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Back to Romania early July, my second visit since 2017. My 2017 visit, which was in early June, consisted of a few days traversing the Dobrogea region along the Black sea coast then moving into the Danube Delta for a couple of days before finishing the visit with two days in the Transylvania region where there is a large population of European Brown Bears. I decided then that two days in the delta was simply not long enough. The region is amazing, if you can imagine an area about a third larger than Suffolk (my home county), consisting of a network of rivers, channels and lakes bounded by forest, reed beds and huge rafts of floating vegetation then you will have some idea of what it is like. It's the sort of place where one would not be surprised to encounter a documentary film crew at work just around the next bend in a waterway.

So, on this occasion, I would spend almost the entire duration of my visit in the delta. As in 2017, I travelled with three other wildlife photography enthusiasts. The delta region begins where the Danube River splits into three main branches near the Romanian city of Tulcea. Access is by boat only and it was from Tulcea that we made our way into the delta. On my previous visit, our base had been the village of Mila 23, right in the heart of the region and about 3 hours from Tulcea. When I first came across it, the name brought to mind stories of the gulag and cold war, think Solzhenitsyn or Alastair MacLean (for those of us of a certain vintage), but the reality is somewhat more prosaic. The current name simply means “23 Miles” simply because it is located at exactly 23 miles along the old course of the Sulina channel. It was established as a fishing village in the 19th century by Lipovans, who are a religious sect that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the early 1800s. The current population is made up of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Turks in addition to Romanians and fishing is still a major part of the local economy.