Canoeing on the Danube

Summary

How long does it take to canoe the Danube?The average distance per day varies greatly and obviously depends a lot on how much you stop and what you want to see on route. That said, at least 60kms a day was pretty standard with the exception of the slow water for the 100kms upstream of the Djerdap dams in Serbia. Our longest day was just over 80kms. From Kelheim the Danube took us 45 days. The Tour International Danube have an itinerary of 65 days – perhaps more realistic if you want to spend a good amount of time in towns and cities. Bare in mind, on our journey, as we had a lot of ground to cover, we generally did longer days than you might as a regular canoe tourer.Where did you store the canoe when stopping briefly?Take a long bike lock. When leaving the canoe we would always lock it to something using a long bike lock and took our paddles with us. As for leaving bags in the canoe, we learnt this lesson the hard way. Admittedly the city of Tour on the river Loire is no small village, but we had loads of our gear stolen from our dry bags, including tent and sleeping bags, when we visited the city for an afternoon. From then on whenever we stopped anywhere we locked the canoe and took both of our large dry bags with us. That meant the canoe was left alone with only food in it, easily replaced. Other than Tour we never encountered any problems however.Where did you store the canoe at night?Canoe club and rowing clubs are fairly frequent from Germany to Hungary and many offer good camping facilities. The TID camping locations, marked on their itinerary, can be useful for this. These are good secure places to stay and meet like minded people. All along the Danube you can find wild camping spots and the further down the river you go the easier this becomes. By Bulgaria and Romania you can camp almost anywhere. We did plenty of wild camping but be aware it is not legal in Germany or Austria so be particularly careful there. Here we simply slept with the canoe rolled ove...