. This 100-kilometre-long series of limestone gorges that culminates in the Kazan Narrows and the Iron Gate was once a forbidding gauntlet for river craft; before it was dammed in the 1960s, boats took four days to complete the upstream battle against it. Today we pass easily through, courtesy of several modern locks.
I am reminded of the antiquity of life along this river with the sight of an ancient stone pylon on the shore, the remains of Roman Emperor Trajan’s Bridge, the first to cross the Danube, way back in 103 AD. The shoreline scenery varies, with dense woods giving way to villages with onion-domed spires and gothic crosses. Going ashore for the first time in Bulgaria feels more like the Danube Blues than the Blue Danube. From the little port of Svishtov our coach passes through sulking villages devoid of enterprise or the young, a threadbare Iron Curtain wasteland. Little do I know that this is the prelude to arriving at a little hilltop village that will be highlight of the trip for me.
In the village of Arbanassi we are led to a stone chapel, built discreetly low so as not to attract the wrath of the Moslem Ottomans who occupied this area for centuries. Inside this 16th-century Church of the Nativity are vaulted ceilings decorated from floor to dome with some 2,000 frescoes and icons. Plus, the Tauck team has hatched another surprise. Four dark-garbed cantors glide into this numinous cavern, their chants filling the space with soaring harmonies. I return to Swiss Emerald with my sombre first impressions of Bulgaria turned right on their head.
In Romania it’s time to say farewell to all that fine fare and wine, to the good-hearted crew, and to the sunny upper deck from where we have scoped this grand river. We sample the Black Sea at Mamaia. Tauck never stints on celebrations, so it’s champagne corks galore, then a plunge into the ocean. But, just as the Blue Danube isn’t blue, the Black Sea isn’t black. It is, I am pleased to report, blue.
Our last two days are devoted to seeing the crumbling Belle Epoque glory of Bucharest’s past, plus Ceausescu’s mad, one-thousand room palace of hubris. And of course “Dracula-stan”, including Vlad the Impaler’s tomb on Snagov Island.