TRAVELLING LIFE
CAROL WRIGHT
Western Europeans like to find an old paint- peeled fishing village and vamp it into a smart little resort. The fishermen move their community aside, become property dealers or open sea food restaurants hung with fish nets and floats. Portofino, Cascais, Albufiera, Torremolinos and St Tropez have all been so transformed.
In Eastern Europe, the reverse applies. Re- sorts are man-made meccas: monuments to dreams of dwelling in capitalistic marble halls. Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast and Mamaia are the old and new models of holi- day places in which to escape the trivial round and common task.
Sochi, Russia's number one resort, based its original pre-war attraction on the cura- tive powers of its mineral springs. Sochi is ideal in late spring when one flies from melting snows in Moscow's pine forests to arrive amid uncurling green woods, crisp mountain air, sun, flowers and a calm sea shore. Sochi rations itself 100 miles thinly along the steep Black Sea banks. Its hotels are neo-classical pastiches of ancient Greece and not-so-ancient Rome. White stucco and gilded statuary, pillars and cupolas de- scend to balustraded terraces stepped down between the gardens. Each hotel is really a sanatorium built by trade unions to provide preventive medicine for the workers. Some like Metallurgy—the palaces are all named after the appropriate craft—admit foreigners or there are the stately intourist hotels of plushy suites and pillared balconies.
If not on a cure, the days are passed in swimming, taking boat trips or short cruises on the Black Sea, land excursions to Lake Ritza, up riverside roads edged with birch encased in upholsteries of moss to the spinach-green lake secretive in its thick pine forest. A Chekhovian charm can be sampled at the Dagomy tea estate where workers have built small pinewood tea houses among the tea bushes where the visitor can sip the brew alongside the sibilant samovar and tiled stove and eat plum bread with polished apples, Georgian style. In the evening there are circuses, open-air ballet in season or restaurants like Azure where the trout is perfect or one can eat in simulated village houses in the woods behind the spa. Sochi and the Caucasus costs £84 on inclusive tours from Britain.
If Sochi is the old-style Communist re- sort, then Mamaia in Romania is the epitome of the new. For me it is soulless—serried ranks of high-rise hotels stud a sand spit be- tween Lake Suitghiol and the Black Sea. Be- tween them are dotted overcrowded restaur- ants and souvenir shops. There is no indige- nous life; hotel staff live in Constanza three miles away and come down each day by bus. The resorts of Bulgaria—optimistically called Sunny Beach and Golden Sands—have been better landscaped and have tried to retain some threads of traditional local style but they too have the same transit camp atmosphere as does Hungary's 'beach' resort of Siofok on Lake Balaton, again with tall concrete cell blocks and stodgy dull food.
A plus of such places is the attractive selec- tion of low-priced well- (perhaps over-) organ- ised day tours round the respective countries. Romania has some of the best though they deserve more detailed study than just a day tour. The painted monasteries of Moldavia- Sucevita, Putna, Moldavita, and Voronet- are slipped into mountain fissure arms and valleys surrounded by pine forests. Their ex- teriors are covered with unfaded scenes from the Bible. With a car, the monastery area would be preferable to the beach scene. There are one or two small hotels in the area, but more in tune with the place would be to stay at a monastery or in a country- man's house. In the monastery, the simple whitewashed rooms have bright red blankets, candles, dark carved furniture and slim win- dows glancing down the valley.
Another place to hide from tawdry today is the Danube delta. Thirty million tons of mud annually are spewed down this river debouching into the Black Sea on the bor- ders of Romania and Russia, forming an ever-shifting jungle of reed islands. It is pos- sible to take a leisurely river cruise from Vienna down to Hirsova on modern Rom- anian river-boats but the best introduction is by road to Tulcea and then a day's paddle- steamer excursion. This is the lazy way,
i lying on deck in sun chairs with ice-cold Tzuica (plum brandy) in one hand, binoculars, to spot the wonderful bird life, in the other. Deeper acquaintance comes in staying in hunters' huts and hunting, even with camera, with the locals. This, with accommodation in Tulcea's new tourist hotel or in special hun- ters' huts in the delta, can be arranged through the Romanian Tourist Board.
Yugoslavia, though not Iron Curtain, is communist. Its holiday resorts come some- where between the two aims—fishing vil- lages yes, but left au natur with a few simple new hotels parked around them. Sophistications are rare, but, with rising prices only slightly tempered by devalu- ation, perhaps less value for money now.
Leaving aside Sveti Stefan, an island where an artists' colony venue has been imposed on a russet roofed island village and the booming cult of nudist camps, the Dalma- tian islands call those who want the fishing- life simplicity. The larger islands like Kor- cula, Brac and Hvar have pretensions to resort life, but it is the smaller chains off Zadar with names like fierce Indian gods: Dugi Otok, Vis, Uglian. or Fag that are my delight in the season of the year.
I once hired a boat with charming boat- man and wife who would feed my husband and me home-made slivovic and turkish cof- fee in the pink chill dawn each day. The days were a pottering of snorkelling, fishing, swim- ming, eating ashore or on deck, exploring the islands, dozing under the sail until the dolphins rose at evening and we made for camp on a deserted island or spent the night in one of the few small hotels or found a private house room for 15s—the common practice on this part of the coast.
If the simple life of sharing the daily round of a Yugoslav boatman does not appeal, it is possible now to hire large houseboats that can be motored slowly down the coast be- tween three pick-up and servicing ports.
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