On my second day on the Argo (my crew duties turned out to be little more onerous than occasional coffee-making) we passed under the rebuilt bridges, and slid by the scarred waterside of Vukovar, the setting for one of the war’s worst massacres. Captain Attila stared steadfastly ahead and smiled: ‘Here we are, you write this in your book, Mr Andrew. Me, Captain Attila – a Hungarian Serb, first mate Vlado – a Serb Serb, and engineer Ivica who is a Croatian. Hungarian, Serb, Croatian work together no problem. One happy family, see?’
With around 1,800 kilometres gone and 1,000 kilometres still to go, the river meets its biggest barrier, the arc of the Carpathian Mountains, with Bulgaria on the south bank and Romania on the north. In the old days it squirmed through a narrow canyon, becoming a roaring cataract that was practically impassable to all but the most skilled of captains. But two giant communist dams, the Iron Gates I and II, have changed that, raising the water level by 35 metres and uprooting whole communities to make a waterway that works.
Once beyond those gates, the Argo plodded on for many hundreds of kilometres across the lowlands of Wallachia in Romania, on a river that had become a massive watercourse of khaki anaglypta.
By now most human habitation had learned to stay well away. It is only where it nears the Black Sea that the Danube sprawls like a teenager on a sofa, falling to pieces across 6,264 square kilometres of delta, a watery wilderness swarming with 160 species of fish and 325 species of birds. This whispering labyrinth is a maze of channels and lakes dotted with isolated fishing villages with reed-roofed houses, the sort of eco-system you’d expect to find in Africa, or Asia, not on Europe’s doorstep.
I’d left the Argo at Ruse, so I completed the last part of my journey in a rowing boat bought from a fishermen. The distance involved wasn’t great, and with the weight of Europe’s water pushing me on, I’d expected it to be easy. It wasn’t, but by that stage there was no turning back.
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