Danube Portfolio, Part One: On Troubled Waters

A cruise back in time, and not in a comfortable way. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

IN EASTERN EUROPE, MEMORY LANE IS POCKMARKED WITH LAND MINES. When I booked our Danube cruise I was fixated on the glittering bookends—Vienna, Istanbul—and unprepared for all the difficult histories in between.

Patrick Leigh Fermor tried to warn me.

I discovered his classic travel journal Between the Woods and The Water while working on “The Fifty Best Hiking, Trekking, and Walking Books of all Time” for Backpacker. The book chronicled Fermor’s walk, at age eighteen, from Hook, Holland, to what was then called Constantinople. He began his walk in 1933, the same year Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. (Which reminds me: Americans: have you registered to vote, yet?) Fermor followed the Danube, just like I would! Wheee!

Fermor’s book is so studded with gems that King Charles could wear it to Westminster Abbey. “Dropping toward the watershed,” Fermor wrote, “the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples a…