Flying South

Below you would soon appear a 3,085-square-mile water-world of channels and reeds - shared by Romania and Ukraine, and seasonal home to millions of migrant birds. This is the Danube Delta: it’s not hot in winter either, but it sure beats Siberia.

There are two migrations: summer birds - such as pelicans - escaping the heat of the Greek Islands, Africa and the Maghreb, from April to September; and winter birds, from November to March. I missed both. Not so Diwaker Singh, a businessman based in Bucharest, who, a few years ago, stood on a hillside overlooking the migration, and fell for the Delta. In 2005, he and his wife, Sonya, opened the Delta Nature Resort - Romania’s only rural five-star hotel - and I was staying in one of its 30 villas. I arrived in darkness and to my surprise, considering my timing, I could hear rustling and twittering, and an occasional ‘parp’, as if someone had stepped on a bagpipe.

Life in the delta runs on similar lines to those of an African safari, though without the punishing early mornings, as the days often dawn foggy. The next morning, I found myself in a shallow, three-metre draught boat, with Radu - a delightful, reserved man, whose bird knowledge far outstripped his English - puttering off into the red-gold landscape. Blue channels disappeared on all sides, occasionally opening out into vast, shallow lakes. Sticks in the water indicated submerged, tubular purse nets, set by local fishermen to capture pike-perch or carp. Grey Herons and languid, snowy-white Great Egrets launched themselves skywards as we appeared around corners; cormorants and pigeons peeled out of the trees. I honestly couldn’t think of a more soothing way to spend a day.

The point of this boat trip was to visit a lakeside monastery - now a nunnery - where the muddy bank looked as though it had been rootled by pigs; it had, in fact, been rootled by fishermen looking for bait. The nuns tend vegetable patches and beehives, peacocks, ostriches and, more conventionally, chickens. I ate alone in the refectory: home-made cheese, sausages and chicken broth, home-grown tomatoes, and fried lake fish with home-grown vegetables. A young nun kept trying to give me home-made schnapps.

The nineteenth-century monastery church looked like a musical box, filled with recently painted biblical scenes. ‘Painters give their time for free to paint the churches,’ explained Sonya, back at the hotel. ‘One of the artists came to do a wall painting of some feathers in the hotel dining room, and when I saw it next day, the walls were covered with birds; it was wonderful.’

I admired these paintings while eating rather good Romanian, Indian and international dishes, and chatting to the general manager - once governor of the delta - about Romania’s changing attitude to the environment. Last year, he tells me, the weather was so unseasonably warm that the pelicans never bothered to go home - they just hung about in the delta, getting fat. And you know what? Even after my very brief trip, I can absolutely see the appeal.

Four nights at the Delta Nature Resort costs from £896 per person, based on two sharing, B&B, including flights and transfers.