Romania eases by on the right bank of the Danube while Serbia slowly flows in to my memory on the left. Me, I'm sitting in the sun on the top deck of the ship. On this day we will experience the Iron Gates where the river narrows and the Carpathian Mountains soar (or at least rise up higher than the rolling farm lands we have been enjoying since Vidin).
The Iron Gates are a beautiful series of gorges with a couple of locks and a hydroelectric dam thrown in.  
On this beautiful, lazy, sunny day it is hard to imagine the difficulties ships faced trying to navigate this area in the past. Until as recently as 1973 ships had to be coaxed through the Sip Channel by locomotive.  
Before that, in 1890. the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph, along with Romanian king Carol 1 and Serbian king Alexander Obrenovich decided they should blast rocks near Orsova, Romania, to deepen and widen the passage. Even though all those great minds worked together they weren't able to tame the strong currents. 
Way before that (105 AD) the Roman conquerers were trying to make a go of it by building a segmental arch bridge near the "Great Kazan" (or kettle), the narrowest gorge. The resulting structure was 1,135 meters long. Of course Emperor Trajan couldn't go away without erecting a plaque in his honour. The bridge helped him in his conquest of Dacia after all.  
 In keeping with the tradition of immortalizing oneself, there is a huge likeness of Decebalus (Trajan's Dacian opponent) on the Romanian bank just a little farther along the river.  
There are some things about River Cruising that are very pleasant indeed.....like sitting snuggled under a nice blanket, on the deck watching this wonderful scenery go by and having one of the crew bring you hor d'oeuvres and a spritzer.
Ahhhh, but back to the blog.
I would be remiss if I did not give you a little more information about the locks and the dams which have tamed the river.  
The first lock experience of the day I slept through. There is little chance I'm going to get myself out of bed and bundled up at 5am to see the ship stop in a box. OK, for the enthusiasts out there I suppose there is some fascination to the whole thing but I knew we had another two to go through before we stopped for the night. The next one turned out to be attached to a hydroelectric dam. What a feat to take a ship this size and raise it up 40 meters to the next 'level' of the Danube. The lock we slipped in to would hold another ship our size as well as some pleasure boats, though we were alone on this day. Apparently there is no charge to use the lock because it is in international waters. Hope they generate enough cash from the dam to pay for maintenance.  
The Power Station is one of the largest plants in Europe and is shared by both Romania and Serbia. I can't imagine how that actually works especially when you consider that it was built when Serbia was Yugoslavia and Romania was controlled by the Soviet Union. The paperwork must have been staggering!
Though I enjoyed the peaceful cruise today I must mention that it came at a cost. Yes we could cruise with little or no effort along the smooth waters but building the dam and the locks took a toll. Beneath us lie the remnants of villages not the least of which was the island of Ada Kaleh. This little island went from Turkish control to Austrian to Turkish to Austrian to Turkish then back to Austrian-Hungarian then to the Turks again. It has a fascinating history and I'm sorry that the village itself is lost. Just one of those things we need to think about when we take a journey. Not everything you see is visible.