The Danube at Last

The champagne corks were popping this week as Le Fabuleux finally made it to the River Danube. It certainly isn’t blue, but it is fast flowing. It has taken 2000km and 250 locks to do it. We have crossed the highest canal watershed in Europe at 420m above sea level and encountered huge 25m locks.

All week we have been on the Main-Danube Canal which was only opened in 1992.  A formidable task to link the Rhine basin with the Danube basin and allow boats to travel all the way from the North Sea to the Black Sea a distance of some 4000km. There is another  2400km from where we are to the Black Sea.

We left Forchheim on Monday morning, after a relaxing break at Nick and Monika’s,and immediately encountered another pleasure boat heading for the Black Sea (eventually). The great photographs of our boat are courtesy of Gerda, who we accompanied with Tony most of the way along the canal. With their fluent german we were able to communicate much better with the locks by VHF radio, rather than the one way difficult conversations we had been having until then.

We had 140km to go and many very very deep locks and only 2 suitable places to stop along the way.

The first night we spent in Nuremberg and then the next day at 6.30 am we met up with an hotel boat (above) which as you can see barely fitted under the bridges. It stopped just after the first lock and we continued through 6 more deep locks to Beilngries where we stopped for two nights.

The 25m locks were incredible. Luckily most of them had floating bollards, so we just tied up to it and it held us to the side and floated up with us to the top.  After Beilngries we joined the really beautiful Altmuhl River and went through past castles on cliff tops until at last late in the date we emerged on to the fast flowing River Danube. We cruised a few kilometres downstream to the marina at Saal and tied up at what turned out to be the most expensive marina in Germany and with possibly the grumpiest harbour master we have ever encountered. There is certainly no correlation between service and facilities and price paid. They even had the audacity to charge us 15 euros for taking our used oil  without telling us there would be a charge.

We spent three days there, one day cleaning the boat from top to bottom and the next day we took the train to Regensberg, which is probably the best preserved  mediaeval city we have seen in Germany. It has the oldest bridge of the Danube, having been built in 1186 and was for some time the only bridge over the Danube.

The current through the bridge (called The Strudel) is very very fast about 15km/h. By the bridge is the oldest sausage seller in Germany (or so they say) so we had a really delicious roll filled with two sausages cooked over an open fire and they were delicious. Then  we continued wandering through the narrow cobbled streets passing the Old Rathaus where emperors and kings have met, until it was lunchtime.

We stopped at a busy cafe and shared a pizza that was probably the biggest we have ever seen (and extremely delicious). Then on the way back to the railway station by chance we stumbled upon St Emmerans Basilica which has two of the most beautiful churches in it that we have seen with fantastic painted ceilings. There were hardly anyone there. We had seen the famous Dom (or cathedral) before but this was so much more impressive  even if it was not as big or high.

  We had drinks with Tony and Gerda on their 15m boat Ottoland II that night and next morning started the long way back to Holland with 3 lots of guests joining us for various sections of the cruise, starting with Nick, Monika and the girls this Sunday. We are staying three days at Beilngries again as it is a pretty place and it gives us the chance to do some more cleaning and painting.

There is a restaurant right outside the boat, and all afternoon customers have been sitting there with their cold beers and huge icecream sundaes while we have been working outside in the hot hot sun. SO that’s enough for the blog this week we have other things to do…um… drink and eat. Ciao.

Beer Gardens and Nuremberg

We awoke early on Monday morning to make the long trip from Schweinfurt to Bamberg. We took Sam’s temperature and it was a high 39C. So we decided to put him on Tamiflu in case he had caught Swine Flu on the plane. Sam stayed in bed as we worked our way along the last part of the River Main arriving at last in the picturesque city of Bamberg.  We had a good mooring just out of town and in a quiet location. Next morning, the Tamiflu had kicked in and in the afternoon Sam felt well enough to walk along the river into Bamberg.

Bamberg is a very very pretty city virtually untouched since the middle ages. A pretty part is called Little Venice where houses sit with the river lapping at their feet.

We wandered around the town and Sam bought a special beer glass to take home.

