Great European Adventure

Itinerary: Istanbul to Vienna

Day 1 Depart Canada. Board your overnight flight to Istanbul, Turkey

Day 2 Arrival in Istanbul, the great Bosphorus metropolis. There is a transfer from the airport, which brings you to your centrally situated hotel for Check-In and welcome through your tour guide. Enjoy the dinner in the hotel.

Day 3 After breakfast in the hotel a fascinating included city sightseeing tour through Istanbul awaits you. Straddling the Bosphorus, its skyline studded with domes and minarets, Istanbul is one of the truly great romantic cities. Its history stretches from Byzantium to Constantinople, when it was the centre of the Ottoman Empire. Also a visit to Istanbul’s impressive Topkapi Palace (€ 35) is planned. His successors added new pavilions, thus spreading the Palace over a total area of 70,000 square meters. The visit through the Palace includes the collection of clocks, the Relics of the Prophet, and the Baghdad Kiosk, which is a beautiful specimen of an Ottoman interior.

Day 4 The morning is for your own disposal before you check-out in the hotel. In the afternoon we board the exclusive train which brings you during an exiting journey to Bucharest.

Day 5 In the afternoon the train reaches Bucharest, the Romanian capital. Comfortable coaches then take you to the centrally located 4/5* hotel, for dinner and the night.

Day 6 Today we have an interesting included city tour, which shows you the city centre of Bucharest, the Parliament Buildings, and the Memorial to Freedom. A stop will be made during the course of the tour for an included lunch. The highlight of the tour is a visit to the open-air Village and Folk Art Museum in Herastrau Park, on the outskirts of Bucharest. Here you can see reconstructions of old farm houses from all over the country, complete with their furniture and fittings, and other farm buildings including barns, granaries and windmills. We are then taken by coach to Chiciu on the Danube, where we embark on the vessel in the late afternoon. Enjoy a welcome reception and dinner on board this evening.

Day 7 Enjoy the day on the sundeck - chatting, reading, snoozing. Or you have the opportunity to join the excursion Constanta and Black Sea Coast (€ 22). Depart from the pier directly to one of the oldest cities in Europe, Constanta. On the way to the Archeological Museum, the bus will pass by some of the most important buildings in town. Once arriving in front of the Archeological museum one will notice the statue of Ovidius Puplius Nasos, the exiled Roman poet, the singer of tender love. He was the one who described for the first time the places and the population of this region. Afterwards the bus will take our passengers through the centre of the city to the resort of Mamaia. Allow passengers free time for shopping / walking. After than we will return to the vessel where the cruise goes on in the afternoon.

Day 8 In the early morning the vessels stops in Rousse. This morning an optional excursion is available from Rousse to Veliko Tarnovo (€ 44), the former capital of Bulgaria. Your ship leaves Rousse after breakfast, and sails to the Bulgarian port of Nikopol, where she moors after lunch. The stop here is simply to allow those on the excursion to Veliko Tarnovo to rejoin the ship. We leave Nikopol in the evening.

Day 9 We spend the day at leisure, cruising through Romania and into the waters of Serbia and Montenegro. Some 450 miles from Rousse our ship reaches the narrow Kazan Gorge, where a tablet with a Latin inscription commemorating the emperor Trajan can still be seen etched in the rock. A little further on, we reach the “Iron Gates”, which for centuries constituted a hazardous stretch of the Danube, as ships had to steer carefully through a narrow gorge with high cliffs on either side. Today, the water level has been raised and the hazards removed but the journey is still of interest, and you can observe the various manoeuvres as the ship passes through the two locks by the Djerdap power stations. In the afternoon we ply a particularly scenic stretch as the Danube passes through the Carpathians and the foothills of the Balkans.

Day 10 We reach Belgrade, capital of Serbia and Montenegro in the morning. The city was built at the junction of the rivers Danube and Save, and has been destroyed and rebuilt many times during its 2,000-year history. An included city tour of Belgrade is available this morning, which includes a visit to the Kalemegdan fortress. At noon you return to the vessel in Novi Sad. After lunch you have the possibility to join the city tour Novi Sad (€ 19). You walk around the old quarter and go by coach up to the Peterwardein fortress, one of the largest defensive fortifications, which were the masterpiece of Vauban, the 18th century French Architect. In the late evening the cruise goes on.

Day 11 The vessel docks at Vukovar in Croatia in the early morning from where the excursion to Osijek and the Croatian Danube Basin (€ 25) is available. Osijek is the administrative and economic centre of Eastern Croatia. It is the country’s 4th biggest city, and is situated on the Drava River. This tour includes the church of the Raising of the Holy Cross and the Tvrda that was built from 1712 – 1722 as a military fortress. Lunch is taken on board as we leave at midday to cruise upstream to the Hungarian border, heading overnight for Budapest.

Day 12 We dock in Budapest, capital of Hungary, at noon. Budapest is a city made up of two parts: Buda and Pest, built on opposite banks of the Danube. Buda is the older and more graceful part, with its cobbled streets and medieval architecture, while Pest is the administrative and commercial centre, with wide avenues and impressive 19th-century public buildings.

East meets West in this fascinating city, and this can be seen in the variety of shops and restaurants. This afternoon there is an included city sightseeing tour, or you may look around Budapest independently. In the evening the vessel heads for Bratislava while we enjoy the Captain’s Gala Dinner and a show by the crew.

Day 13 During lunch we reach Bratislava, which is the capital of the Republic of Slovakia and which celebrated its 2000th anniversary in 1991. We will pass underneath the colossal new ‘SNP’ suspension bridge across the Danube. Our included tour of Bratislava gives you an opportunity to appreciate this small, but charming capital city. In the evening the vessel heads for Vienna.

Day 14 Disembarkation in Vienna after breakfast. Transfer to airport for your flight home.

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