Lake - Fish - Danube Delta

After almost 4000 kilometers and 4 weeks, we arrived at the Black Sea the day before yesterday (Constanta)! But first, let's talk about Tulcea, new friendships, a deep hole, and the Danube Delta.

On May 15th, we drove from Busteni to Tulecea to start the Danube Delta tour from there. You can't drive cars there, so we planned a small backpacking and camping tour. People ferries or private speedboats take you into the Danube Delta. So on Tuesday, we wanted to start, and the only question left was where we could leave Knut for a few days. Just as we had agreed on a road to park, we met Florian, whose house we parked in front of. He speaks very good English and a little German, so we got talking. Together, we planned the rest of our Danube Delta tour at his house, with the help of his tips. After that, he accompanied us to the port to buy our ferry tickets. We also quickly arranged to park our car at Florian's neighbor's place for the few days. We all agreed that it would be safer than parking on the street.

When the neighbor opened the gate to his driveway, we were both busy wondering if we would fit through the gate... in doing so, we paid too little attention to a few rotten wooden planks on the right side of the driveway! We started driving and needed some momentum to get over a threshold. For a moment, we were happy that we made it through the gate. But then, it crashed! The planks that the right front tire was on had broken, and we were stuck with the front tire in a 1 meter deep hole, with the front bumper lying on the ground!

But luckily we had Florian! After some initial confusion, it quickly became clear that the car had to be lifted somehow so that the hole could be covered with new planks! But how do you lift a VW Bus weighing about 2 tons that is stuck in a driveway?? The most obvious solution was initially a car jack! However, we could only place it in the middle of the car because it was too tight in the front. As a result, the whole side of the car was lifted instead of just the front wheel. As we had to find out, this was too much weight for the regular car jacks: they broke in no time. We needed a different solution! In the end, it consisted of a long iron rod, a lot of firewood, and a few strong Romanian boys:

In the end, we managed to get out of the driveway, and we were damn relieved!! In the meantime, we had been to the workshop and Knut was completely okay. The right side mirror had broken off, but everything can be repaired with gaffer tape, as we all know!

After we were freed from the driveway, we had 15 minutes left until our ferry departed! Florian loaded us and our backpacks into his car and quickly drove us to the harbor. At the very last second, we managed to catch the ferry.

In the Danube Delta, we stayed at a small campsite in the garden of an elderly couple on the island of Crisan. After the eventful and exhausting day, we had freshly cooked fish soup (a local specialty), fried fish, and homemade ice cream in the evening! Robert and Hanna camped with us, and the next day we took a boat tour to the small canals and lakes together. There were many birds, especially pelicans, which live in large colonies here. When we returned to Tulcea, we had a nice and interesting afternoon with Florian and his son.

Now we're taking a vacation at the beach :P