Thursday, July 30, 2026
Today we set our clocks back one hour as we changed timezones. That’s a good thing, because it helped everyone get up early to watch us enter the largest lock system on the Danube, the Iron Gates, about 6:30 am. We had already gone through Iron Gates II, a sizable single lock, in the middle of the night. Iron Gates I is a double lock, meaning that we entered one lock, and after that one filled, we moved forward immediately into a second lock. The second lock then filled bringing us up to the level of the river upstream.
After passing through the lock system, we were in the Iron Gates Gorge. In sharp contrast to the fairly flat terrain surrounding the river downstream, this section of the Danube has tall, steep sides and was a very strategic location for many centuries. In addition to the natural beauty of the canyon, we passed by a large sculpture of the face of King Decebalus carved into the cliff.
During the afternoon, the AmaVerde arrived at Golubac Fortress, our first stop in Serbia, and docked there. At the west end of the gorge and close to one of the narrowest parts of the Danube, Golubac Fortress was used to collect tolls from vessels passing through in addition to its role defending ownership against attackers.
We walked through the fortress and viewed exhibits of various trebuchets and similar armament before having a little time to explore the fortress. Afterwards, we were treated to samples of local wines, cheeses, olives, and bread before returning to the ship.
During the evening cocktail reception, we were given more bad news: the ship could not continue to Novi Sad as planned. Instead, we would spend an extra day in Belgrade, and a side bus trip to Novi Sad (part of the original itinerary) would be offered on Saturday instead.
After-dinner entertainment was a professional theatrical singer with an amazing voice.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to the Eastern Danube. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Today we again have a morning somewhat at leisure, so Kenna and I ventured back into town in search of yogurt. We always like to check out a grocery store in countries we visit, and this was a good opportunity as we had heard a great deal about Bulgarian yogurt. Bulgaria has a unique yogurt culture it uses, and it is supposed to be very good. The grocery store is downstairs in the mall containing the souvenir shop we visited yesterday. While shopping for yogurt, we encountered several others from our ship on the same mission, so we were able to compare notes.
After returning to the ship and having lunch, we headed out for an afternoon tour to an ethnographic museum and a winery. The ethnographic museum had examples of traditional costumes, local porcelain, and armaments used in various conflicts. Our guide explained that the porcelain, in particular, was very precious during the Communist period in Bulgaria. People would save for years just to purchase a single piece.
A short bus ride took us to the Dos Alamos winery just outside town. Dos Alamos isn’t a very Bulgarian name, but signifies two poplars that were apparently on the property. We drank samples of their wine while the owner gave an introduction to his winery and some of the local traditions (festivals, etc.) surrounding their wine production. We sampled four of their wines, which Kenna and I enjoyed although we prefer more robust red wines.
After returning from the tour, we watched a short dance performance by some local youth (including our 19 year-old tour guide). We then got some bad news: because of very low water levels in the Danube, we would not be able to visit the Croatian city on our tour, Vukovar, and Mohács, Hungary, the last stop before Budapest. Instead, we would stop at Novi Sad, Serbia, and do some touring there. The following day we would need to take a bus to Budapest where we would stay in a hotel for the last night of our tour. Of course we were all disappointed but knew the water levels were outside everyone’s control.
We also passed a river cruise ship that had gone aground and from which all of the guests had to be evacuated by police boat. We later learned that the affected ship was the Viking Ullur, which had tried to approach Vidin to get supplies but was unable to do so. We were thankful for the skill of our Captain and that our ship didn’t experience the same thing.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to the Eastern Danube. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Due to the quickly dropping water level in the Danube, we left immediately for the city of Vidin in northwest Bulgaria. We abandoned our planned initial stop in Ruse and arrived in Vidin about noon. As a result, we had a morning at leisure. Kenna did a core exercise class and she and I did a stretch class on the Sun Deck of the AmaVerde. Later in the morning our Cruise Director gave a talk on the plan for the rest of the cruise, particularly the parts of the itinerary that were affected by the change in departure port.
