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  Blue River, Black Sea

  Andrew Eames

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  BLUE RIVER, BLACK SEA

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552775076

  First published in Great Britain

  in 2009 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Black Swan edition published 2010

  Copyright © Andrew Eames 2009

  Andrew Eames has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of Andrew Eames. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects, the contents of this book are true.

  All photos have been kindly supplied by the author except for the following: parliament building, Budapest: Dick Durrance II/National Geographic/Getty Images; Regensburg: imagebroker/Alamy; Wachau: F1 online digitale Bildagentur GmbH/Alamy; Sulina: Bartek Wrzesniowski/Alamy.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Praise

  About the author

  Also by Andrew Eames

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  1 Donaueschingen: the Danube Begins

  2 Immendingen: the Danube Disappears

  3 Sigmaringen: Encounter with a Prince

  4 Ulm and the Danube Swabians

  5 Donauwörth and the After-Effects of War

  6 Ingolstadt: a Shock En Route to the Forum

  7 Regensburg: the Pope and the Punk Princess

  8 Passau: Learning the River’s Rules

  9 Austria: Hitler’s Home Ground

  10 Dinner with the Archduke, Lunch with the Princess

  11 The Wachau and the Vienna Woods

  12 Old Empires, New Nations: Vienna to Esztergom

  13 Communists and Aristocrats in Budapest

  14 On Laguna to the Drava

  15 Serbia: the Argo Gets New Crew

  16 The Argo in Troubled Waters

  17 Restart: the Countess and the Communists

  18 Romania: Regime Change and the Politics of Gold

  19 Walking in Transylvania: the Apuseni Mountains

  20 Walking in Transylvania: the Saxon Villages

  21 Transylvanian High Society

  22 Bucharest’s Royal Pretender

  23 The Danube Delta

  24 Rowing to Sulina

  25 Blue River, Black Sea

  Plates

  Acclaim for Blue River, Black Sea

  ‘Eames is unquestionably a master of travel writing … both entertaining and illuminating’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘A pleasant float through our emerging continent’

  Wanderlust

  ‘Absorbing and highly entertaining … Rarely do you read a travel book that so effortlessly combines history, culture, an acute observational eye and a sense of humour’

  ABTA Magazine

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Andrew Eames was born in 1958. His career in journalism started in south-east Asia, and in the UK he has worked on specialist magazines and national newspapers, as well as writing four books: Crossing the Shadow Line, Four Scottish Journeys, The 8.55 to Baghdad (which won the 2004 British Guild of Travel Writers Narrative Travel Book of the Year Award) and Something Different for the Weekend.

  He lives in west London with his wife and two children, and spends as much time as possible messing about in boats.

  Also by Andrew Eames

  Crossing the Shadow Line

  Four Scottish Journeys

  The 8.55 to Baghdad

  Something Different for the Weekend

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Although it was a true pleasure in the execution, this was a complex project in the planning, and many people deserve my heartfelt thanks for their suggestions and their hospitality. Pivotal in route-planning and contact-making were Count Tiber Kalnoky in Transylvania, Ursula Deutsch at the Danube Tourism Commission in Vienna, Barbara Geier at the German Tourist Office in London, Elizabeth Courage (formerly of the Hungarian tourist board) in London, Mark Andrews in Budapest, Count Jószef Hunyady in Hungary, Attila Munkas of the Argo and Branko Saviæ at YugoAgent in Serbia. Mike Morton of Beyond the Forest in the UK provided essential assistance with getting there and back. Big thanks to all of them, and particularly those among them who also put a roof over my head en route.

  Various people opened their doors to me when they didn’t need to. In particular I’d like to thank Prince Karl-Friedrich Hohenzollern, Archduke Alexander Habsburg-Lothringen, Princess Anita von Hohenburg, Abbot Gregor von Henckel Donnersmarck, Count László Karolyi, Countess Jean-Marie Wenckheim-Teleki, Julia Nótáros, Carmen and Adi Costina, Gregor Roy Chowdury and Prince Paul-Phillippe Hohenzollern.

  First mate Vlado on the Argo turned out to be an invaluable companion, and Barbaneagra Neculai in the Delta was (unknowingly) instrumental in my final chapters. For advice on walking through Transylvania I’m grateful to Nat Page of Fundatia Adept, to the Mihai Eminescu Trust, and Johan of Green Mountain holidays in Romania.

  And finally this list would not be complete without a fulsome acknowledgement to those who stayed behind, particularly, Susanne, for essential cultural, emotional and topographical orientation. We call it home.

  ‘Nothing great was ever achieved without a bit of enthusiasm.’

