Bamberg

Today we were in Bamberg, still in Germany. This town was quaint and interesting, even nicer than yesterdays visit to Nurnberg.  It is a Medieval town and an UNESCO World Heritage Site. From its numerous modern shops to its market places full of fruit vegies and flowers, to the charming old buildings of various styles, a really nice place to visit. Our walking tour took us through these markets and to the Regnitz River which runs through the town. Interesting sight here was the Old Town Hall which is built on an Island in the middle of the river. This occurred because the Bishop, at the time, refused to give the towns people land for a Town Hall. The building is ½ wood and ½ brick/stone and not all that big, but it’s there. Up a rather steep hill is the 13^th Century Cathedral which although nice, is not as ornate as most we have seen, so that was quite refreshing. The really beautiful Rose Gardens in the grounds of the Library were also where we could get nice views overlooking the City. The narrow street serpentine around and in front of 18^th Century Mansions, most of which are colourful and well kept.  Bamberg is famous for its beers and there are 8 Breweries which produce over 50 beers.  They say the most unusual one of these is a beer which tastes a bit like liquid bacon.

 Town Hall

Rose Garden with Monastery in the background

 Typical Street scene

Nurnberg (How they spell it)

Early this morning we passed the European Continental Divide. The canal linking the Main and Danube rivers was only completed in 1992, although other parts of the canal system were in place before this date. This summit of the Canal is located 406 metres above sea level, which makes it the highest point of Europe’s system of commercial waterways. Instead of going ‘up’ in the locks as we have done since leaving Bucharest, we now go ‘down’ in the locks before reaching Amsterdam. 

It costs 13 Euro cents per mile to travel on the river systems using the many locks.

Today we are in Nuremberg, Germany. This is the place Hitler declared would be the place where the General assemblies of his party, the so called Nuremberg Rallies, would be held. The City is quite big really and the large Fortress/Imperial Castle with its walled interior has pride of place overlooking the City itself.

Because of Hitler’s presence here at times, 90% of the Old Town suffered extensive damage during World War 2, due to bombings by the Allies, but much of it has been restored to the glory it once knew as the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire.

In one of the town squares there is a VERY ornate fountain with statues hi-lighted in gold. There are a couple of very nice Churches which, of course, are ornate and huge with lovely stained glass windows and impressive looking Pipe Organs. In one of the market squares there was a fruit and vegies market, but, the thing that interested the majority of us was the stall selling the original recipe Gingerbread. This was really delicious and we did end up buying a couple of pieces to bring back to the boat. We enjoyed our look around this City very much.

Once back on the boat, we were entertained by a German ‘one man band’. He was truly very talented, playing 5-6 musical instruments and entertaining us with his antics. He appeared not to speak English, so his announcements were met with dead silence most of the time, but he managed to get his message across and he had some of the passengers up and participating in the musical hilarity in the end.  This fellow had the biggest moustache we’ve ever seen.

In th grounds of the Imperial Castle

 Marketplace

The Beautiful Fountain

 

Regensburg

After leaving the tiny town of Engelhartszell last night we passed the town of Passau where views of the lovely Fortress and Abbeys were visible from the boat during our dinner time. Passau is the point in the River where 3 Rivers meet. The Inn and the Llz Rivers join the Danube.

We had a late entry into Regensburg, Germany, this morning, so it was a bit of a welcome sleep in for everyone after the full day of touring yesterday. Just before reaching Regensburg we passed Valhalla (meaning’ Hall of the dead’). This place looks similar to the Parthenon in Athens, a HUGE building, sitting high on a hill overlooking the Danube. The Building was built as a Hall for heroic Germans. It contains 150 busts of ‘noteworthy’ Germanic people and is very imposing and impressive.

