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The Blue Danube is brown — at least when I first see it in Budapest. According to romantics, the River Danube looks blue when you’re in love, but green if it’s a one-sided affair, grey when the passion’s gone and black when it’s all over. Brown doesn’t rate a mention on this love litmus test.

Romantically browned-off or otherwise, I board Tauck’s rivership, the Swiss Emerald for a week-long cruise down the Lower Danube to the Black Sea – whatever colour it turns out to be. But first, a quick look around the twin cities of hilly Buda and flat Pest.

The contrasts are everywhere. Budapest mixes elegant Hapsburg-era palaces with blocks of neo-brutal Soviet Hangover School architecture. Similarly, the dining options veer from veal paprikash to, well, Burger a la King. Meanwhile, the background music might be Franz Liszt or a busker doing goulash Johnny Cash. Oddly, nowhere do I hear the Blue Danube Waltz.

Long, Parisian-style boulevards lead through this grand city. At the end of one we find Heroes Square where our guide runs through a list of famous Hungarians: Belas (Lugosi and Bartok), Rubik (of the cube), Biro (of the ballpoint), Estee Lauder, 22 saints, 13 Nobel laureates and Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Arranged in a semi-circle around this sunny square are 14 bronzes of Hungary’s greatest warriors, kings and bishops, but no pen, cube or Zsa-Zsa anywhere.

Local boy Liszt called our next stop, the compact and ornately beautiful Budapest Opera House, “this little jewel box.” And indeed it is, especially when our tour minders whip out a surprise: a costumed tenor and soprano step forward from a balcony to serenade us with duets from Don Giovanni and La Traviata.

It’s hard to top that with much but sailing away. So, next day our sleek, 110-metre, 120-passenger rivership turns downstream to begin our 1350 km journey south and east towards Romania, via Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria.

We first dock at rural Solt, near a sort of Paprika Western theme farm. A team of Hungarian Puszta cowboys performs thrilling stunts for us, culminating in “horse surfing” - a rider stands balanced atop the haunches of two thundering steeds while driving them and three lead horses at top speed around the arena.

Sailing on, we get to know our fellow passengers, mostly Americans, plus the Dutch, Romanian and Indonesian crew. And too quickly we become used to dining each night like gourmands. Tomorrow is another day, a new country. We awake in Croatia, at Vukovar, a pretty 10th-century town that was befouled by ethnic cleansing during the orgy of tribal spite that was the 1990’s Balkan War. Walls pockmarked with yesteryear’s bullet holes, and the shells of bombed buildings contrast with today’s easy-going ambience. Shade trees, bronze statues, ice-cream stalls, people again at ease – all slowly assuaging the grievous memories.

Full moon rises over the Danube. Banks as dark as the Black Forest slide past. Next morning finds us in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. When we visit the town’s ancient fortress, our politically incorrect (and thus great fun) guide, Lilly, cracks the old joke about not ordering “Banana Split” here since the anti-Croatian hardliners wanted to rename it “Banana Belgrade.” She adds wryly, “Everybody in the Balkans remembers mostly when their side was great – even if the last time was in the 14th-century.”

Every few nights a new troupe of beautiful and handsome folk dancers entertains us in the ship’s dining room before we settle down to our next feast. Accompanied by fiddlers and strummers, they swirl, twirl and sing. It’s skillful and authentic but as one New Yorker muses, “The leaps and hoots seem pretty much the same. Main difference from country to country is the embroidery.”

I retire to my cabin where I can slide open its floor-to-ceiling windows and look out on the river, just metres away. There’s a flat-screen satellite TV where you can just turn off all the news from the disaster world we’ve left temporarily behind. And if we’re lucky, in most ports we can download wireless emails, although at a formidable cost.

The Iron Gate of Romania was once a forbidding gauntlet for river craft. As we approach it, the windless morning river stretches ahead and our wake ripples behind us like tugged silk. We enter a 100 kilometre long series of limestone gorges that culminates in the Kazan Narrows and the Iron Gate. On the northern bank are Romania and the wild Carpathian Mountains; to our right is Serbia, soon to be followed by Bulgaria.

I spot an ancient stone pylon on the shore, the remains of Roman Emperor Trajan’s Bridge, the first to cross the Danube, way back in 103 AD. The river here funnels down to around 200 metres wide. Before it was dammed in the 1960s, boats could take four days to complete the upstream battle against it. Today we pass easily through several modern locks.

The shoreline scenery varies, with dense woods giving way to villages. The onion-domed spires and gothic crosses of Orthodox churches in turn are succeeded by industrial zones, then more deserted stretches peopled by just fishermen or children swimming.

Our first view of Bulgaria is more like the Danube Blues than Blue Danube. Departing the little port of Svistov on a coach we pass through threadbare villages, devoid of enterprise or the young, the sort of old Iron Curtain wasteland where Tom Waits’ tongue-in-cheek quip might fit perfectly: “Everything’s broken and no one speaks English.” Little do I know that this is the prelude to the hilltop village of Arbanassi, which turns out to be the highlight of the trip for many of us.

We roll into a well-maintained stone village where “For Sale” signs in both English and Cyrillic promote investment in formidable villas. Arbanassi, we learn, is a favourite bolt-hole of both holidaying Brits and Bulgarian mafiosi. Here we head to a discretely low stone chapel, built that way to not attract the wrath of the Moslem Ottomans who occupied this area for centuries. Once inside this 16th-century Church of the Nativity we are all but overwhelmed by its cavern of stunning images. The vaulted ceilings are decorated from floor to dome with some 2000 frescoes and icons. Spinning in infinity around us is a cosmos of painted angels, saints and Madonnas.

As if that weren’t enough, the Tauck team has hatched another surprise. Four bearded, dark-garbed cantors glide into this numinous cocoon and begin chanting, filling the space with soaring harmonies. We return to the Swiss Emerald via the cobbled streets of the country’s medieval capital, Veliko Turnovo, with my somber first impressions of Bulgaria turned right on their head.

Romania at last. Time to “debark”, as Americans often say. Farewell to all that fine fare and wine (and our expanding waistlines), the good-hearted crew, our guides and the sunny upper deck. We have two final days seeing Bucharest and parts of “Dracula-stan — ” Transylvania and Vlad the Impaler’s tomb on Snagov Island — but first we sample the Black Sea at Mamaia.

Champagne on the beach, a panoramic group photo. Then a plunge into the sea. Just as the Blue Danube isn’t blue, the Black Sea isn’t black, or even brown. It is, I am pleased to see, almost blue.

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