By John Borthwick
UnspecifiedCredit: Lonely Planet Images
Sailing down the Danube, John Borthwick discovers blue is a very personal hue.
THE BLUE Danube is brown - at least when I first see it in Budapest. According to romantics, the River Danube looks blue when you're in love, green if it's a one-sided affair, grey when the passion's gone and black when it's all over. Brown doesn't rate a mention on this love litmus test.
Romantically browned-off or otherwise, I board Tauck's rivership, the Swiss Emerald, for a week-long cruise down the Lower Danube to the Black Sea - whatever colour it turns out to be. But first, a quick look around the twin Hungarian cities of hilly Buda and flat Pest.
The contrasts are everywhere. Budapest mixes elegant Hapsburg-era palaces with blocks of neo-brutal Soviet hangover-school architecture. Similarly, dining options veer from veal paprikash to, well, Burger a la King. Meanwhile, the background music might be Franz Liszt or a busker doing goulash Johnny Cash. Oddly, nowhere do I hear the Blue Danube Waltz.
Long, Parisian-style boulevards lead through this grand city. At one end is Heroes Square where our guide runs through a list of famous Hungarians: Belas (Lugosi and Bartok), Rubik (of the cube), Biro (of the ballpoint), Estee Lauder, 22 saints, 13 Nobel Laureates and Zsa Zsa Gabor. In a semi-circle around this sunny square are 14 bronzes of Hungary's greatest warriors, kings and bishops, but no Zsa Zsa.
Liszt called our next stop, the compact and ornately beautiful Budapest Opera House, "this little jewel box." And indeed it is, especially when a costumed tenor and soprano serenade us from a balcony with duets from Don Giovanni and La Traviata.
It is hard to top that with much but sailing away. So, next day, our sleek, 110-metre, 120-passenger rivership turns downstream to begin our 1350kilometres journey south and east towards Romania, via Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria. We dock at rural Solt, near a sort of paprika-western theme farm. Hungarian Puszta cowboys perform thrilling stunts, culminating in "horse surfing" - a rider stands balanced atop the haunches of two thundering steeds while driving them and three lead horses at top speed around the arena.
Sailing on, we get to know our fellow passengers, mostly Americans, plus the Dutch, Romanian and Indonesian crew. Each night we dine like gourmands.
The next day we awake in Croatia, at Vukovar, a pretty 10th-century town that was befouled by ethnic cleansing during an orgy of tribal spite that was the 1990s Balkan War. Walls pockmarked by bullet holes and the shells of bombed buildings contrast with shady trees, ice-cream stalls and people at ease, slowly assuaging terrible memories.
The full moon rises over the Danube. Banks as dark as the Black Forest slide past. Next morning finds us in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. At the town's ancient fortress, our politically incorrect (and thus, great fun) guide, Lilly, cracks the old joke about not ordering "Banana Split" here since the anti-Croatian hardliners wanted to rename it "Banana Belgrade". She says wryly: "Everybody in the Balkans remembers mostly when their side was great - even if the last time was in the 14th century."
Every few nights a new troupe of beautiful and handsome folk dancers entertains us in the ship's dining room before we settle down to our next feast. Accompanied by fiddlers and strummers, they swirl, twirl and sing. It's skilful and authentic, but as one New Yorker muses: "The leaps and hoots seem pretty much the same. Main difference is the embroidery."
I retire to my cabin where I can slide open its floor-to-ceiling windows and look out on the river, just metres away. There's a flat-screen satellite television where you can just turn off all the news from the disaster world we've left temporarily behind. In most ports we can download wireless emails, although at a formidable cost.
The Iron Gate of Romania was once a forbidding gauntlet for river craft. As we approach it, the windless morning river stretches ahead and our wake ripples behind us like tugged silk. We enter a 100-kilometre-long series of limestone gorges that culminates in the Kazan Narrows and the Iron Gate. On the northern bank are Romania and the wild Carpathian Mountains; to our right is Serbia, soon to be followed by Bulgaria. I spot an ancient stone pylon on the shore, the remains of Roman emperor Trajan's bridge, the first to span the Danube, in 103AD.
The river here funnels down to about 200 metres wide. Before it was dammed in the 1960s, boats could take four days to complete the upstream battle against it. Today we pass easily through several modern locks.
The scenery varies - dense woods give way to villages; onion-domed spires and gothic crosses of Orthodox churches are succeeded by industrial zones, then stretches peopled only by fishermen or children swimming.
Our first view of Bulgaria is more like the Danube blues than the Blue Danube. Departing the little port of Svistov on a coach, we pass through threadbare villages, devoid of enterprise or the young, the sort of old Iron Curtain wasteland where Tom Waits' tongue-in-cheek quip might fit perfectly: "Everything's broken and no one speaks English." Little do I know that this is the prelude to the hilltop village of Arbanassi, which turns out to be the highlight of the trip for many of us. We roll into a well-maintained stone village where "for sale" signs in English and Cyrillic promote investment in formidable villas.
Arbanassi is a favourite bolthole of holidaying Brits and Bulgarian mafiosi. We head to a low stone chapel, built that way so as not to attract the wrath of the Muslim Ottomans who occupied this area for centuries.
Inside the 16th-century Church of the Nativity we are all but overwhelmed by stunning images. The vaulted ceilings are decorated from floor to dome with about 2000 frescos and icons. Spinning in infinity around us is a cosmos of painted angels, saints and Madonnas. Four bearded, dark-garbed cantors glide into this numinous cocoon and begin chanting, filling it with soaring harmonies.
We return to the Swiss Emerald via the cobbled streets of the country's medieval capital, Veliko Turnovo, with my sombre first impressions of Bulgaria turned on their head.
Romania at last. Time to "debark", as Americans sometimes say. We have two final days to see Bucharest and parts of "Dracula-stan" - Transylvania and Vlad the Impaler's tomb on Snagov Island - but first we sample the Black Sea at Mamaia. Champagne on the beach and a plunge into the sea. Just as the Blue Danube isn't blue, the Black Sea isn't black. It is, I am pleased to see, blue.
The writer travelled courtesy of Tauck World Discovery.
TRIP NOTES
* Tauck World Discovery's Lower Danube cruises from Budapest to Bucharest (and reverse) operate from May to September. Prices start from $US3990 ($4794) for 11 nights and cover breakfasts, dinners (with wine), most lunches, some meals ashore, excursions and gratuities.
* Phone (02)82967071 or see www.traveltheworld.com.au.
Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter
Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.