Gaspar’s Island

May 27, 2015 - 20:38 | author: Bálint F Gyula | translator: Herkely Dominica | photo: byF

Today we ended up on an untouched sandy beach to rest a bit. The first marks on the beach were ours in the sand. After the recent rain for sure.

We spend the night close to Gorni Tsibar yesterday, next to a dirt road running on the embankment. The dinner was roast chicken wings and baked potatoes – Sztoji made an excelled supper.



We planned to spend today’s first rest and meeting with Sztoji at the Bechet – Orjahovo ferry. He went back from Bulgaria to Romania at this place. He said it was very strange that he had to pay when he drove up to the ferry as well as when he left the ferry port in Romania. Moreover, he had to undergo custom clearance. According to the cashier because it is a different company.

Here at Oryahovo the Danube reduced the width from 1300 meters to 670 meters. There is a small island in front of the, which covers the tight, so coming from the top it seemed that at the island the coast closes and it would be the end of the Danube. Of course this is only an optical illusion, in reality, the estuary is more than 650 kilometers from this place. That was nice to see that from Oryahovo the hills moved closer to the Danube on the Bulgarian side, and finally we could see the houses. On the Romanian side continued to be nothing, planted rows of trees that is decimated much by the Danube-erosive effect.



We called Sztoji by the radio, but said he left the area, and cannot really come back. So we agreed to go ahead and look for a suitable camping site in Corabia.

Gaspar slightly resented yesterday that I wrote "almost marathon," in the report. When we could not manage to dock to rest after Bechet, because the muddy, steep shore, we went further, and raised that perhaps this time we can paddle the 42,195 meters until the first rest. We made it! We paddled down the marathon in 4 hours seven minutes and 2 seconds, which time is slightly better than the results of the Vitéz Kürtős Team on the 28th SPAR Budapest Marathon in Sekler cake costume(4:13:36).

As we were moving down, Gaspar saw a luminous white band. "That's a sandy beach, we will stop and rest there. My dream island, with sand, ladies and palm trees." When he landed an hour later, it turned out that almost everything matched. It was the island with sandy beach and palm trees, but no ladies.



In fact, we were on a sandbank at Ostrov Papadia’s upper tip. Inherently it had sandy beach all around, but a little farther the bushes and trees started to grow. The whole island was approximately 900 meters long and 300 meters wide.



Unfortunately, as we reached the coast, the clouds came out. The clouds were continuously darkening under the sun, but the storms finally got away and we got off one in the late afternoon. In both cases, it marched through behind us, only the intensifying west wind reached us. We could not take the advantage of the first one, because we were on the island, but the second pushed us from the back for a while.





Gaspar felt right at home on the island, he undressed and ran a bit on the beach. Later he engraved the names of the team members into the sand. In fact, he only tried to spend some quality time, until the clouds go away and to have the opportunity to take sunny pictures on the island. Finally the sunshine came back and we even had time to swim a bit as well.







We guessed the remaining distance from the Corabia island to thirty kilometers, but our measurement went away somewhere, because today is far above the eighties. It is true that Sztoji found an excellent camp site four kilometers under the city, but about six or seven kilometers slipped somewhere in. The only flaw of this place the high loess wall was, and we had to remove the kayak within the fallen trees.



The distance of tomorrow will be around 70 kilometers (of course it is possible that it will be another 80), we're going until Zimnicea, while roughly half way we will pass the Olt estuary.

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