For those who might be interested, here is my review of my recent "Black Sea to Budapest" trip.
I felt that this was a good, but not great, trip. Wednesday, May 1, was the Labor Day holiday so we could not have dinner at a palace in Belgrade, which didn’t bother me. We knew that in advance, and our tour cost was reduced to take that omission into account. The following Sunday was Orthodox Easter — a big deal in many of the countries on the tour — and several places decided to just stay closed for the rest of the week. The various closures might have contributed to my lack of enthusiasm for the trip.
There were 112 Tauck travelers, 3 tour directors and a cruise director. I felt that one of the tour directors talked to us as if we were a group of kindergarten children, but the others were great. When we took excursions on land, we had 3 coaches. Sometimes, we further divided into smaller groups for walking tours. The day that we visited individual homes during our stop in Vukovar, we split up so that we had only 10-12 people in each of the homes. I would say that some of the local guides were not up to usual Tauck standards, perhaps because this part of Europe is still developing its tourism industry.
The walking tour of Bucharest that focused on its history under Communism that I had booked through Get Your Guide was quite informative. Bucharest is a combination of huge buildings from the Communist era (thanks to Ceausescu), a lively old town full of cafes and restaurants, and dilapidated buildings in disrepair because no one has clear title to them, so no one wants to invest money in them. Our hotel was not in the tourist area, but was close enough for me to walk back to the hotel from the old town.
The MS Savor was excellent. I was in a Category 5 cabin, one of the ones with an angled wall. I had been in a similar cabin before, and like the location — the first cabins close to the reception area, the lounge, and the Compass Rose restaurant. I have not heard any noise from the public areas, and it’s a quick run back to the cabin if I forget something. A highlight of the time on the boat was that one of the servers, Boryana, recognized me from my trip on the Savor two years ago.
I met many nice fellow-travelers who made me feel welcome, but it was harder to get to know my fellow travelers because there was a group of over 30 people traveling together. They had traveled all over the world together over many years. With a few exceptions, they kept mostly to themselves.
There was more time spent on the riverboat on this trip than on my other river cruises. The cities were farther apart. Also, there wasn’t much to do in many of the stops that we made along the river. The Eastern Danube just isn’t the tourist mecca that the Western Danube or
the Rhine are.
We had lectures (of about an hour each) on the boat on 3 mornings. Vlad Petrov, one of the tour directors, gave an interesting talk about the history of the EU. My big take-away from it was that the concept behind the EU was modeled on the Roman Empire, which spanned vast distances, but the people had a common identity as citizens of Rome as well as of their local area, and were further united by one currency. Another morning, we had a lecture by Srdjan Ristic, a Serb, about the history of Yugoslavia (who promoted his newly published book on the topic). The next day, we had a lecture from a Croat about the Balkan War.
I was pleasantly surprised by our trip to Pecs, Hungary. I had never heard of it. It is a charming town — actually, the 5th largest city in Hungary. The local guide said that many people spend their honeymoons there. It was not on the Danube, but well worth the drive from where we docked in Mohacs.
Our boat docked in Vukovar, Croatia, which was devastated in the Balkan War. After a walking tour of the small downtown, which was practically deserted on a Thursday afternoon, we drove to the town of Laslovo, where we split into small groups of 10-12. Each group was hosted by a person or family who explained how their lives were affected by the war. My group was fortunate to visit the home of the Vaci family, where Valerija spoke to us in perfect English about the trauma of having been sent, at age 7, to live with her grandmother in Hungary while her father served as a soldier and her mother worked in a bank to earn money to send to Hungary for her support. At that age, she could not understand why her mother would send her away, and for years, she harbored resentment, even after she returned home as a teenager. This visit was the highlight of the trip for me.
We disembarked in Budapest, where I had been before. Because we went immediately from the boat to a walking tour, that included a visit to the interior of the Parliament building, I stayed with the group until our group lunch at our hotel, following which I was able to check into my room, and then set out on my own for the next day and a half. After a quiet week on the Danube, I welcomed the hustle and bustle of the lively city.
