The Danube’s green waltz

AT the end of its 1,771-mile journey across Europe, the mighty Danube River seems to give up trying to reach the Black Sea. It turns north, away from the coast, crosses the lonely steppe country, then frays into myriad channels, marshes, swamps and lakes edged by waterlogged willow trees.

Colonies of birds fly in from Asia, Africa and Siberia. In the stalled, murky water, giant carp and catfish lurk, sought by fishermen who live in villages that can be reached only by boat.

This is the Danube River delta, a 1.6-million-acre World Biosphere Reserve, out of time, unknown and remote, a lost puzzle piece at the wild, eastern edge of Europe. To see it is proof that the meandering river has never lost heart.

All along, it knew that the shortest route is not always the best way to get where you want to go.

In Romania, summer vacationers make a beeline for Black Sea beaches south of Constanta, about 80 miles east of Bucharest, Romania’s capital. But only a few follow the river to its delta, which lines the northern part of Romania’s Black Sea coast between Constanta and the Ukrainian border.

In 1999, Diwaker Singh, an Indian investment broker who works in Bucharest, brought his family here. He found thousands of nesting pelicans and cormorants flying in tight V formations, flotillas of water lilies and endless beds of reeds, Black Sea dunes, Greek and Roman archeological sites, painted monasteries and lost fishing villages.

But there were no reliable ways to see them and no interesting places to stay, except for a handful of dour, communist-era resorts and ugly, high-rise hotels in the delta gateway town of Tulcea.

Singh became acquainted with Virgil Munteanu, then-governor of the region, who helped him get approval to build a luxury hotel on a hill near the village of Somova, overlooking the delta. Singh’s goal was to create a model eco-resort, showcasing the folk architecture, arts and crafts of Romania and employing local people.

Munteanu, who had just finished his term in office, became the general manager, and the Delta Nature Resort opened in May 2005.

I came here for a long weekend last month after a four-hour trip from Bucharest, mostly on bumpy back roads. I traveled in one of the resort’s big Mercedes-Benz vans with Nassim, Singh’s eldest son, a tall 16-year-old with the face of a cherub and the experience of a tycoon-in-the-making. He divides his time among an English boarding school, India and Bucharest.

When we passed a horse-drawn hay cart on the highway, Nassim smiled and said sagely, “The old and new really clash here.”

Less than 20 years after the overthrow of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Bucharest looks like a city on growth hormones. Big-name foreign companies have opened shop, drawn partly by rock-bottom prices for goods and services as well as a highly literate, high-tech-savvy workforce. Real estate values are skyrocketing, and there is construction seemingly everywhere, spurred by Romania’s expected acceptance early next year into the European Union.

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The old ways

ONCE we left Bucharest, I saw shepherds moving their flocks of sheep and goats in the age-old rhythms of transhumance, the seasonal shifting of livestock from one pasture to another. In a countryside largely untouched by development, in a nation still manifestly part of the developing world, geese and pigs forage outside tumble-down farmhouses. Families sell colossal watermelons by the roadside, fetch water from wells and ride to town in wagons like the Pennsylvania Dutch. Fields of wheat, corn and ravishing yellow sunflowers stretch in seemingly every direction, with nary a gas station or convenience store to interrupt.

The Danube delta is the region’s one major attraction. Eleven thousand years ago, sand banks built up at the mouth of the river, giving it no other recourse than to pool into placid lakes and back up into narrow, stagnant channels. Near Tulcea, the Danube separates into three main branches: the Chilia, bordering Ukraine; the Sfintu Gheorghe, flowing east below a chain of ancient, rounded-off mountains; and the Sulina, straightened by engineers in the 19th century to accommodate freighters.

The road to the Delta Nature Resort turns west at Tulcea, passing a Ceausescu-era factory, with fuming smokestacks and broken windows, that processes the raw materials for aluminum. It keeps the town employed and distributes hot water to several dozen villages nearby, but it also sends pollutants through an above-ground pipe to an earth-embanked reservoir yards away from one of the delta’s arms.

You cannot visit this place without being struck by how precious but imperiled it is. This aviary, fish tank, oxygen-producing lung has narrowly escaped damaging development on numerous occasions, most recently in 2004, when dredging began in a channel on the Ukrainian side, now halted partly because of pressure from environmental groups. Before that, Ceausescu drained sections of the wetlands for agriculture, and the straightening of the Sulina allowed mammoth freighters into the delta as far east as Tulcea. Its sturgeon population is now critically endangered because of the unappeasable demand for the fishes’ tiny black eggs, known as Beluga caviar.

“The biggest problem,” Singh told me when I met him in his Bucharest office after my stay at the resort, “is that no one seems to know who is responsible for the delta. It’s now under the Romanian ministry of agriculture, and that’s a contradiction. There is no master plan for it, and the people of the delta see no reason why they should be involved in its conservation.”

As we turned off the highway west of Tulcea, I marveled that it took an Indian deal maker to take on the task of protecting the Danube delta. This is a man whose knowledge of Romania, when he first arrived here eight years ago, began and ended with Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci.

Outside the ramshackle village of Somova, we ascended a hill covered in shaggy grapevines. Suddenly, I saw the delta, a petit-point tapestry in shades of green that stretched from horizon to horizon. A wattle fence banked by a riot of wildflowers marks the beginning of the resort, centered on a courtyard building with a bar, restaurant and observation tower.