After lunch, we joined a walking tour of Vidin. Vidin is a small city, rather off the tourist track but with quite a bit to see. Led by a very knowledgeable 19 year-old tour guide, we walked to the ruins of a nearby fortress and explored it. We then walked to the city’s synagogue (really a Jewish community center currently) and learned about the thousands of Jews that were sheltered and saved from the Nazis by Bulgarians during World War II.
Following the tour, we visited a local Russian Orthodox cathedral, said to be the second largest in Bulgaria. It was a beautiful building, but under renovation. We were sorry that the scaffolding detracted from the exterior beauty of the building. On the way back to the AmaVerde, we stopped by a local souvenir shop for our usual collection of items from a new country: a flag for me, a pin for Kenna, and a postcard for our daughter Celeste. The proprietor of the shop spoke Bulgarian and Spanish (but no English) so we had fun making our purchases with our rudimentary Spanish.
Many of us on the ship spent time on the Sun Deck after dinner as there was a beautiful full moon rising over the river.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to the Eastern Danube. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Monday, July 27, 2026
Today we board the ship for our Danube cruise, the AmaVerde. We were informed by email a couple of days ago that our itinerary has changed a bit. Due to low water on the Danube, our embarkation point was changed from Giurgiu to Turnu Măgurele, a bit further upstream. The ship also changed, from the AmaBella to the AmaVerde, but we were told they are sister ships and our accommodations will remain the same.
On the way to breakfast, we encountered a large group of high school kids from various countries wearing lanyards and badges. They told us that they are attending the International Linguistics Olympiad this week. They were all bright, friendly, and excited. We wished them good luck in their event. From looking at sample problems on the Olympiad website they will have a challenging week. I want to go back and try some of those problems myself.
After breakfast, Kenna and I took a short walking tour in a direction we hadn’t been before, including a Russian Orthodox Church with ornate onion-shaped domes. We then made our way to a nearby hotel in the Old Town that was the meeting point for our bus ride to the ship for our cruise.
The three-hour bus ride to Turnu Măgurele passed through agricultural areas, growing sunflowers, canola (out of season), and wheat (also out of season). It also passed through a significant large solar “farm”, and it was explained that Romania is generating a significant amount of their electricity from renewable sources such as solar.
Upon arriving at the AmaVerde just south of the town, we quickly boarded and were led to our cabin. We spent some time in the lounge and exploring the ship while waiting for later buses to arrive, followed by introductions of the cruise staff and the safety briefing.
Dinner followed in the ship’s restaurant. We sat next to a couple from Quebec who didn’t speak much English, but we hobbled by with our long-dormant high school French while they used their limited English and we had an enjoyable conversation.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to the Eastern Danube. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Today is a day on our own to explore Bucharest. After a fairly standard buffet-style breakfast at our hotel, we set out to do some sightseeing. We stopped at the tourist information office in the area under the nearby square and learned how to do the local hop-on hop-off bus tour operated by Bucharest’s public transportation agency. After a short wait, a bus came and picked us up.
We expected the usual hop-on hop-off bus experience where they give you cheap earbuds and you listen to a recorded narration in your choice of language. There was no such narration, but instead a QR code that did not work was posted next to our seat. By dissecting the QR code URL, Kenna figured out how to get the audio narration, which helped a lot.
After touring through city through areas that we had largely explored on foot yesterday, the bus took us north to Bucharest’s “Free Press Square”. We decided to hop off at this point and walked a short distance to the Ethnographic Museum. This is an outdoor museum with examples of historical dwellings and churches from many parts of Romania, largely from the 18th and 19th century. The dwellings differed considerably from each other due to the varying lifestyles in different areas. Particularly notable were the churches that had been relocated to the site. They had high steeples and obvious crosses, and the ornate decor of the interiors was particularly impressive.
We then continued further south to Bucharest’s Arcul de Triumf, modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and probably contributing to Bucharest’s tagline as “The Paris of the East.” It was not straightforward to walk to the Arcul itself (we found no underground passageways as in Paris), so we just walked around it to the bus stop where we hopped onto another bus to take us back to the hotel.
