Male Vode - Turkish bayou

Lovely weather, nice sun, tie the boat, get the paddles, give direction to the gas and get straight to Turski dunavac (Turkish bayou)! You have not heard of the Turkish bayou? Maybe Male vode (Little river)? Not even that? However, neither have we, and it is only 15km from the center of the city. With the Internet, help from GPS, and a little bit of luck, we were on a dusty road, near the coast, hoping to find a suitable place to drop a kayak in the water. Thanks to the skillful hands of fishermen who already made a "infrastructure" we finally managed to put kayak into the water and start to paddle. While we were watching flow of the water we were already sweating. Knowing how hard it is to paddle the mainstream of the Danube River upstream, we wondered why we had at all done this, and thought that maybe it hadn’t been that smart to force our arms when the weather was hot like that.

For those who do not know Turkish bayou is the smallest of the Danube flows, which is in this area divided into three flows and therefore called Male vode. They say that it's a paradise for anglers, whether they’re using a net, hook or dynamite...Although, because of the last one, they say that the fish doesn’t bite as hard as it used to. The bayou still seems untouched by human hands. Clean water, clean shores, completely unrealistic scene for our Belgrade standards. The feeling that there are no bags, bottles or stoves in the water simply causes discomfort in us while we were catching the rhythm...

We caught downstream direction. Bayou empty, no living soul on the water...well, almost. Somewhere further, while we we impressed by large trees and undergrowth that surrounded us, we heard a irrigation motor pump rambling in our brain, and we could also hear a few voices from the cafes on the coast. Good, we weren’t alone. Bayou was great for paddling. You simply enjoy when you’re going downstream. Kayak almost flows by itself, and with some boats that are passing by us and welcome us, we got the first shots.

In National Geographic style we took out our camera and like an experienced paparazzi caught the first heron. Then we were screwed. Heron experienced flier, took off and started to make circles around us with a loud screeching. We immediately thought - that couldn’t be good. Heron wasn’t giving up, but neither were us. It evolved around us like vultures around the prey. Ghostly echo of its screeching we began to interpret as a call for help. We imagined a flock of herons haunting us. Since we are not courageous, we tried to be smarter than a heron, so we started to move forward and left heron behind us.

Bayou is about 7 km long and 100 m wide. We paddled around 8 kilometers in total. The left coast, or coast of Cakljanac island, is nature reservation and forest dominated area, while the right bank is milder and there are some improvised cafes. Configuration of the left bank is interesting. In many places there is a soil erosion and a complete system of interlaced three roots can be seen . Also those trees have their bayous over the water and when you paddle upstream, and you can use them for taking a break, without fear that you will flow back a few hundred meters while resting.

After an hour of paddling down the river we decided to slowly start going back, thinking that it would take us at least twice as much time to get back. However, going back upstream was much easier than we expected, maybe because we were closer to the coast, so the currents were weaker, or simply a bayou was slower than it seemed from the shore.

While we were going back to the coast we noticed a sight that caught our attention. We got our cameras and slowly approached the coast, so we could see what was going on. Two small ratish-beaverish creatures enjoyed being in the shallows. They weren’t interested in our presence, even though we almost ran them over by kayak. At that point we didn’t know about the creatures we saw, so we decided to baptize them. As this is a Turkish bayou, it is appropriate to give them Turkish names. So we named them: Skender Nibbled, and Musa Milling.

As Skender and Musa were extremely willing to pose, we made a small photo shooting, until we didn't have any more space on the card. When they decided that we were to boring and they were too tired, they hid in some bushes. After we found on the Internet that these were two nutrias, at least judging by the photos. So we decided to leave Nibbled and Milling and keep going our way. We were going close the coast and slowly we got to the place from where we started.

The sun was already beginning to set behind the trees, and bloodsuckers appeared. Our idea was to wait for the sunset and shoot some pictures of bayou, to catch the magical moment. However, we had a little of bad luck – when my colleague Darko was trying to get out, he slipped and fell into the water. As we, unknowingly, have chosen the steepest part of the coast, getting out of the water was problematic. Finally, after about twenty seconds of agitation and scraping the muddy slope, stuck between kayak, mud and frogs, he managed somehow to get to a bayou and pull himself out. I was trying to hold kayak with a paddle, to stop it from completely going downstream and at the same time tried to encourage Darko.

Probably, at the end, you wonder why the name Turkish bayou? And we wondered the same thing. Legend says the following... One morning during the Ottoman occupation, the detachment of Turkish janissaries carelessly swimming in the bayou of the Danube. How they didn’t have to worry about anything, janissaries were bathing without realizing that the water current carried them downstream. Suddenly, when they were already quite far away, as a bolt from the blue, appeared a horde of water nutrias that have invaded the janissaries. With screaming and shouting, they dragged them under the water. One by one Turkish janissary disappeared under the surface of the winding bayou. They say that nutrias were in the service of some Hajduk Milivoja whom the Turkish tortured and eventually killed after being caught in the woods. They said it was his revenge. But in any case, the body of janissaries have never surfaced, and local fishermen told that sometimes, something attach to anchor that would pull the boat upstream and then suddenly it would stop...

This legend, of course, has nothing to do with reality, but regarding overall impression, we invented it...Well, after all that's the way sone legends are created...Anyway, since the bayou almost cost Darko a head, there could be some truth in this story...The legend is worth its name, right?

Categories: Rivers