“Next” is the name of the restaurant in the centre of Constanta where there is indifferent food and service, which seemed to reflect our experience and sentiments of Romania.

Mangalia

Similar to our movements in Bulgaria, and heading North, we cleared into Mangalia, a smaller Port of Clearance with the Harbour Master doing much of the processing. Then we moved a couple of miles across to the Marina, quite late at night, and without any fuss.

The Marina has good water and power and charged us US$33 a night without a receipt. The small harbour is a bit shabby, but the locals quite friendly; they do not have many foreign visitors there.

Constanta

We were cleared for Constanta, where we headed the next day along a meadowed, low-lying coast. Portul Constantza is a large commercial port with substantial breakwaters, with Portul Tomis, the yacht harbour and Marina just north, next to the city.

We had hoped to top up our diesel tanks with cheaper fuel in Romania, but this proved to be too difficult. In Bulgaria the script is Cyrillic, whilst in Romania, it is Roman, which makes the language a bit easier to understand. However, sourcing our various stores was not easy.

Constantia has a rich Black Sea heritage with the ubiquitous Roman ruins. There is a display of sarcophogae in the city centre with attendant headstones inscribed in Greek and Latin, with many epitaphs commencing with “Greeetings, passerby”, and you wonder indeed, how many others have passed by this monument and message, chiselled in stone. The main boulevard has much renovation work done with fresh paint on the iconic buildings, such as the gracious Archaeological Museum, and more modern cafes are centred here. There is a similar array of restaurants along the waterfront, catering to the more well-to-do, with a fair bit of litter down the hillside between the two domains. There is more graffiti, and, with the litter, we suspect that the Romanians are not as content as the Bulgarians. This is despite a general edict that Romanians have two month’s holiday a year. This would also probably reduce their GDP considerably. ATMs only dispense the local currency, the Lei.

The Marina is quite shallow in areas and would have charged us about Euro 35 per night, so we anchored instead, off a break-watered beach, just north of Constanta in calm conditions. The beaches were well patronised on the sunny day. Here we spent a few hours using our hookah equipment doing a bit of hull maintenance for our longer run back to Greece. There was a surprising amount of growth on the hull since cleaning it only five weeks ago. We will take this task further in the Sea of Marmara in a couple of days, as it substantially affects our speed and economy, especially in the calmer conditions.

Once again it has been a lesson in geography and history. Romania is twice the size of Bulgaria, and both back onto the Balkans over the top of Greece. The Balkan states, much of it former Yugoslavia, have also had a long, troubled, tribal history. Conflicts become difficult to resolve when there is diverse partisanship. Certainly, the Soviets did them no favours either, but we have met people who believe the socialist system works.

Greece is next.

Robert Burn

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Mangalia

Port Tomis (Constantza)