Tired after a considerable amount of walking, we decided to relax for a while in our hotel room. Having had authentic Romanian food last night, we opted instead for pizza at a small nearby pizza place.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to the Eastern Danube. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
As I have often done in the past, I am blogging the journal from our latest vacation trip. I will be posting daily installments over the next week and a half, offset by five weeks from our trip. The trip includes a river cruise on the eastern Danube River on the AMAWaterways ship AmaVerde, visiting various cities along the way.
Saturday, July 25, 2026
Our next adventure, a cruise on the eastern Danube from Bucharest to Budapest, is starting in Vienna rather than at home in California. I have been participating in an IETF standards meeting in Vienna this past week and this trip is an add-on to attending the meeting.
We got up early at our hotel, the Hilton Vienna Park, had breakfast and took the CAT train from the station across the street directly to Vienna Airport. We checked our bags at the Austrian Airlines counter, and quickly encountered a very long line to go through airport security. It appeared that there was some construction taking place because the line markings didn’t quite match reality. We made it through the line and to the gate, although with not much time to spare. As we have frequently encountered in Europe, the gate wasn’t a jetway but rather a passage to a bus that we had to ride to reach the airplane. So we waited a little while for the bus to fill up before making our way to the plane. If we’re transferring to the plane via a bus, why do they have boarding groups?
The Bucharest airport was very much like any other, except that the signs were now in Romanian and English rather than German and English. After collecting our bags, we made our way to Bus 100, which Google had indicated was the correct bus to take us into town. We were able to use Apple Pay as we entered the bus. By the time we left, the bus was rather crowded, and became a bit more so at the first couple of stops. After about 6 stops, we got off across the street from our hotel.
Our hotel, the Grand Hotel Bucharest, is a large high-rise near the center of the city, adjacent to the Old Town, which is the main tourist area. Our room was clean and comfortable, but compared with the many other hotels we had stayed in recently, seemed a little dated. Nevertheless, it was more than adequate for our needs and had a great view.
After dropping our luggage, we set out on foot for the Old Town. Bucharest’s Old Town is diagonally across a large traffic circle from the hotel, but there was a convenient underground hall that allowed us to walk directly across. Not having had lunch, we stopped at a street-side shop for a take-away meal of a hot dog, a meat-filled pastry, and sodas.
Entering Old Town, we encountered many cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating, many of which invited us in (but we had just eaten). As a tourist area, there were the requisite souvenir shops as well. We also encountered the first examples of Romanian architecture: large, imposing, ornately decorated bank buildings. We continued out of Old Town and walked past the Communist-era Parliament Building, said to be the second-largest building in the world. We followed Bulevardul Unirii, which extends out from the front of the building and features a line of synchronized fountains in the median.
After returning to our hotel to rest for a bit, we returned to Old Town and stopped at one of the outdoor restaurants featuring traditional Romanian food. Our dinner was excellent and Kenna had a particularly enjoyable red wine.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Kenna and I woke up extra early today so that we could have our bags packed and placed outside our cabin door by 7 am. We beat that schedule by a few minutes, which gave us time to take a final stroll around the Sea Cloud II and get some coffee. Breakfast at 7 was with Dave and Jan, discussing future travel plans.
The expedition leaders noticed that there were quite a few people with outgoing flights around 1 pm, so they arranged a bus tour to the Rotunda of Mosta and then onward to Malta Airport, timed to arrive at 11 am. Right on schedule at 8:10, we were called to disembark, say good-bye and thank you to our tour leaders, identify our luggage, and board the bus for Mosta.
Mosta is a smaller city near the center of the island of Malta. The Rotunda is a parish church that is noted for being the third-largest free-standing stone dome in the world. It is also notable for having been bombed in World War II. A large bomb came through the Rotunda dome during a religious service but did not explode. The rotunda interior is beautiful, having been painted in a calming Wedgewood-ish shade of blue, with many paintings around the circumference. The ceiling (dome itself) was beautifully restored and decorated with a tiled pattern. We also visited an adjacent World War II shelter in front of the church, another reminder of the many attacks Malta weathered during that period.