Next day we left Bamberg for Forchheim our base for the next 5 days as we visited Nick and Monika and their two children Vivien and Leslie. Nick is Wendy’s brother. The weather was lovely as we sat into the night chatting in Nick and Monika’s garden and having a great BBQ. Next day Sam had to leave for NZ, so we went with him on a short walk to the railway station and sadly waved goodbye as he took the train to Frankfurt Airport and his flight home.

That night we headed to Forchheim and explored this lovely old town whilst Vivien and Leslie went to ballet school. It has a lovely Rathaus (town hall)

In the evening Nick met up with us on the outskirts of Forchheim at the ancient Kellerberg beer garden. What an experience!  It is on the side of a hill  with perhaps 20 different beer gardens there. Each has its own tunnel going into the hill to keep the beer cool and tables and chairs under the trees, where you can drink delightful locally brewed beer, and eat very well and very cheaply.

It was packed with hundreds and hundreds of people each enjoying the warm evening ambience and delicious food.

On Friday Wendy and I had to go into Erlangen by train. Wendy to have a temporary filling and me to have my shoulder looked at. I waited two hours at the orthopaedic specialists and after an X-Ray and ultrasound was diagnosed with bursitis. I was given a cortisone injection and voltaren which so far haven’t worked very well. Oh dear!

After the appointments we headed to “The Berg” in Erlangen which is another huge beer garden like the Kellerberg. We had more freshly brewed beer and a picnic of Bavarian specialties that Monika had put together. In the evening we sat outside in the garden while Nick and Monika prepared and cooked flammekuchen, sort of like a pizza, in a special wood fired oven outside.

On Saturday we all caught the train to Nuremberg which is a delightful  old town that you would scarcely guess what almost obliterated in WWII, and has been rebuilt stone by stone in such a way you wouldn’t know.

Whilst Monika and Leslie went shopping the rest of us wandered around the lanes and and old houses, walking up to the castle that dominates the old town. We met some strange characters in an old shop.

On Sunday we had a champagne brunch to celebrate Nick and Monika’s wedding anniversary and in the evening we went out to a local Schloss Restaurant for a typical Franconian meal. The girls dressed up in their traditional dentelle dresses.

Today is Monday and we have left Nick and Monika ,and continued along the Main-Danube Canal to Nuremberg. This week we head to the Danube, which is in flood at present, and visit the UNESCO designated city of Regensburg.

A Journey through W-Land

We stayed another day in Miltenberg but the glorious hot and sunny weather deserted us, and we had a warm showery day which we used for odd jobs and a bit of sightseeing around the town.

Next day we continued up the Main through the area the Germans called W-Land, because the River Main twists its way up and down making a large W as it goes. The next stop was another gem of a town called Wertheim. We stopped in the Wertheim Motor Boat Club just off the river and a stone’s throw from the centre of Wertheim. Sam climbed up to the castle at the top of the hill an Wendy and I did some shopping.

Then the wine country started. Mile after mile of vines and small wine towns. The weather was much cooler and we had showers on and off over the day and the ones that followed.

There were castles in the hills and the scenery matched that of the best parts of the River Neckar.

There were still very few cruisers and in fact until today when we moored up with 4 Dutch boats on the way back from Budapest we saw no other cruisers from out of the area. The Main is a difficult river to cruise. The locks can be slow both to fill and to wait outside for them to let you in.  Sam was a great help with the locks and steering.

There are very few mooring places suitable for a boat our size. Everything is geared to boats under 9m. It needs careful planning to ensure you get to a suitable place each night and some days this entails a very long day. Still having gone up 333km of the river now we have spotted a few good places for our return journey in August, like this yacht harbour near Wurzburg.

The next major place we stopped at was Wurzburg, the largest town on the middle Main. Unfortunately there is nowhere for a boat our size to stay there so we continued up 10km to a lovely walled town called Eibelstadt where there was a great marina. with a friendly harbourmaster and best of all a super Italian restaurant in the marina itself where we could celebrate Wendy’s birthday. In the morning as we only had one bike (as a tyre had burst in the previous week’s heat), Sam biked along the Mainweg, a cycle path going the entire length of the River Main, to Wurzburg where he spent the day shopping and sightseeing. He rode up to the Marienburg Schloss

And admired the view of the River valley below and looked at the lovely castle gardens.