We managed to arrive in Regensburg a little ahead of schedule, so quite a few of us left the boat as soon as things were set up, and we went exploring the City on our own. The town is pretty with many narrow streets and alleys, and of course, a few nice Churches. We were docked some ½ km from the Stone Bridge which was built in the 12^th Century and is the oldest of its kind in Germany. We made this our first stop in the town. After walking over and back on this Bridge we then wandered around seeing as much as we could and only stopped for a bite to eat at around 1 pm. We had lunch at the “Old Sausage Kitchen” one of Germany’s oldest Restaurants. We had German sausage and sauerkraut with a bread roll…quite nice (except for the sauerkraut-yuk) On our travels we managed to find a Macca’s (just when we had said we hadn’t seen one), and a supermarket was close by. Interesting thing in the supermarket was that a few people were standing at a machine, waiting. We stayed to see what this was and were surprised to see people feeding empty bottles into this machine and eventually they received a piece of paper back from the machine which we assumed was a credit for the bottles. It is interesting to visit supermarkets in these towns as we find stuff we’ve never seen before. At our visit to the Trinity Church, Dave went up into the spire for good views all over the City. We thought this little place was really nice, not unlike Austria in the style of the houses and the ever present  lovely window boxes filled with flowers.

Salzburg

This morning we docked in Linz, Austria, and then we were off to Salzburg, also in Austria, for a full day of touring. Salzburg is billed as ‘The home of Mozart and The Sound of Music’. We travelled for about an hour to a small village called Mondsee, which is set on a rather large Lake at the foot of some really tall, rugged mountains. Some of the scenes from the Movie “Sound of Music” were filmed in this area. The Roman Catholic Church in Mondsee, which was originally a Benedictine Monastery, was the place where, in the movie, the Von Trapps were married. This Basilica is extremely ornate with its sculptured pulpit and seven famous baroque altars. The town itself is quite quaint with some attractive buildings and with lovely flower box gardens on almost every window sill.

 

From Mondsee, we then travelled another ½ hour or so to Salzburg, the 2^nd largest City in Austria. First stop we visited the Palace and the lovely gardens, we then  walked over one of the numerous bridges over the River Salzach and into the Old Town. Here we had a walking tour around this part of the City, and then had free time to explore by ourselves. Unfortunately it began to rain almost as soon as we started walking, so, it wasn’t all that pleasant fighting our way through the very crowded narrow streets, armed with umbrellas. We firstly visited the house where Mozart was born, a small museum is now housed here. Although there are lots of narrow streets here, every now and then these opened up into largish squares where markets stalls ply their trade most days of the week. Most of the shops here have wrought iron signs with characters appropriate to their type of shop, hanging out the front of the shop…all very nice. Even Macca’s had one. There are 2 lovely large Churches, both heavily decorated,( as they all seem to be over here in Europe) but distinctly different to each other, in one of the squares. We did seek refuge in one of these when the rain got heavier towards the end of our time here. Rides in horse drawn carriages seemed popular, and there was a funicular which one could catch up to the Castle on top of the hill overlooking the City. We didn’t have enough time to do this as it turned out. Despite the rain, we thought this City was very nice and we enjoyed our day there.

 Mozart lived here

 

Durnstein

Well, the concert last night was terrific! We really enjoyed it all. We had been discouraged from taking a camera, but we all wished we had taken one anyway as lots of people were taking photos. There was a 14 piece orchestra and they played some of the more well known and also some of the great classical music. There were 3 Opera singers, two of whom were more Operetta singers…they were all very good and entertaining. There were also 2 couples doing Ballroom Dancing to some of the tunes. Bren would have loved it! These dancers were very good also, and the costumes were really nice. So, a very enjoyable evening and quite a surprise to us really, as most of you might know, we’re not really classical music buffs.  We got back to the boat around 10:15 pm and the boat sailed towards our next stop soon afterwards.

This morning we docked in a little town called Durnstein. A very pretty Austrian town right on the River Danube. From the water we could see remains of a Castle very high on a hill overlooking the town. As we had docked earlier than advertised, Dave and I decided to climb up to the Castle. It took us about 25 minutes up very steep paths, with numerous breather stops, to reach the top, but the views from up there were so worth the effort. The nearby hills are covered in Vineyards, all terraced and in their neat rows. We did make it back to the Boat in time to go on the tour of the town, but they are too slow for us and give way too much information which one can’t take in, so after a while, we took off again and did our own thing. The town is very ‘cute’ with narrow winding streets and the houses all set on the sides of the hills. One of the crew told us about an Austrian sausage, so he took us to the little kiosk nearby and we had  one…very nice too, so no lunch for us today. Besides grapes and wines, this town makes lots of Apricot preserves and wines. One of the guides we met later told us that the town is expensive to live in.

 Castle

 Great view