We arrived at the airport exactly as planned, retrieved luggage from the bus, and checked in. The premium lounge at Malta airport was very pleasant, although a bit crowded, and had a number of Maltese foods to try before we left.
Our flight to Frankfurt was routine, and we saw a number of our fellow cruise passengers on the plane. We had just enough time to pass through the queue at immigration and on to our flight home to San Francisco.
This article is the final installment in a series about our recent trip to Malta and Sicily. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
The last full day of our cruise was spent not actually cruising, but docked at Valletta. Due to an enormous (over 6000 passenger) cruise ship, the Sea Cloud II was forced to dock some distance from the cruise passenger terminal, which meant that we had to take shuttle buses to get to the ship.
Our morning excursion was to the village of Mdina, a former capital of Malta. Mdina is located on a prominent hill in the central part of Malta. It is a picturesque town with narrow streets and lots of tourists. Malta’s main cathedral is located there. A local guide took us through parts of the small town before giving us some free time to explore, much of which we spent with Dave and Jan at a cafe recommended by the guide with a wonderful view of the island and excellent cold drinks and chocolate cake.
After returning to the Sea Cloud II for lunch, we ventured out again with a guide to the St. John’s Co-Cathedral that we had visited on our own earlier in the trip. The commentary from the guide was helpful in understanding the many chapels that are a part of the structure.
This evening we had a slide show of pictures contributed by people on the tour, curated by Anna, the photo expert on our cruise. This was followed by a final buffet dinner, with many good-byes to fellow travelers and the staff.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to Malta and Sicily. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
After an overnight cruise from Sicily, we arrived at the second-largest island of Malta, Gozo. Unlike most of our earlier port calls, we anchored offshore and used tenders (lifeboats) to reach Mgarr, the primary port city. After arriving at the port, we boarded buses to travel to the Gjantija Temples, which date to about 3600 BC, and a small museum near the town of Xaghra in the center of the island.
We then continued to the north end of the island where there were many salt pans for evaporating sea water. While we have seen the salt evaporators along the shore of San Francisco Bay, these were much smaller evaporators operated by families in the region. We listened to a short talk on the salt harvesting process, and were given burlap sample bags of Gozo salt.
For lunch, we had another tradition, a Pasta Wheel lunch. Cooked pasta was swirled in the center of a large wheel of parmesan cheese, resulting in a very creamy and rich taste. In the afternoon, Sea Cloud II again set its sails for our final voyage back to Valletta.
Our farewell cocktails and dinner were served this evening in case some passengers want to spend more time off-ship on our final evening in Valletta. Kenna and Dave received certificates attesting to their climbing one of the ship’s riggings.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to Malta and Sicily. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.
Monday, June 22, 2026
Today we explore the last Sicilian city of our tour: Siracusa (Syracuse). After breakfast, we boarded buses to go to the Archaeological Park, which includes some large ancient caves where prisoners toiled and were imprisoned. The park also includes both a Greek theatre and a Roman amphitheatre. We learned two significant differences between theatres and amphithitheatres: (1) theatres are generally not fully circular, but typically half-circles facing a central stage, while amphitheatres are generally circular. (2) theatres generally present plays and similar artistic events, while amphitheatres were often used for violent spectacles. We noted that Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View hasn’t been the site of anyone being thrown to the lions that we are aware of.
After our tour, we returned to the Sea Cloud II and had a few options. There was a walk to the market with Paolo, the cultural specialist on our cruise, but we were very warm from the previous tour and decided instead to go to a cooking demonstration of Pasta alla Puttanesca on the ship. It looked simple, but a good chef always make it look that way.
After lunch (the puttanesca was delicious), we took a walk with a local guide to Ortygia Duomo. This was yet another notable cathedral, in this case incorporating ancient Greek columns into parts of the building interior. Kenna and I then broke off and did our own exploration of Ortygia, an island connected by a couple of short bridges to Syracuse.
Syracuse is justifiably proud of its famous native son, Archimedes. A prominent statue of Archimedes stands near the bridge to Ortygia, and streets are named after him as well.
This article is part of a series about our recent trip to Malta and Sicily. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.