An Exercise in Irrelevance

Now in the grandly titled Delta Nature Resort which is about 20km upstream of Tulcea. We were bought here by a bloke called Vlad; fortunately, he had none of the xenophobic nature of his namesake; rather, he was a jovial, engaging man with a slightly old car. He drove us here carefully, except for a perilous moment when he tried for the dubious extra security of his seat belt while travelling at 50kph.

The Nature resort. Well, it’s a big wetland lake like so many of the others that we have seen over the last few days, reed beds, hanging trees and, of course, birds. The resort has been embedded on the side of the hill, not really adding to the place, but not detracting too much from it either. It’s has pretentions to being five star; we were given a fruity cocktail when we walked through the door, the receptionist knew who we were without look it up, and took five minutes to describe the many features of our chalet (“this is the wardrobe” — good to know). Any attempt at having an “environmental feel” as my Rough Guide tells me, is destroyed by the double aircon units, and general feeling of excess here.

It’s got a slightly tatty feel for swanky place. A guy had to climb down a manhole to switch on the jacuzzi; he left the cover off, the hole left waiting to catch a small child. The pool is small and the underwater light fittings slightly wobbly. But it all worked, so I am now swum, showered, jacuzzied and sauna-ed. Best of all was a wobbly, imcompetent hour rowing on the lake. Got to see two snakes this time, the occasional fish, and the birds up close, as well as many water lillies and reed beds, generally while crashing into them.

Back to the inevitable chocolates on the bed, with covers carefully turned down. Always an effort to do it yourself, I find. Not sure what the food is going to be like, but pretentious and not that friendly for the veggie I suspect, as well as being pointlessly expensive.

Quite enjoying it, in spite of myself, but am glad we are here for only a day; without a car, we would be have been stuck with expensive taxi rides everywhere, and the polite staff would drive me mad after more.

Written on 09/07/2009

Am in Crisan, a small village on the delta of the Danube in Romania. It’s a strange village because it is two dimensional; spread out across up and down the shore of a narrow spit of land, trapped betweeen one of the two main branches of the Danube in front and a reed bed behind.

All around the river branches and reforms. It’s just a short boat ride till you are on a stream with banks lined with reeds, travelling through large ponds choked with water ferns and lily pads. As the boat travels through, frogs leap for safety, out of the path. And there are birds everywhere; I’m not one of lifes twitchers, but here you can see the motivation. Pelicans, herons and ibis are common. Occasionally in the distance, a flash of blue is the most you are likely to see of the kingfisher, elusive, but at least you see it often.

The village is quiet and peaceful. I’ve not seen a car move, just a JCB, but boats everywhere. It has little tourist stuff going on; there are a couple of pensione, including the one we are in, one canoe hire place, and two bars. Most of the people who visit are fishing or birdwatching. I wonder how it will be 20 years time. Will the Danube rise; will it turn into an hippie outpost; will it become a tourist spot with bars and souvenir shops selling ethinic tat by the yard?

Tomorrow, we travel to the north of the main stream; not sure whether the environment will be much the same, or whether we will see many other kinds of bird. I don’t really care; it’s enough to relax regardless.

Written on 07/07/2009

I think I now have my blogging environment as I want it. I’ve been using blogpost.py to do my posting. I couldn’t let go of my text only environment. I don’t care if it’s old fashioned, but I like the separation of editing and viewing. In this case, I’ve even had to learn asciidoc, but it was worth the effort.

Today, I think I have fiddled with blogpost.py for the last time. I can now set both categories and status (published or unpublished) from within the blogfile. I’d added a post command previously; originally, blogpost used to have a create and update command.

The big advantage with this is that all the information about the blog is apparent from the file; this means I can use a single make file to compile the lot. Any changes that I make while on the road will automatically publish to the web when I get online again. I can even put a catch-up in my backfile to make sure everything is up-to-date.

Okay, so I am sad; so sue me.