Romania borders the Black Sea from the town of Tulcea and the near by delta in the north to town of Mangalia and the surrounding area in the south where the high rise tourist hotels are located. We visited the Neptun area in late June of 2003 as spent a few days. The picture above was taken from our hotel room looking east. The Black Sea is in the background of the picture behind the line of begitation running the length of the picture. The water in the foreground is a small lake. The picture below is of a section of the lake. We particularly liked all the guys fishing right next to the “NO FISHING” sign on the red pole. In addition to Neptun there are Olimp, Jupiter and Venus areas as well. Our Lonely Planet tour book tells us that the leaders of the country in the communist days spent their time in the Olimp area and that the hotels there are more plush than those in the other areas. Plush, however, is a relative word. Our hotel was one of the few three star hotels in the area and was crumbling and in need of lots of maintenance. We found the elevators in the hotel to be interesting. Three elevators side by side. Each of which operated independently - each one had its own set of call buttons and when you pushed one button that only called that elevator. So, whenever anyone wanted an elevator they always pushed all three sets of buttons. This lead to some interesting times when people were entering the hotel in the afternoons or departing in the mornings.

We suspect that the beds in our room had been in the hotel since it was built as well as the sheets in use. The sheets and pillow cases had lots of holes in them and they were starched! Jim decided that they were using starch on them so that they would hold together - without the starch he thinks that they would just tear apart whenever you pulled on them. Oh yes, no air conditioning. Fortunately it was not too hot when we were there but it was warm and it was necessary to keep the windows open all the time we were in the room. We could not leave them open when we left the room because the balcony ran the whole length of the floor we were on and it would be very easy to go from room to room on the balcony. There was not any way to leave the window open that would prevent entry. The real bad news was the disco across the street that started at 8 PM and went on till well after 3 AM - not much chance for sleep unless you used your earplugs which Verna did.

The beach areas were all sand but commercial development is starting to take its toll. And, what is being built is being done without any planning or adherence to any sort of building codes from what we could see. Structures were being thrown up that consisted of nothing but a few pine boards nailed together with a roof put on a top to protect whatever the vendor was selling - mostly clothing items but we did find one shed that held about 15 computers that was operating as an internet cafe.

The season here is very short - nothing opens before June and it is all closed in September. The guests in the hotels were mostly Romanians but we did see a few car registrations from Hungary and Moldova. Prices for hotel rooms and food in restaurants were about three to four times more expensive than anything we had encountered in Romania previously. There were several people standing by the side of the road as we entered the Neptun area waving keys in the air - we assume that this was similar to the people we encountered in Dubrovnik, Croatia, who where standing by the side of the road with signs saying they had rooms available in their homes.

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