September 7th, 2010

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Tuesday Sept 7 at KM 1070 on the Roumanian border

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I did not quite make it to Belgrade on Monday. I anchored just 10 kms short of the Serbian capital. And it was a good thing that I did not try find a marina late Monday. Because in the end I could not find any reasonable place to tie up to in Belgrade. The cruising guide I use is a couple years old and things change fast here. The one place in the book was in total disrepair and abandoned. There were a few more marinas listed on the East side of the city. But when I tried to enter the inlet the depth sounder dropped fast to a place I did not want to be stuck in the current. So, just like Croatia, I guess I was not meant to see Belgrade and kept going. On reading up once again what Belgrade has to offer, I might not have missed that much. It did not look that inviting from the Danube. Nothing like Novi Sad, Budapest. So, here I am in a very pleasant little town on the Serbian, Romanian border.

This is where I clear out with the Serbian Police and Customs. I am rafted onto the Duty Free barge. It looks like I am a little better protected than I was in Mohacs, in the current. But they wanted 30 Euroes for the moorage. I thought that the 20 Euroes I paid in Novi Sad was exorbitant. I threw a fit. Thirty Euroes is 40 bucks. That is about 80 percent of my daily Social Securiy check. So, in the end I paid twenty dollars. I prefer laying at anchor nut I needed to grocery shop, clear out and send this update. The good news is that I did not lose my data on the external hard drive after all. It works just fine here.

This is where the landscape changes from flat Willow, Cottonwood river bank to rolling hills very similar to Napa Valley. Oak scrub and cattle grazing meadows. This is the start of the most spectacular passage through the “Iron Gate”. This used to be a very treacherous river gorge but it has been tamed with  dams in a few places.

I deleted the reference of the Bald Eagle in the previous post because I started to doubt the accuracy. But now that I was able to get into my pictures it does look like an Eagle. But checking it on Wikipedia I think it might be a White Tailed Eagle.