Day 58 - Brăila to Tulcea (62 miles)

Today felt hard. I’m not sure why because on paper it was not the worst day I have done. Maybe the almost continual ascent and descent from the latter part of the morning slowly wore me down. The heat certainly did not help and maybe it was really reaching the 36 degrees shown on a town indicator. Or maybe the cumulative effect of the last couple of days has tired me out. Certainly the headwind worked against me. Whichever one - or combination - of these it was, I found the inclines, most of which were not really too bad, quickly sapped my legs of energy and I would be dropping into my lowest gears and slowly grinding out the ascents. And it felt like there was an ascent around every corner.

The day started in a much easier fashion: I retraced my entry route into Brăila from yesterday and then continued on for another eight miles to the industrial city of Galițan along a fast and flat road. I passed through the edges of the town and headed down to the river to catch a ferry, a small drive-on, drive-off, flat top affair that carried half a dozen cars and a handful of foot passenger to the village of I.C.Brătianu on the opposite shore.

Leaving the ferry felt like I had entered a different world to that on the other side of the river. The peace of empty countryside, a flat landscape and big skies, and that sense of isolation and detachment that you might get when you leave a mainland for an island. I hardly saw a car as I followed the route along the edge of the flood plain, wide expanses of flat agricultural land to my left, the Danube somewhere off in the distance, and the beginnings of the escarpment, separating the flood plain from higher ground, rising to my right. 

Like yesterday my quiet road joined one with more traffic, still small and not excessively busy but now further up the escarpment, winding its way through countryside and the villages that had positioned themselves above the flood plain. It was here the series of continual undulations began, nothing excessive in the normal scheme of things but today, with thirty-four miles of continual rising and falling, the route took its toll.

I stopped to buy more fruit from another roadside stall - there are lots here in Romania where locals sell the produce of their smallholdings - and then again at the border town of Isaccea for lunch. Isaccea sits by the Danube and the river here forms the border between Romania and Ukraine to the north. As I cycled the higher ground to the village I could see Ukraine across the fields and river looking peaceful and green, an image that belied the drama that lay within. And shortly after as I sat having a quiet lunch in a small bar in Isaccea, that quietness and my normality felt strange knowing I was no more than half a mile from a country at war. 

Ukraine on other side of river

Two and a half hours of sweat and effort later I arrived in Tulcea. It was turned from a rural backwater into an industrial and commercial city during the Communist era and is now known as the 'Gateway to the Delta', providing a base for tourism into the Danube delta. I can not travel much further east into the delta by road; from here transport to places further on relies on boats. To get to the point at which the Danube flows into the Black Sea - ‘kilometre zero' - I need to get a ferry to the town of Sulina some 45 miles further east. Timings require I spend the night there before returning so tomorrow I abandon my bike for two days as I head for my first contact with the Black Sea.