While our lovely Viking longship continued to sail down the Main-Danube Canal, we took an optional tour on the Danube itself.
The Danube Narrows (German: der Donaudurchbruch, or, literally, "Danube breach/opening") is a wonderfully scenic gorge. Although it's not quite as gorge-like as we are used to, given our puny little southwestern rivers. For a stream, though, that's already traversed almost 450 kilometers* (through regions that actually get reasonable amounts of rainfall) you couldn't expect anything more narrow than what we saw on this tour.
This is the tourboat that took us from the town of Kelheim up the Narrows to Weltenburg Abbey (I'll show and tell about the Abbey next time)...
As you'll see, the weather for this excursion was less than ideal. Most of our fellow travelers stayed in the cozy enclosed bottom decks, but we wanted to spend as much time as possible up top, in spite of the cold drizzle...
One good thing about the weather: I was able to wear every piece of outerwear (and long underwear) that I had packed, and this made me happy; it's always a goal not to leave unused anything you've carried for thousands of miles! Another plus: this was really the only day with sub-standard weather on our whole vacation...and it could have been a lot worse!
The views from up there were well worth a few shivers...
Oddly enough, especially given the weather, ours wasn't the only boat on the river!
He was going downstream, while we motored up, but it was windy and we didn't really envy him. Especially since we were treated with customary Viking-excursion-luxury, like a free beer (although some of us opted for Spezi, since it was, after all, only mid-morning) and pretzel...
But the rocks were the big attractions... and I mean big! The shot has a human walker in it for scale...
But we did see a couple of man-made attractions that were worth a snap. On an particularly commanding height is the Befreiungshalle ("Liberation Hall")...
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| it looks super-mythic in the mist, don't you think? |
If we ever make it back to this part of Germany, we want to hike up to the Befreiungshalle (on a clear day) and look down at the Narrows.
Another non-natural structure was the end point of our short cruise, the Abbey at Weltenburg, which we saw emerging from the mist and curves in the river...
The Abbey and its grounds were fun to explore, and I'll show you what they are like next time.
*I had a lot more trouble than I expected finding this number. That is, until I located this fabulous Danube map, complete with mile-markers. I'm sure I'll be using it for all the rest of my Danube posts.
2 comments:
That is a very cool map showing the locks on the danube with kilometer markers. It would have been fun to follow along on the cruise.
I know! It's the only map I've found that goes into that much detail. I took one picture of one of the km markers on the Narrows but it's too blurry to read well.
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