Day 7 Iron Gates (between Romania & Serbia)

Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Orsova, Pleven, Romania
Today we are on a section of the Danube that cuts through the Kazan Gorge know as the "Iron Gates". This portion of the river was extremely dangerous years ago and was not considered safe to navigate until the 1970's, after the building of the dam and lock system. This will be our first time through any locks and we are looking forward to seeing how it works. As we come into the first lock, we can't believe how close the ship comes to the cement walls and we are amazed how fast the water is brought into the lock to raise the ship. It takes around 2 hours to pass through 3 locks. As we exit the last lock, the change in topography is dramatic. We went from mostly flatlands with pine trees along the river, to mountains and sheer cliffs. This is how we always pictured it. The scenery is so beautiful we talked about skipping dinner as we watched the sun go down.
Ten minutes later we were in the dining room with our friends . The fear of possibly starving in the middle of the night won out. Plus we rationalized that we didn't want to worry our friends by not showing up. It's such a huge boat (not) that they may have never found us and worried all night ..... And we certainly didn't want to put them thru that. We had a delicious meal of Duck a la Orange and gnocchi with Crepes Suzette for dessert.
Tomorrow we are off to Novi Sad. Bye for now.
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