Goats and fish

We awake surrounded by goats. Dora doesn’t like goats. Too smelly apparently.

We like goats.

But with the goats comes other baggage. Susana has a new fondness for dogs, although this one was a little manky.

The same could be said for the fair haired shepherd boy who was suffering badly from sun burn. You might say that spending too long with his goats had impaired his social graces. He stood a few feet from Dora staring at us through the window.

Dora doesn’t like young goat herders, too smelly apparently!

You might say that we also had impaired social graces. Dora was parked in his field amongst his goats.

We went about our business, giving Dora a good clean before heading off, leaving the shepherd, sheepdog, goats and sheep to it.

We continued along the long straight flat roads on a landscape similar to Romney marshes in Kent,

except that is for the blue sky.

Replace this with dark grey and horizontal rain and you would get Dungeness.

The odd ram shackled villages strewn along the roads looked similar.

Picket fences defining boundaries, but all a bit random.

You don’t get much roadside grazing in Kent. It is quite common here.

That is one straight road, only with the odd surprise, when a section has been dug up, a couple of inches planed off the top, you need to keep your wits about you!

I am not sure if they grow poppies on purpose, but occasionally you get these vivid patches of red amongst the crops, amazing.

And other things we like, avenues of trees, such a pleasure to drive through.

So eventually we get to Tulcea and we head to the supermarket. We are delighted to find a Kaufland, also in Bulgaria. These are a little more expensive than Lidl, but they have really nice deli’s. Outside was this advertisement. For our regular readers you will find out more about this image latter on in Romania. It will be a fabulous post, we promise.

Tulcea lies on the confluence of several rivers, but the one you will know is the Danube. The Danube finishes its journey at the Black sea, and the reason why we are here is because of the Danube delta. But the delta is for tomorrow, today we see what Tulcea has to offer.

The river here is wide, and there are plenty of boats and ferries moored along the banks.

We head off to the information office and with our plan in hand find somewhere for lunch where we can have some of those lovely salads from Kaufland.

And after lunch, off to the Danube delta museum and aquarium.

I have always loved geography, and some of theses maps and diagrams brings it all back to me; the lose of energy of the water, the dropping of the sediments, the silting up of the river and the creation of all these lakes and rivulets. Birds love it here. This is why we have come.

But we also love aquarium. We are not expecting anything like Valencia, but still it is looking hopeful.

Because of the scale of the river, you get some really big fish here.

So we get to learn all about the different habitats which we are likely to see tomorrow.

And some shark like fish.

Often the water is pretty brackish, quite realistic we presumed, either that or they didn’t clean the aquarium out that often!

And some of them were choked full of fish.

Crazy catfish with long whiskers and funny faces.

And evil looking pike.

What are you looking at?

And really big sucker fish.

For some reason they also had some coral reef fish, which seemed a little out of place.

They did add some colour though. The fish around here are a little drab!

Amazing how nature has evolved into such diversity, incredible colour, incredible patterns.

That was an entertaining couple of hours, and at only €10 for the both of us and the photo license was a quarter of Valencia. Then again Valencia was amazing.

We also pop in a folk museum, but no photos allowed, not without paying a pretty hefty fee. This is quite common in this part of the world. For the fish we thought it was worth it, but not for the costumes and and strange traditions.

So we head off into the delta to find the small village of Murighiol.

The small hills we pass surprise me. Maybe left over banks of the river.

But no sign yet of the river.

Susana is really enjoying this drive, and you can tell it is warming up as she is wearing one of her lovely dresses.

The village is only about an hour away, down more straight roads and across plains of crops, but what is still surprising, even though the scale of production is vast, they are still manually working in the field.

We reach the village and start looking for somewhere to spend the night.

We also need to find someone to take us by boat through the delta. It is the only way to see it.

We pass through the village checking out potential sites. There aren’t many around. We pull in the side of the road, a pick up truck has been following us, he also pulls over.

He starts to by trying to sell us a tour of the delta tomorrow. Things must be a bit slow around here. It is quite expensive, especially as it is just two of us and we would have to rent the whole boat. He wants to charge us €50 per hour, so a four hour trip would cost €200, much more than we wanted to spend! He also has a place to camp at €10 a night.

We tell him we will think about it.

We head back into town to see if we can find someone more within out price range, we don’t mind sharing if it keeps the costs down, but it looks like we are the only tourists in town.

€35 each for a three hour tour, that sound much more like it, and he has a place where we can spend the night. A small piece of concrete right on the river bank. He can also pick us up here in the morning, the ultimate convenience, so everything works out well.

It is just getting towards sundown, so we pop off to some nearby lakes to see what the birds are up to;  some reed warblers, avocets, and lots of comical stilts.

Oh, and an amazing sunset to end a perfect day.

We had planned to eat out, trying the local fish, but nothing appears open, what a shame, we will have to raid Dora’s reserves.

We have an early night, up early tomorrow!

GDR