Today got off to an interesting start. I woke up at 6:59 on my clock so I was technically awake when the alarm went off at 7. June was already awake, but she noted that the room clock said 6. I confirmed that I’d actually set my alarm as intended. I realize it’s a very first-world problem, but our breakfast wasn’t delivered for an hour (we’d ordered it for 7), and truth be told, I didn’t receive the bagel I’d requested. Turns out that we were on the Serbia-Romania border, with one side of the river in each country and yes, Romania is an hour ahead of Serbia. I manually set my clock to “ship time” (ie, set the time zone to Vienna, not to automatic) and the day continued.
Today there were three options: tour A which was very uninteresting, tour B to a fortress and then a short hike in the largest Serbian national park, or stay on the boat while it moved locations. I chose tour B which was a mixed success. When we disembarked for the tour we had to walk through another boat to get to land — seems the boats can dock with one adjacent to them dock, a second adjacent to the first and so on up to the fifth adjacent to the 4th. We’ve had others walkthrough our boat before but this may have been the first time we walked through another boat. When we boarded the boat after our tour, there were five(!) boats and we were number 4. Soon the first three all left and we scooted closer to shore for customs and immigration as we left Serbia and prepared to enter Bulgaria.
Late afternoon was a wonderful ride down the Danube between Serbia and Romania. It was incredibly relaxing and delightfully social to hang out on the top deck with David, June and other friends and watch the land go by. Then into the Iron Gate, a stunning gorge that’s only about 150 meters wide and over 80 meters deep with limestone cliffs and surprisingly lush greenery. Indeed, we found a couple of earthcaches in Romania as we rode past so that might be the first country I’ve legitimately found a cache in that I haven’t (yet) set foot in. Finally, we entered the Iron Gate locks, two sets of locks that each lowered the boat by 30 meters. I joined the dwindling group of geeks at the front of the ship as we queued up, entered the lock, waited for another boat to enter, waited for the water level to drop, then repeated the process for the second lock. Alas, we had to go inside before completing the process.
I’m starting to recognize more of the Cyrillic alphabet. A letter that looks like pi is a P, a letter that looks like P is an R, a letter that looks like a 3 is a Z, letters that look like lower and upper case B are B and V, respectively; a letter that looks like a backwards N is an I; a letter that looks like an H is an E, etc. It’s still puzzling to me when a Serbian word will be written in the alphabet I’m used to and when it will be written in Cyrillic. I look forward to seeing if Bulgaria has similar behaviors.
By the time I wake up tomorrow I will be in Bulgaria.
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