We asked where we could get the bike tyre fixed and the man we asked said  “no problem” and drove it to a local bike shop and got it fixed for us.

After a well earned day’s rest we left Eibelstadt for Kitzinger the next day. Unfortunately Sam was quite ill with a temperature and aches and pains. He spent the next couple of days resting and dosing up with paracetamol which kept the temperature in check. Kitzinger was a lovely small town and we had a great mooring on the quay with our own flower bed right outside the boat. People kept coming up and chatting and we talked for a while with someone whose father was an

American GI, as many American and British forces were stationed around the area until only just recently. When we arrived we met a man who used to live in Warkworth (just North of Auckland for non NZers) and he was really chuffed to see a NZ boat. He came back with his daughter a few hours later and gave us a gift of a bottle of the local wine. That has been typical of the friendly people we have met throughout Germany.

Today was a long day as we had to make serious dent in the final leg on the River. We have stopped at Schweinfurt on a quay right by the town. It is the top of the final stroke of the W.

Tomorrow we head for Bamberg, an ancient mediaeval city where we leave the River Main after 384km and join the Rhine-Main-Danube canal towards Erlangen where we are meeting up with Nick, Monika, Viv, Les and Cindy for a few days, and sending Sam off on the long trip back to New Zealand.

Land of the Rising Sun

Japan is 3 hours behind New Zealand, roughly the same size and shape, similar green country side with occasional mountain ranges and it even has those days with summer, winter, spring and autumn all rolled in to one. Yet, it really couldn’t be a more different place. To start with, while sharing a similar land area, Japan has over 30 times the population of our own. This makes it crowded. From the airport to Kawasaki where I would be staying, everything building was packed as closely to its neighbour as physically possible; most of the streets are one way, as there isn’t the space for wider roads.

4 hours, but only 50 kilometres, after arriving in Tokyo, I was in Kawasaki, a city possibly the size of Auckland that is about 30 minutes from the Tokyo Metropolitan Centre. I was staying with the Hanaokas, family friends of my Japanese teacher from school. We had a traditional meal that night, Tamagoyaki, a variant on a stir-fry in which cooked vegetables and meat are dipped in raw egg just before eating. Not your average meal, but it turned out to be quite tasty.

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The next day was busy. We started off by visiting the famous Tokyo tower, from which you have a 360 view of the sprawling concrete jungle of the Tokyo Met.

Following this we visited Akihabara, also known as Tokyo’s ‘Electric Town’. The shop below is Yodobashi camera, an 8 story building with an entire floor dedicated to a particular type of electronic. Floor 4 for TVs, floor 5 for cameras etc.

After a good work out of the credit card, we headed to the NHK headquarters. This is the Japanese broadcasting agency, much like England has the BBC. While not a particularly interesting building, I managed to get some cute Domo-kun memorabilia.

Lastly was Shibuya, a rather classy part of town that contains many department stores and up market shops. Shopping in Tokyo is as much of an experience in itself as anything else. Upon entering, your ears are bombarded with praise from the various employees repeating ‘Irrashaimase’ which doesn’t have any particular English translation, but the gist of it is that you’re a very nice person, and it would be very kind, extremely kind in fact, if you were to patronise us lowly store employees by buying something.

The photo above is a segment of the insides of another electronics shops, Bic Camera. Here one could purchase a mobile phone for a mere $15. Unfortunately all it allowed you to do was make phone calls. So much for the country of robots and high technology.

That evening we dined at a local sushi restaurant where I tried such delicacies as salmon eggs, crab eggs and sea urchin (all raw, of course). However let’s just say you won’t be finding me queuing up for them anywhere.

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Prior to arriving in Japan, I was lucky enough to have had a visit arranged to an NEC research laboratory, thanks to the father of one of my friends. NEC, or Nippon Electric Company, is the largest technology company in Japan, with around 150,000 employees worldwide. Throughout the morning I was shown an assortment of demos ranging from face recognition to automatic obstacle avoidance in cars. It was a fascinating experience, and I met some very intelligent and fun people.

 

That afternoon I left my lovely host family, who were extremely kind and for the experiences I had with them I am very grateful.

As my flight the next morning required me to be at the airport at 6:30am, I had planned to stay somewhere a little closer. 