  Rev. Lloyd Murdock, Presbyterian

  church of St Mark, Cape Breton

  1

  Donaueschingen: the Danube Begins

  I was deposited in Donaueschingen by a dibbly-dobbly railway which had trundled over the Black Forest from Freiburg, stopping at every cow-pat. The last of the winter snows had only been a month gone, but already the rolling hills of the Baar looked bleatingly fresh and glossy in the spring.

  ‘Snow!’ exclaimed a child a couple of seats behind me in the train, but it was only an echo of a season, a cloud of featherlike seeds slaloming through the trees, searching for new life, riding t
he breeze and catching the sun like soft, airborne skiers looking to go off-piste.

  Donaueschingen itself turned out to be a pleasant, if unexceptional, pint-sized place with a Fürstenberg Prince’s Palace in the style of a French chateau, an onion-domed church and an imposing selection of houses, some frescoed, some half-timbered, and many in pastel pinks and blues, like crayons in a tin or ballerinas waiting for the ball. Any pop-up book would have been pleased to have had it.

  At the town’s core was not the palace of the Fürstenbergs, but the home of something far closer to the hearts of modern Germans than the aristocracy: the giant Fürstenberg brewery, a rambling beer palace on a traffic island that puffed steam and smothered surrounding houses with its wet-wool smell. Unlike tobacco, bread or coffee, where the aroma is better than the product, beer is one of those commodities that delivers better than it promises. But the claggy smell didn’t inhibit a selection of vigorous-looking pensioners, either with knapsacks or on bicycles or both, who circled the town’s streets and greeted each other with the fellowship of the like-minded. They had the air of people who knew exactly what they were about to do, how they were going to do it, and the number of vitamin pills that would be required. Despite the earliness of the year they were already improbably tanned.

  I had a plan, too. I was in town for two extremely important reasons: first to pay homage to the official source of the Danube, which rises in Donaueschingen; and second to buy a bicycle that would be capable of taking me all the way down the riverbank to Budapest.

  As plans go, it was a fairly simple one, and one where you’d think that little could go wrong. Unfortunately, however, I’d arrived at lunchtime and all the shops were shut, so the pensioners and I were all revved up with nowhere to go, circling the beer palace of a traffic island.

  It happened to be market day in Donaueschingen, and stalls in a narrow clutch of streets had a selection of those gadgets used for cutting vegetables that somehow never ever make it into mainstream retailing, gadgets that are always demonstrated by men with toupees who once had careers as DJs until hair loss kicked in. Them aside, the remaining stallholders were Turks with worry beads and Sikhs in shades, and they were all talking amongst themselves in the lunchtime lull, knowing full well that pensioners fuelled by multivitamins were not going to be interested in denim fashion accessories fresh out of a crate from China. For this new arrival from London, that clutch of streets felt comfortably multicultural, and not claustrophobically small-town Baden-Württemberg at all.

  It was on the other side of the market that I first came across the river, a slender and handsome chalk stream, beribboned with Ophelia tresses of weed which sheltered tail-flickering trout. But it wasn’t the river I’d come for. A sign on the bridge indicated this was the Brigach, and I had known it and its colleague the Breg existed. Officially, these two ‘send the Danube on its way’, which makes them sound like a pair of proud parents waving from the bridge. Unofficially, the two B rivers merge, and are then joined by the baby Danube, which completely usurps their riverbed, chucking them out of the pram. A European cuckoo.

  In the back of my mind I’d envisioned the Breg and Brigach as being tucked away out of sight and somehow sadly lacking in the river department, which would explain why no one mourned their passing. I hadn’t expected either of them to be so handsome or so central to the town. Poor innocent Brigach, it didn’t deserve to be treated with such contempt. And if the Brigach didn’t deserve it, then probably neither did the Breg.

  However, any concern over B-river discrimination was soon overtaken by a more pressing and selfish consideration, because Donaueschingen’s bicycle shop had remained firmly closed well after the designated lunch break, despite the opening hours posted on the door. Departing from the norm is a rare state of events in Germany, and I was worried. I knew the shop had a range of second-hand machines – I’d telephoned beforehand and I could see them through the window – so its continued closure was a setback, to say the least. Without a bicycle, the struggle for supremacy between B and D rivers didn’t matter a bean; my journey was dead in the water before it had even begun.

  At this point I had one of those strange moments of good fortune that have occasionally illuminated my life, for which I should be more than truly grateful, and for which I promise to be when I am old. The most recent was on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura, where I’d had my briefcase containing flight tickets and passport stolen from a hire car. I’d disconsolately set out to drive the 3 miles to report the loss at the nearest police station, met the eye of a smiley old man by the roadside, and just beyond him spotted the briefcase, inexplicably completely intact, sitting beside a bush by the road. As the tears of relief rolled down my cheeks, I felt as if I’d just taken part in some parable which I didn’t have the wisdom, or the faith, to comprehend fully.

