Tulcea

Understand this before booking anything. Three arms carry the Danube from Tulcea to the sea, and they are wide, deep and used by shipping — a large fast boat runs down one of them in a couple of hours and it is an impressive journey that shows you very little wildlife. The delta that people come for is in the side channels, the canals and the lakes between those arms, and it needs a boat small enough and shallow enough to enter them, moving slowly, ideally with the engine cut. So the question to ask an operator is not how long the trip is but where it actually goes and what boat it uses. A full-day trip from Tulcea in a small boat with a guide who knows the current channels is worth more than a multi-day package that stays on the arms. Even better is to base yourself in a village inside the delta and go out at dawn, which is when the light is low, the water is still and the birds are feeding. Bring binoculars, sun protection with no shade to rely on, insect repellent in the warmer months, and something waterproof: an open boat in delta weather is exposed in both directions.

Sulina sits at the end of the middle arm, where the Danube finally reaches the sea, and it is the strangest town in Romania. It was an international free port administered by a European commission for the better part of a century, and it drew Greeks, Turks, Italians, Russians, Armenians, Jews and others into a place that is now a quiet town of a few thousand at the end of a waterway — a lighthouse standing inland because the coast has advanced past it, a long beach, and a cemetery with sections in several scripts that is the clearest surviving record of what the town used to be. There is no road; you arrive by boat. Elsewhere in the delta, Crișan, Mila 23 and Sfântu Gheorghe are fishing villages of single-storey reed-thatched houses along a channel, where the boat is the car and the day is organised around water. The Lipovan community, descended from Russian settlers who arrived generations ago, still speaks its own language here and fishes in distinctive slim boats; the food follows from all of it, and a fish soup eaten in a delta village — made from whatever came out of the water that morning, in a pot, outside — is among the best things eaten in Romania. Accommodation is guesthouses rather than hotels, and half-board is normal because there is nowhere else to eat.

The delta's bird list runs to well over three hundred species and the headline is the pelicans: this is the largest breeding concentration of white pelicans in Europe, joined by the rarer and heavier Dalmatian pelican, and seeing several hundred of them fishing cooperatively on a lake at dawn is the single image most visitors take away. Around them are herons and egrets of several kinds, cormorants in dense colonies, spoonbills, glossy ibis, terns, marsh harriers overhead and, in the reeds, a great deal that is heard rather than seen. Spring migration through April and May and the autumn passage are the peak periods; high summer is hotter, busier with domestic holidaymakers and still excellent at dawn; winter is severe, quiet and for the committed. Two forests are worth the effort of reaching: Letea and Caraorman grow on ancient sand dunes and are unlike anything else in the country — oak and ash draped with lianas, growing in sand, with herds of free-roaming horses among them. Both are strictly protected, both need a guide, and both are reached by boat and then on foot or by cart. Inland, along the county's western edge, the Măcin mountains are the eroded stumps of one of the oldest ranges in Europe, low and rounded and utterly unlike the Carpathians.

Tulcea town is the gateway and it is a working port rather than a destination — arrive, provision, take the boat. It is a long drive from anywhere else in Romania: the delta sits in the far east of a large country, several hours from Bucharest and further from Transylvania, which is the single biggest reason it gets skipped or done badly. The trip-planning guide is blunt that this region does not fit the country's northern arc and needs its own days rather than being wedged in — rightly: a day trip from Tulcea is a taste, two nights inside the delta is the minimum for the place to work on you, and three is better. The natural combination is with the Black Sea coast to the south, which the Constanța guide covers — the two together make a coherent eastern leg of four or five days that has nothing to do with the rest of the country and is all the better for it. Book accommodation inside the delta rather than in Tulcea if you possibly can, and confirm how you are being transferred, since the boat is not incidental to the trip but the whole of it.