by Andrew Eames
The Danube saunters through Regensburg, home to a pope, a princess, and Germany’s oldest sausage kitchen.
Austria’s Wachau, where picture postcards are made in heaven.
Princess Anita von Hohenburg with her daughter the Countess, on the terrace at Artstetten.
A splash of blue on the Danube: a floating swimming pool on Vienna’s Danube Canal.
Budapest embraces the river while Bratislava’s communist-era architecture keeps its distance.
On the bridge at Esztergom, emulating Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Mark in his Budapest flat, his twenty-eighth address in thirty years.
Tamas tended the horses first, then the fire.
Laguna, the half-Lipizzaner who was scared of puddles.
The Argo, Serb-owned, a hundred years old and still going strong.
The Danube has been tamed by two massive dams – the Iron Gates – where it squirms through a gap in the Carpathian mountains.
Vlado, first mate (and best mate) on the Argo, although he did initially threaten to throw me overboard. The Argo’s toilet required a special kind of agility.
Countess Jeanne-Marie by the Wenckheim family mansion at Szabadkigyós, eastern Hungary, where Patrick Leigh Fermor once played bicycle polo.
The plaque on the wall indicates that the property has been bought, and left to rot, by the Rosia Montan gold mine, like most of the buildings around the main village square.
Resting by hay-makers’ summer cabins in Transylvania’s Apuseni mountains.
Count Tibor Kalnoky samples the plum brandy at his guest house in Miklósvár, Romania.
Rural Transylvania: no Draculas here, but there are bears in the hills – and a bull.
Setting out to walk between Transylvania’s Saxon villages.
The roads may be surfaced, but who can afford a car?
A farmer prepares for work in the Saxon village of Copsa Mare.
Barbaneagra Neculai of Mila 23, in the Delta. Despite the name – Barbaneagra means ‘black beard’ – he was clean-shaven, unlike the more traditional Delta-dwelling Lipovani.
It may look pretty enough, but the boat I bought was a pig to row. Its oars were lumps of wood, secured by red threads that weren’t up to long journeys.
Souvenirs of a more glorious era for Sulina, at the river’s end.
The transport that meets Sulina’s daily ferries is still just horse and cart.
Looking rough, and celebrating hard, at the end of a long journey.
Black Sea shipping stops briefly in Sulina to clear customs.
Dawn on the Delta; after Mila 23 it’s increasingly unclear what is sea, what river, and what land.