We ate classic cyclist food last night: burgers and chips in a cool and quite
hip place. The bottle of excellent Riesling went down well too. The hotel room
was wonderful although we both slept badly. I had recurring nightmares of
steering my bike into the Rhine…which is something to avoid when following
EV15.
There was a superb breakfast (well done the Brunfels hotel) and then we were
off negotiating the usual omnishamblolic exit from any city. The route is
never quite right, there are always tram tracks waiting to grab your front
wheel and every 50m or so you have to stop and check which way you’re supposed
to be going.
It would be churlish to leave Mainz without a photo of the statue of its
greatest son.
There’s some pretty exciting thigh and crotch action going on here. Who
knew?
Mainz does have very cute traffic lights. They’re reminiscent of the ones that
I saw in the former DDR which have a little man with a hat on.
Is this Cartman from South Park? Surely not..
After an age of wriggling around and stopping at cute traffic lights, we
eventually ended up on a giant bridge over the Rhine.
The Rhine and some Rhine cruise ships. We shall be seeing more of them.
More junctions with Eric Cartman lights and some motorway underpasses eventually
got us out onto the Rhinstraße. We are on the eastern (or here I suppose
northern) bank of the Rhine at this point.
The weather is great. I really really need a shave.
We trundled along the path which you can see in the background of this
photograph. We saw a gravel factory but I promised yesterday that I wouldn’t
post any pictures of gravel factories. Also, the opportunity for humour based
on medieval religious disputes is going to be thin today so don’t expect much
of that today.
We were heading for Rüdesheim am Rhine which is — according to the Rüdesheim
tourist board anyway — Germany’s second most popular destination for foreign
tourists after Köln Cathedral. Well…as we cycled through it, there were
definitely a some tourists but they seemed to be exclusively German and also,
Rüdesheim had a very strong Skegness-kiss-me-quick-hat vibe. I’m very
suspicious of this second most popular destination thing. Don’t people
know about
Minatur World in Hamburg? I would gladly fly from Tokyo to see that.
Get your Küss mich schnell hat here.
After negotiating some extensive roadworks and avoiding large tourists with
wheelie cases, we got to the ferry which would take us to the southern/western
bank of the Rhine for the rest of the day.
A ferry. And two large tourists.
There really is something magical about taking one’s bike on a ferry. It is just
so effortless.
The town on the other side of the river from Rüdesheim is Bingen and Bingen
really marks the beginning of the Rhine gorge. The Rhine cuts its way through
the Hunsrück and Taunus mountains and the cycle paths, roads and rail lines
all hug the Rhine on both sides with vineyards covering the slopes and castles
perched high above the river.
This area is much beloved of both German and foreign tourists. Most people
seem to take tourist cruises up and down this part of the river. The cruise
ships are enormous. Not on the scale of the cruise ships one sees in
the Mediterranean or the Caribbean but compared to the other ships on the
Rhine, they’re big.
My idea of hell.
The boats travel relatively slowly up the Rhine but do about 25kmh when they’re
going with the flow. This rather tweaked Dr T’s competitive instinct and
therefore we spent a sweaty 30 minutes trying to beat a cruise ship to
Bacharach. Tourists lounged on the sun deck drinking cocktails and eating giant
strudels
mit zahne while we pounded down the Rhine bike path. Ghostly
Sean Kelly made his traditional doleful appearance “
Oí tink Kirk is only just holding on here as Turner puts the hammer down.
Dey’ve been on t rivet for turty
minutes now and it’s going to be a real difficult one to time trial it to the
stage end”.
We stopped in Bacharach mainly because it’s named after Burt Bacharach the
legendary composer of such classic songs as Raindrops Keep Falling On My
Head and Close to You. The town inhabitants were so taken by Burt’s
melodic orchestral compositions that they decided to change the name
of the town in honour of the great man. Here’s a picture of him looking
bemused about having a town on the Rhine named after him.
“Where is the town?”
The previous paragraph is a complete lie. Burt was born in Kansas and had
nothing whatsoever to do with this tiny and rather cute little Rhineside
village. They had a cake shop and so we had cake. We were half way to
Koblenz and deserved cake.
Cake and coffee. Only 50km to go and it’s unlikely 50km of cycling will
burn this off.
From here until the suburbs of Koblenz, it was just stunning. There’s a lot of photos coming up. Sorry.
A castle in the river, a castle on a hill.
The castle in the middle of the river is the Mäuseturn. There’s a legend about some bloke inviting a bunch of his taxpayers for lunch,
burning them alive and then being gnawed to death by vengeful mice in a
tower. The “inviting people for lunch and then burning them alive” has
a big Vlad The Impaler resonance but the mice thing? Feels a bit
contrived but who am I to cast aspersions on the historical veracity of folk tales?
