Viking Cruises

Call us on 138 747 (AU), 0800 447 913 (NZ), contact your local Viking travel agent or visit viking.com | 15 IRON G ATES , ROM A NI A Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Slovakia and spend a couple of days in Budapest, Hungary. Ask Cruise Director Leonard (who sipped a Virgin Mary while giving a talk on the legend of Dracula the day before) and the highlight of our itinerary is sailing through the Iron Gates on day seven. Chairs on the sundeck fill up by midmorning as we glide along. With Serbia on the left and Romania on the right, the landscape shifts from verdant forest to high, craggy escarpments. I'm unclear whether "Iron Gates" refers to the hydroelectric plant and its two locks (the river was dammed here in the 1970s) or to the towering gorge walls but Leonard's commentary – tales of dragons in caves and a love affair between the sun, moon and river – makes the latter more appealing. When the giant stone face of King Decebalus appears (he's taller than Rio's Christ the Redeemer), carved into rock on the Romanian side like a silent sentinel, I'm convinced. "Welcome to our charming and lovely town. We have one bank, one church and one school." Nikolai, the guide who greets us in Donji Milanovac, not far past the Iron Gates, is disarmingly tall and endearingly frank, "After the political and religious problems, our best years are to come." It's hot and quiet walking the few blocks to the church, past small grocery stores, neat gardens with huge, blousy hydrangeas, a handful of restaurants and the school, where Nikolai was once a student. A craft market is set up by the river and women hang hand-embroidered tablecloths and blouses on fences; I board the ship with bottles of homemade cherry brandy and plum rakia. "I like how relaxed it is," says Amy, who's here with her husband, Bill, to celebrate his birthday (the crew serenades him on the big day). We're having an early lunch on the ship and share a table at the indoor-outdoor Aquavit Terrace, one of two dining spaces; our waiter remembers Amy likes iced tea and that I'm into the veggie burger and sweet potato fries. The American couple is already planning a trip to South-East Asia and a voyage on the Seine. "Our kids are grown, our job is done," says Amy happily. Days later I'll bump into them in a Budapest bar. When I'm not too tired after a tour or another 20,000 steps a day, I plonk down in the lounge, which is always packed with curious guests. One night, Leonard tells us about growing up in communist Bucharest and his experience of the 1989 Romanian revolution and on another, a Serbian writer does a neat job of unravelling the geopolitics of the region in simple terms.

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