Upper Tumane to Dedine - Danube and canyon views hike

I recommend this if you are adventurous only...

The hike is not technically difficult, but if 12-15 km is the perfect day hike length, this is on the long side - so probably not for casual hikers.

There are no trail markings until the last four kilometres or so, when one or two appear, although it's still not well-marked. For most of the hike little tracks and trails appear and disappear all over the place. I lost count of the number of times we came to a three or four trail crossways, picked what we thought was the right path and then needed to turn back. You need to regularly check your bearings!!

On the plus side, the countryside is beautiful and nearly deserted. We saw one other human being - a local farmer - all day. There are some great views of Brnjica Canyon and across the Danube into Romania. If we had more time we would have climbed to the viewpoint for the Golubac view too, but we actually ran out of daylight ...

This might be the perfect hike for a sunny day in late February or early March at the end of a good spell of dry weather and when you get more daylight than in deep winter. We did this hike in late January. The advantage of doing this hike in winter is that with no leaves on the trees, the views into Romania are better than in the warmer months, and the trails were not overgrown with grass, which can be a problem in summer with this type of 'off the beaten' trail...

The downside was that even though the forecast was for 12 degrees and sunny, it had snowed overnight, so we had a mix of melting snow and mud to contend with, which slowed us down. If there'd been a week of good weather and no recent snowfall before we did this hike, it would have made all the difference. We would have been much faster and managed to do the Golubac viewpoint too.

The mud was annoying but mostly fine - until about 4km from the end, where it got very caked onto our shoes and made them as heavy and clunky as clogs. See para above about doing this hike after a spell of dry weather :)

If you want to shorten the hike, try skipping the radio tower at the start and staying on the road or even starting at the little house which is my fifth flag. You should be able to get a car this far. We were using trails uploaded by two other users "GBole" and "Andjeoa" - they both start closer to the road Tumane Monastery is on, but we drove up most of the steep ascent. It saved us about 2 kms and an hour of hiking in the dark.

None of this is meant to put anyone off - any hike is better than no hike at all! Just be prepared :) Take hiking poles. You will thank me and have fun too.