Due to the topography, the road, the train, the boats and the cycle path all
follow the same routes.
All four modes of transport in a single photograph.
We passed by the famous
Loreley Rock. This rock juts out into the Rhine and is over 120m high. It is seemingly
one of the most difficult stretches of the river to navigate. The legend of
Loreley is of a fair maiden — they’re always fair — who, having been spurned
by her fisherman boyfriend, sat on top of the cliff singing alluring songs to
lure them towards the rocks and their doom. The legend has inspired poems and
literature for centuries — including the Pogues 1989 song “Lorelei”.
There’s supposed to be a statue but didn’t see it.
There were more castles including this pair which have a story behind them.
Two castles and a wall between them.
The story is long and complicated. I quote:
The two castles of Liebenstein and Sterrenberg feature in a legend of
two brothers, sons of the lord of Sterrenberg, and their cousin Angela,
who came to live with them when her father died. Both brothers were
attracted to Angela. Henry, the restrained elder brother, kept his
feelings secret, while his impetuous sibling Conrad wooed and won her
hand. Before the couple could marry, the Crusaders passed by recruiting
volunteers to fight the Turks. Conrad went away to war, leaving Henry to
look after his fiancée.
Years passed and the old lord built a second castle, Liebenstein,
across a narrow defile from Sterrenberg, as a home for his younger son
and niece when they married.
Eventually, the war was over and Conrad returned, accompanied by a
Grecian princess he had married while he was away. Henry was furious and
challenged his brother to a duel, but Angela came between them, urging
them not to fight over her. She then went off to become a nun. Henry had
a wall built between the castles so he should not see Conrad. After a
cold winter in Germany, the Grecian princess fled south with a passing
knight.
Grief-stricken, Conrad threw himself from the battlements and died. Both
castles still stand, with the wall between them as testimony to this
tragic tale.
Well, that’s a nice story isn’t it?
This part of the Rhine flooded a lot in the past and, it appears continues to
flood despite intense efforts to regulate the flow of water as the river comes
down from Constantia. We saw this history of the highest flood waters on the
side of a house which was easily 4 meters above the currently level of the
river.
The most recent one is Jan 1995!
Gradually the castles came to an end as the landscape flattened out. The
endless parade of cute little villages did not come to an end.
A less impressive member of God’s property portfolio.
Almost without warning, we were in Koblenz and fighting the traffic, the road
works and the one way system. I’m afraid we did cycle for at least a 500m the
wrong way up a major road. Germany is a very ordered place and two sweaty
cyclists cycling the wrong way up a road was a cause of great consternation.
The area we were cycling through became a little seedy. The distance to the
hotel was going down but the seediness factor was going up. In fairness,
“seedy” for this part of Germany isn’t terrible but I wasn’t getting a good
feeling about the hotel.
As it turned out, I had not only let the side down with my hotel choice I’d
also let myself down. A heavily shuttered graffiti covered concrete box spoke
of rooms rented by the hour and still-warm sheets. I might have braved it
myself but probably not. However, through the magic of having a phone and a
credit card, we were booked into the only 5 star hotel in Koblenz within 5
minutes. It was a complex ride through the city to get to it but when it
appeared next to the river, it was pretty obvious we’d made the right
decision.
Reassuringly expensive looking.
The hotel is lovely and only suffers from one problem. The German BMW Z8 owners
club is having their annual get together here and we’re the only people in the
hotel who don’t own a Z8. I’m not really sure what they’re doing here. Do they
just talk about BMW Z8’s all day? The bigger problem is that they’ve booked out
the entire hotel restaurant tonight to have a BMW Z8 themed dinner. We were told
we couldn’t eat tonight and I had to bring out the Slightly Angry Eyes™ before
we were granted access to the restaurant.
We ate five-star food on looking out over the Moselle as people in boats and on paddle boards gently floated past our table. The Fährhaus Hotel has lived up to
its reputation.
This is considerably nicer than the sex-worker hotel in the centre of
town.
Today was beautiful. The weather was superb and looks like it’s going to
continue that way for the rest of the trip. The Rhine Gorge is stunning, the
villages are cute, the cycle paths were (mostly) fabulous.
This was a 100km day and worked well. Tomorrow is about the same and we’re
going to Köln where we will see the absolute top tourist destination in
Germany.
Stats:
- Distance: 105km. Very doable. An easy two 50km stage split.
-
Average Speed: 19.5kmh. All those complex, yet safe, junctions in town take
their toll on average speed.
-
Contact points: It appears that all “soft tissue” issues are under control
and there are no more body grumbles than one might expect after eight days
cycling.
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