Strong drift wave turbulence and anomalous transport have been investigated under conditions of large ion dynamics effects, i.e. the major part of the fluctuation energy spectrum is located at perpendicular wavenumbers kperpendicular to approximately= rho s-1 ( rho s=(Te/mi omega ci2)1/2 being the effective ion gyroradius. It was found that the stationary turbulence and the particle transport are determined both by the linear kinetic theory of the drift waves and nonlinear effects. The kperpendicular to -scaling of the spectra in the range kperpendicular to rho s>1 obeys the numerical results obtained from the Hasegawa-Mima model. The phase difference between the density and the potential fluctuations agrees reasonably well with the predictions of the linear theory. The resulting fluctuation-induced particle flux fits to estimates of the diffusion coefficient evaluated from the density fluctuation spectra.