Below it, 30 villas in three military rows and a swimming pool watch over Lake Somova, connected to the main river channel at high tide. A dock at the waterfront with a handful of motorboats tethered to it serves as the resort’s parking lot.

I met Munteanu at the reception desk. He described the sightseeing itinerary included in my three-night package and warned me to stay indoors between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when hordes of mosquitoes come out. The resort was preparing for a corporate executive retreat, but for the moment I had it virtually to myself.

A few months after the resort opened, avian flu was discovered in delta ducks and swans, the first instance of the potentially lethal virus in continental Europe. Since its appearance in the Danube delta it has spread as far west as France. Transmission of the H5N1 virus from birds to humans is rare, yet thousands of contaminated birds have been killed in Romania, and the fear of a pandemic has kept the resort’s villas largely empty.

That’s a pity, because they are charming, green shingled structures with stone fireplaces and wide front porches where greenery hangs from the roof to the balustrade, framing the view. Each one has a spacious living room, bedroom and bath, decorated with such folk craft touches as woven rugs, wooden lamps and ceramics chosen on forays through the Romanian hinterland by Singh and his wife. The villas have modern amenities such as air conditioning, but I immediately opened the tightly screened picture windows to let in the breeze and the hum of the delta.

The first evening, I sat in the high-ceilinged dining room, surrounded by an Audubon guidebook of delta birds hand-painted on the walls. I was about to order from the menu, which is heavy on freshwater fish and produce. But Nassim stopped by to tell me that he had asked chef Sandeep Chadha, one of the only resort employees not from the delta region, to make food from the subcontinent.

So I started with a plate of delicious, mixed Indian appetizers, followed by creamy catfish curry. The wine list features Romanian vintages that I thought would be better used in the making of ethanol. The restaurant sells wine by the bottle, so I couldn’t try Romanian vintages by the glass.

And I had other concerns, stemming chiefly from service that had all the ambitions of a luxury hotel but consistently fell short. My villa had fresh flowers that were left to wither. No one tended the pool area, and when I asked for coffee in my room, a waiter brought only a single cup, because, he said, the resort didn’t have any thermoses.

After that, I breakfasted on the restaurant’s terrace, watching barn swallows flit neurotically around nests tucked under the roof. White pelicans and black cormorants flew by, playing a game of chess in the sky. They work together, Munteanu told me, with the pelicans forming a circle on the water and the cormorants plunging in the middle to bring up the fish.

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For bird lovers

MY two days at the resort were devoted to delta sightseeing, first in a speedboat that took me into a network of river veins north of Tulcea, marked by signs, like city streets. I saw egrets, herons and immature cormorants in treetop nests, isolated wildlife viewing towers, dilapidated excursion boats and weekend anglers in dinghies underneath an awning of willows, hoping for a strike from one of the delta’s mean trophy pikes. Along the river, kids in mismatched swimming suits dived off the banks while their parents played cards and drank beer at waterfront campsites.

I got all the way to Sulina, the biggest town in the delta with a population of about 5,000. A century ago, it was the headquarters of the European Commission for the Danube River, which engineered the removal of seven wide “S” curves in the Sulina channel, shortening the trip for freighters from Tulcea to the sea by about 17 miles. At the time, the town had about 35,000 people, foreign consulates and a busy port.

But no engineer can change the fact that the Danube is a great sieve, carrying silt and debris that it leaves behind on entering the Black Sea, incessantly reconfiguring the coastline. Sulina is now about five miles west of the sea, a town in dry dock. Submerged concrete barriers have been installed in the channel to keep the waterway on course.

The next day, resort guide Catalin Stonescu took me to the moldering natural history museum in Tulcea to inspect a full array of stuffed delta birds, plus fish swimming in tanks in the basement. We also crossed Lake Somova in a motorboat, where I saw something better: a pale yellow squacco heron poised on a lily pad, as motionless as the ones at the museum.

Then it was on to the Christian Orthodox Saon Monastery, whose silver domes loom above reed beds. The compound has two churches, one from the early 19th century, built in the Russian style with a baby-blue interior, the other more typically Romanian, lined with recently renovated frescoes. We lunched in the refectory, served by a nun in a black habit who filled the table with delicious stuffed peppers, chicken stew, home-made cheese, bread, wine and pastry.

Too soon, the idyll was over and I was back at the Bucharest airport, watching Romania rush into the future, half wondering whether the weekend had been a dream. So I got out my map and traced the inefficient, indirect course of the Danube, which I now know reaches the Black Sea in its own good time.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Romanian river tour

GETTING THERE:

From LAX, connecting service to Bucharest is offered on Lufthansa, KLM, Air France, British Airways, Air Tahiti Nui and United. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,132 until Sept. 1, dropping to $1,016 until Oct. 31.

WHERE TO STAY:

Delta Nature Resort, Somova-Parches, Kilometer 3, Tulcea, Romania; www.deltaresort.com, has 30 villas, a restaurant, pool and boat dock overlooking Lake Somova and the Danube River; doubles about $125 per person, including breakfast, or $200 per person, full board. Special sightseeing and fishing packages are available. A van transfer from the Bucharest airport to the resort costs $650 for four people round-trip.

TO LEARN MORE:

Romanian National Tourist Office, (212) 545-8484, www.romaniatourism.com.

-- Susan Spano