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I was staying in a district of Tokyo called Asakusa, a place I had visited previously on a school trip in 2004. The youth hostel I was staying in was entirely quintessential, with an assortment of American and European backpackers. I had a wander around the town and was very pleased to stumble upon a lovely market we had been to 5 years ago.

After a $12 big mac at Makudonarudo (try saying it aloud), I headed back over the river, past the fabulous Asahi beer brewery building, and down a nice quiet street to  where the hostel was.

After a 4am start, I managed to navigate the slightly overwhelming Tokyo subway/train system to Narita Airport from where I would be flying to Frankfurt, Germany.

All in all, I had an amazing experience. I feel a lot more confident with my Japanese now, and sometimes have to stop myself from replying in it when someone says something in German (my knowledge of German is severely limited, mainly to my favourite types of food and not much else).

I have no doubt that I will be back to the land of the rising sun in the (hopefully) near future, and I strongly recommend it to anyone with even the faintest inkling of a desire to go.

Hot Hot Hot

It has been a scorcher of a week with every day  over 33c. The inside of the boat has been even hotter rising to 43c one day while we were out and seldom dropping below 25c at night.

We left Worms on the Monday and headed down the Rhine with a goodly current behind us. There were lots of boats such as this container boat that was carrying over 350 containers.

The boats have a hydraulic wheelhouse that can be extended to peer over the containers. The Rhine was getting more interesting now as we swept along past hillsides of vineyards and names like Nierstein and Oppenheim.

We stopped for the night in a lovely little lake accessed from the Rhine through an almost hidden channel. We anchored for the first time this year.

Then next day we turned off the Rhine and into the River Main, which is to be our home for the next 6 weeks.  As we were going along I noticed the temperature gauge roaring up and fearing the worst we stopped and looked inside the engine compartment. All seemed well so we continued gingerly ahead and the temperature started to go down. We breathed a sigh of relief and as subsequent events showed it was down to the quality of oil used in the last oil change.

We cruised through industrial surroundings up river to Frankfurt and pulled into a new harbour there called Westhaven.

The weather was still stifling hot. Next day whilst Wendy painted the top deck with non slip paint to make the deck as new again, I changed the oil and the oil filter. What  a difference both things have made. The deck is looking great and we realised that the boatyard that had caused us all the grief with shoddy workmanship earlier in the cruise had also put poor quality oil into the boat. After the oil change we had no smoke, no oily exhaust and the temperature of the engine was markedly less. We had been plagued with smoky  and oily exhaust ever since we picked up the boat in May.

The next day we headed by train to Frankfurt Airport to meet Sam who had flown in from Tokyo after spending a few days there on the way to join us for two weeks cruising up the Main. There will be a special edition of this blog in the next day or two with reports of Sam’s experiences in Japan.

Then it was time to leave Frankfurt and head up the River. We stopped the first night at a small marina in a shallow basin just off the river. It cost a fortune, the owner was arrogant and refused to let us stay unless we left our boat registration papers with him over night.  As there was nowhere else nearby to stay we had no choice. What a contrast with the next night at Aschaffenberg which is actually in Bavaria, where we stayed in the Nautilus Motor  Boat club and the people there were so friendly even taking us to a nearby Hypermarket in one of their cars to enable us to get supplies. Sam had a swim in the river there whilst we could see the annual dragon boat festival just down river from us.

We had a few cold beers with them on the club terrace whilst Sam got introduced to WeissBier which he loved.

Aschaffenberg is dominated by its Schloss which was almost completely demolished in WWII and has been restored to its original state over the last 40 years.

There are lovely gardens surrounding the Schloss and we enjoined the Pompeyanum a reconstruction of a villa from Pompeii built in the grounds.

Then today we have cruised up the river for 37km passing thousands of german families and kids having fun in their boats, river beaches and festivals. It was soo hot everyone was out at the pools,water slides, in the river or just sun bathing.  We stopped tonight in Miltenberg which is a quintessential German Mediaeval Town full of timbered houses and centuries old traditions. It was the annual Town Festival and there were brass bands everywhere, food stalls, beer stalls and thousands of people.

We are staying tomorrow in Miltenberg before continuing up the River .