  This time it was a bicycle journey, not a flight, that was at issue. So I wandered up the hill through the centre of Donaueschingen in the vain hope of giving the bike shop’s long-lunchers more time to return to their posts. I didn’t have a plan B.

  Fortunately I didn’t need one. Towards the top of the hill I passed a cluster of some twenty-five people gathered on the steps of the Rathaus, and twenty-five people, in a clump, in early spring, constitutes quite a crowd in Donaueschingen. My first thought was that it was a fire drill, but these were individuals, quietly waiting, not groups of work colleagues murmuring and giggling. My second thought was that it must be some sort of political demonstration, but there were no posters, nor any strutting rabble-rousers preparing to make their views heard. Apart from the two clerks sitting behind a desk, the only people who evidently knew each other were three council workers in bright orange dungarees who looked distinctly amused at the whole operation. They were smirking in particular at the behaviour of a small man who was doing his best to look important in the no-man’s-land in front of the desk, but with no natural charisma, no podium, no microphone or other badge of authority, he didn’t quite know how to start, where to stand or in which direction to face. This was their boss, the man who ruled their lives, and in the unforgiving light of the public gaze he was floundering. The council workers were plainly enjoying his discomfort.

  As I came abreast of the crowd, this man just about managed to assemble everyone’s attention by raising his voice until it squeaked, like a musical instrument which was being abused in the hands of a beginner. He nodded to one of the men in dungarees, who reached for a bicycle from the bicycle rank. But instead of swinging his leg across the saddle and heading off on some prearranged errand, he wheeled the bicycle forward and the burgermeister, or whoever he was, announced:

  ‘So this one – how about ten?’

  The crowd shuffled. No one volunteered.

  ‘Five?’

  ‘OK, I’ll take it for five,’ piped up a voice from behind the burgermeister’s right shoulder, in a tone that suggested he was only doing it out of compassion for the homeless. A man who’d been lounging against the Rathaus wall produced a banknote, handed it to the girl behind the desk, and the bicycle was his.

  Suddenly I was hyper-alert. Clearly I was witnessing some kind of auction, of direct relevance to my immediate future: the bicycles drawn up outside the Rathaus didn’t belong to council workers or shoppers at all, as I’d previously assumed. Plainly, fate intended me to take part.

  ‘Can anyone … ?’ I asked the man next to me.

  ‘Sure, but you need to be quick.’

  A couple of other bikes had already gone, both of them for laughably small sums, and judging by the way he was distributing them at the earliest possible bid, the burgermeister was clearly keen to get it all over and done with as quickly as he could, hankering for the security of his scrupulously tidy desk, his protective ring of staff and the reassuring familiarity of the daily routine.

  The bike that had caught my eye was a Kettler, a well-known German make and practically new, so when its turn came to be wheeled forward I waved in the burger-meister
’s direction.

  ‘Ten.’

  It was a ridiculously small amount for a bike that probably cost 500 euros, but I wasn’t the only one interested: a smart-looking mother had been waiting for this moment with her teenage son at the edge of the group, and she immediately jumped in.

  ‘Twenty.’

  This was a whole new dynamic on the steps of the Rathaus. The mother and I exchanged steely glares and traded bids steadily, while the burgermeister looked more and more embarrassed, as if he’d stepped inadvertently into the middle of a family dispute. The two of us became the focus of all attention: the yummy mummy versus the un-yummy bummy with the rucksack. This was real-life drama in Donaueschingen. We were clearly not stooges planted in the crowd by the Rathaus to drive the prices up. So who had the deeper pockets, the greater desire? As the temperature rose I could sense we were heading for the front page of the Donaueschingen Gazette.

  Eventually the bidding neared 100 euros and I began to falter; and at this stage I made the fatal error of upping my offer in a two rather than a five. Sensing my weakness, the mother closed in for the kill.

  ‘One hundred and five!’ she said with great finality, trumping my puny two-step by a whole 8 euros.

  I shook my head. She didn’t look as if she was going to give up, and besides, I was saying to myself, I’d only be tempting fate with a bike so new and so appealing; it was such an evident thief magnet that I’d be constantly worrying about the responsibility of looking after it. So I let it slide, defeated, and my well-dressed enemy wheeled away her new acquisition, hostilities over, without favouring me with another look.

  The only other bike I was interested in was a brown thing that looked OK, model unknown, relatively new. I got it for 20 euros, emphatically and viciously outbidding an elderly gentleman who quite thought he’d got it for half that price and was taken aback at being so savagely gazumped. I handed over the cash, signed a chit to prove that I hadn’t stolen it, and wheeled it away down the hill. And although it was momentarily unridable because of flat tyres, I could tell that this brown thing was one of the best investments I’d ever made. It would only let me down once in the next 1,400 kilometres, and even that was to be my own stupid fault.