some weekend house 1007 – private property in front of Decebal´s face 9

We leave with gray sky, our friends from last night gone fishing for hours already. It is windy and as there is almost no current because we are not far away from the Portile de Fier/Djerdap I watergate we get along quite slowly.

We try imagining the scenery some 25 years ago, before the building of the two huge watergates. Water was 30m down and there were island and whole villages the older people tell us about that are never to be seen again. Some kind of Danube Atlantis… Some of the villages were “moved” to places higher up, othersjust drowned forever. The famous turkish influenced island Ada Kaleh for example is now part of the underwater landscape.

The Iron Gate was very feared by the fishermen at that time though and probably we wouldn´t have made it through the sizzling floods with our little wooden raft.

So in a way we are happy we don´t have to fight the strong waters, on the other hand it is less exciting than I thought this passage would be.

As night falls we keep going until we really cannot see anything but black shades of mountains on the sky anymore. Landing gets quite interesting in the big bay of Kazan, but in the end we make it. Just to find out that Romanian border police is approaching. Suspecting trouble we are quite surprised when they leave after checking our passports, a call to the local police station and writing down our names.

In the end we have a nice hot soup and go to bed.