A peaceful dip in the Danube

MARTIN STREL, a 45-year-old Slovene, dived into the Danube on June 25th in Donaueschingen, a German town in the Black Forest, where the longest river in Europe, bar Russia's Volga, starts. Fifty-eight days and 3,004km (1,878 miles) later, he climbed out close to Constantia, a Romanian port on the Black Sea. “Enough,” he told onlookers. Mr Strel had swum through ten countries—Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and tiny strips of Moldova and Ukraine—before taking a final turn along the Danube-Black Sea canal to beat the world's long-distance record set by Fred Newton, an American who crawled 2,938km down the Mississippi in 1930. Accompanied by a son in a kayak, Mr Strel swam for 12 hours a day, managing to sleep only two or three hours a night. “I don't know how I survived,” he said. “The pain was unbearable.”