The Tourist

It's been a while - about 13 years, I think, since I've been to the Delta. I think this was my father's dream, to grow up a bit and to travel the Delta together, which he knows like the back of his hand - 25 years of pounding the hulls, measuring what needed to be measured, but without hurry, because the days were not in the bag, drinking lots of vodka with haholics and, in general, zero headaches. The dice have rolled on not being mosquito-friendly, but not at all, believe me? Now, if you don't make peace with mosquitoes, Delta's not for you, sorry to say, try the mountains.

After '89, CTRL + Z

The Delta, like the Strugatki brothers' Zone, doesn't care who comes and what they do there. If it survived Ceausescu, who, after his inspiration faded after visiting some rice paddies through the Chinese brother-state in 1971, set about massive dams, especially in the Babina and Cernovca ostroves (3,800 ha, which in 1989 were finalized as functioning rice paddies), with the ambition to turn it into a huge rice paddy, I am convinced that it can hold on to anything. After '89, the people from the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve said "hey, let's CTRL + Z what Ceașcă had done and let's restore what was there before". The problem is that in 30-40 years, possibly with the help of extensive ecological reconstruction work, all the conditions are in place in the Delta to form and stabilize another ecosystem with a completely different life cycle. So, what do you do, do you just blast this one too, hoping that with patience, hard work and a bit of luck, you'll get back to the way it was? It's complicated, it's better to say thanks that you still have the Delta (as a matter of fact, when I arrived in England, among landscape architects, I was a bit surprised that I had to explain to them what it is - not because they were not well read people, but rather focused on the practical aspects of the projects they were working on, which never involved a system as rare as the delta) and you start making small local adjustments, because, well, with the pharaonic changes we've got it pretty clear how things are.
Tulcea newsletter
Compared to other fellow Tulcenians (and to my father's expectations), I can say with regret that I passed through the Delta as a weekend tourist. It didn't stick. The only thing more special was that I had a free ticket on the catamaran to Sulina, on the grounds of my Tulcea ID. When I was younger I found the grinding poverty of the locals very picturesque - that's when all you have is Tom Sawyer in your head and going barefoot seems like the ultimate gimmick. Growing up, it began to seem incomprehensible to me - you have a unique place in Europe, and you as a state are sticking your feet in it. I'm talking about after '89, because what was before - the windowless ruins of the four-storey blocks of flats that Ceaușescu dreamed of urbanizing the Delta population and where horses and donkeys now take refuge from the sun - are more than enough testimony.

Porto franco

There's a noticeable difference between Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe, but Sulina seemed a bit urban for my (former) tourist taste. No kidding, Sulina has its own charm. It used to be a prominent town in its day, declared a porto franco by the Ottomans in 1870, and the quality of the former administrative buildings, now in ruins, shows that it had excellent days. There is also a cinema, right on the waterfront, now under renovation. After Mrs. Udrea put cubic stone in Sulina, to stop her heels from getting glod on her heels, the modernizations have continued and more. For the locals it's been a godsend, so I'll try to enjoy it with them. Let's not be mean, it's also nice in Sulina, I miss those semi-wild horses that go too-too-quietly, at midnight, on the cliff, if nobody says anything to them.

It's really cool at St. Pete

But wait, I thought I had the other place in mind. It's really cool in St. Pete. As soon as you get off the boat - "The Passenger", as the locals call it - you see pretty much nothing. That's exactly what I like to see when I go somewhere supposedly wild. No gravel roads, no (semi) continuous water front. If you have a guide (long live Mr. Nichiforovich) or are already magnetized, you immediately stumble over a high metal-panel fence, which turns out to be the locals' bastion, tucked away but somewhat in plain sight (two steps away is the open, welcoming, clean, expensive tourist pub). A grade ten, things are organized by barracks, like in the army. On the premises, out of sight of the tourists (no one in their right mind would come to investigate what goes on behind those rusty ironworks), the locals drink Salniuța vodka (also called "genocide") with the sun on their heads and play chess. Cool combination. I think I got involved in a game or two, I can't remember (naturally). I just remember being urged in a friendly way to keep studying. That is, if I'm not lucky at drinking or chess, maybe I'll be lucky with women, as Eliade, a man who has lived through life, says. From Sulina you can get to Sfântu if you take the pier and walk for a couple of hours (5-6, about 30 km). It's a nice road, super zen, the sun beats you in the sun, because nah, if it's a concrete dike, there are not many trees, only reeds, left-right as far as the eye can see, but it's worth it. Unless you meet an escapee from Poarta Albă, as I was told. I haven't had the pleasure, so I can't go into details. Even if they are, I don't envy them. Clearly you can't be found by the mother patrol in those coves, but you're pretty much being eaten by insects while you're on a diet of reeds and stale water. Life ain't fair, csf!
Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe are special cases, I don't even know if I'd put them in the same pot with the rest of the Delta. They got preferential treatment, so to speak. They both have the advantage of being at the Danube's spill into the sea, so you have a complex ecosystem (consisting of a combination of natural and man-made ecosystems and eco-tones, such as seawater, terrestrial eco-tones, marshes, slightly flooded areas, dikes, etc.), the water is brackish, mosquitoes - theoretically - fewer (sea air doesn't really suit them, they're not like us), you have the sea in front of you, with TV-like sunrises and everything (by the way, the beach is absolutely incredible - walk out into the water, out to sea, and you can hardly see the land - the slope is very flat, I don't think I've seen anything like it anywhere), with the wildness of the Delta behind you.

Poaching, a way of life

Mono-filament nets are fishing tools that catch anything that moves, from juveniles to adult fish, without discrimination (true fish biomass traps, they appeared in the mid-1980s, in the Golden Age, imported from fellow Yugoslavians). The fry, which you throw away because there's nothing you can do with them. The problem is that when you throw it away it's already dead, so big cross. I don't know who answered me (I think it was a local from Sf. Gheorghe, at a local diner) when I asked him, that yes, sir, of course you can eliminate poaching in the Delta, it's really simple. How? You remove the people. All of them. When there won't be a single human foot (patrol, local, tourist, etc.) left in the Delta, then poaching will disappear. Radical. So I guess we'll have to learn to live with poaching like we do with mosquitoes. Some say: well, wait, but we have a few (Environmental Guard - Commissioner of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve, Border Police, ANPA - National Agency for Fisheries and Aquaculture) police and patrols that patrol - what do they do? What are they doing, unattended by anyone, guess what? We're human beings, don't their families have to eat something? I ask.