We were somewhere near the tractor town of Slobozia, headed for the Danube delta, when Razvan, my guide and driver, turned off the potholed road to show me the Dallas Hotel. There it stood in the middle of a vast potato plain, a replica of Southfork ranch surrounded by stooping farm workers, their rusting bicycles and – wait for it – a half-size Eiffel Tower.

Zany Parisian landmarks and gone-to-seed TV-tribute hotels (the Ewing oil wells, judging by this particular Dallas, have long since run dry) used to be the highlights of a visit to Romania. No longer. Sibiu, the showpiece medieval city of German-Saxon Transylvania, is 2007’s European Capital of Culture, while the Danube delta is fast emerging as an important eco-destination, flush with 300 bird species and about 2,000 square miles of backwater islands, isolated peasant villages and willow-lined channels. This was once a vast, watery blank where dissident minorities went into hiding; now it is home to Romania’s first top-end wilderness lodge, Delta Nature Resort.

Combine all this with an abundance of world-class picturesqueness – my first view was of a man cutting the waist-high grass at Bucharest airport with a scythe – and Romania feels like a must-see-right-now destination.

“Of course they cut the grass,” said Razvan when he met me at arrivals. “How else are the airport workers to feed their animals?”

We drove east. The severest spring floods for decades had pushed the delta beyond even its most extravagant contours. Egrets and ibises stalked the meadows. Water lapped at the walls of reed-thatched cottages and puddled around the mosques of the Turkish population – just one of numerous minorities who have washed up here on Europe’s lowlying margins.

The delta took an ecological hammering under Ceausescu – he had planned to drain it for agricultural use – but was designated a World Heritage Site in the 1990s. With the opening in 2005 of the five-star Delta Nature Resort, with its plantation-style main lodge and 30 guest cabins, it’s as if the area has gone from dowdy Broads to luxury Okavango overnight.

From my spacious combination of stylish summerhouse and fishing hut, with its sitting room and private terrace, I looked out across Lake Somova to the forested banks of the Danube and pondered that Romanian rarity: a first-class international menu.

The resort is located on comparatively high ground, which puts the delta itself a good hour away by the hotel’s speedboat. No matter: among the backwater landscapes of drowned trees and lily-draped lakes nested cormorants and terns, coots, pelicans and herons in extraordinary profusion. Patrolling crows swooped on unguarded nests to filch eggs. Snakes were wrapped around the willows. Fishy bubbles rose from the murky depths.

We put ashore on Uzlina island, where an old farmer with shock-blue eyes offered us a glass of homemade wine and cheese curds from behind a rampart of water-lapped sandbags. Hats for every season – reed-woven ones with wide brims, trilbies, thick woollen ones with ear-flaps – hung from every hook, and on his shelf a faded photograph showed him meeting Ceausescu, who had had a holiday home nearby.

We drove west until the mountains – and the preposterous architecture – announced Transylvania. In the aristocratic mountain resort of Sinaia, fin de siècle villas squatted in shabby, landscaped gardens. Pride of place went to Peles Castle, the summer residence of King Carol I and his poet-queen, Carmen Sylva, in the late 19th century. Here were secret doors behind library bookcases, Murano glass chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors of Venetian crystal, and Carrara marble door surrounds. In the landscaped gardens, a brown bear padded restlessly against its chain, while its gypsy owner pocketed a few lei from snapping tourists.

At Magura village’s pensiune, we stopped for a reviving meal: pork chops, herb-scented potatoes and wild mushrooms, all sourced from within a stone’s throw of the house. It was a welcome break from the Romanian restaurant norm, where the best you can say is that the dishes announce their shortcomings in advance – “vegetables dressed in cornflakes”, “snack with mush”. The worst was the positively anaemic “Dracula soup” – was it tomato? – that I encountered at the house in Sighisoara where Vlad the Impaler, the original Dracula, was born.

We drove on into Saxon Transylvania, where the high-walled houses and churches, slit for defensive bowmen, betrayed the signs of an ancient insecurity. The Saxons who settled in the region from the 12th century found themselves on Europe’s front line against Turks and Tatars – and, 800 years on, ended up being persecuted by the communists. An old man, sitting in an apple orchard heavy with blossom, told me that he was one of the last remaining Saxons in Biertan. The rest had begun new lives in Germany.

The world they left behind has hardly changed over the centuries. From poppy-strewn meadows, the domes of sweet-smelling haystacks rose around spindles like candyfloss. Horse-drawn ploughs worked the fields. Gypsy drivers wearing squashed black bowlers perched on stout carts, fetching red tassels hanging from their horses’ heads.

Approaching Sibiu, its moated bastions and thickset towers enclosing a glorious medieval core, we came across five shepherds. They were traditionally dressed in old moleskin breeches, waistcoats and high, rounded hats.

They worked the edges of the huge flock, 500-strong – among it, three donkeys laden with copper kettles, blackened pots and scythes. They were headed, they told us, to new pastures around the Fagaras mountains. We watched them, a glimpse of another age, as they cleared the road and headed out across the sunset plain.

Travel details: Jeremy Seal was a guest of Regent Holidays and Delta Nature Resort. Regent Holidays (0870 499 0911, www.regent-holidays.co.uk ) can tailor-make itineraries throughout Romania. A seven-day fly-drive tour, including the Delta Nature Resort (0870 068 2798, www.deltaresort.com ; doubles from £106pp, B&B), starts at £675pp (or £979pp with a private driver/guide), visiting Bucharest, Brasov, Sighisoara and Sinaia. Prices include flights from Heathrow to Bucharest, car hire and B&B accommodation.

Or try Fregata Travel (020 7420 7305, www.fregatatravel.co.uk ), or Romania Travel Centre (01892 673437, www.romaniatravelcentre.com ). The Romanian National Tourist Office is on 020 7224 3692, or visit www.romaniatourism.com .

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