Antar and Marko were watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on TV when the storm rolled over. It hit the steel decking over their heads with the sound of a thousand children drumming their heels, and zapped the would-be millionaires into a zillion green dots.
‘Ach, there it goes again,’ said Marko, slapping a meaty palm on the TV set with a chuckle. ‘It’ll be back in a minute. Serves us right for watching Croatian TV. Coffee? It’s Turkish.’
Outside it was dark, way past midnight, but still hot and humid. We were on a decommissioned lighter chained to pilings on the Serbian side of the surging river Danube, although the river itself – churned with rain and the colour of greasy caramel – was only visible where it appeared in the yellow light cast from the cabin window.
I was at a crucial stage of a journey down the length of the Danube, from source to delta, all 2,840 kilometres of it. This immense river is Europe’s Amazon, and the only major watercourse to run from west to east (all others run north to south). On its way it passes through eight countries – more than any other river in the world – before making its exit into the Black Sea – and yet most people only have the vaguest idea what it passes, who lives beside it, and where it goes.
I wanted to explore it for myself, and although I’d intended to do part of my journey on the water, I’d decided against joining one of the Danube cruises, on the grounds you can eat a lot but see very little. The only other option was to find a willing captain and hitch a ride on a freight barge, but until that point I’d had little success.
In the end it was a German ship-owner who suggested I try Serbia, on the basis that it was outside the EU, and, as he put it, ‘anything could happen there’. And so it proved – with the help of Antar and Marko, Serb customs agents on the Hungaro-Serb border in Vojvodina – I’d called up the captain of the Serb-owned Argo as he ploughed downstream towards us through the night. And Attila had said yes, he’d take me on. As crew.
Although I didn’t know it then, the prettiest parts of the river were already behind me. I’d viewed the Upper Danube from the seat of a bicycle bought at a lost-property auction in the small town of Donaueschingen, in Germany’s Black Forest. Donaueschingen is where the Danube begins, at a spring that bubbles out of the ground between the town’s palace and its brewery. And it is also the beginning of a Danube cycle path that runs over 1,000 kilometres, all the way from Donaueschingen to the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
The river doesn’t become navigable until the German city of Ulm, and even then it is not without a false start. A mere 22 kilometres out of Donaueschingen, by a village called Immendingen, it disappears – or at least the riverbed remains, but the water itself vanishes underground. The geology of the area is such that most of that ‘Danube’ water actually ends up eventually in the Rhine, so it is only at times of heavy rain that Europe’s longest river keeps its head above the ground, and flows all the way from source to mouth.
The Upper Danube, in Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary, is the best-known section of the river, and rightly so. In its top stretches, it wanders maze-like through lovely pastoral landscapes, burrowing through limestone gorges past monasteries and castles.
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