Day 7: Deggendorf to Passau
A short and easy day with little or no drama. We were checking in at the hotel in Passau at 11:45…
Another classic picture of the Danube cycle paths heading east.
The breakfast at the truly excellent Gastof Höttl was great and we were ready
to go at 7:30. There was a minor problem with some leaking chain lube but it
was easily cleared up and we were on our way pretty quickly.
The by now familiar farm paths and dedicated cycle paths led out of Deggendorf
through some light industrial parks and onto the Gäuboden Plain. The Danube is
wide here and it’s done a lot of meandering and flooding in the past creating
a wide and fertile area of farmland. Most of which, like everywhere else in
Germany, is given over to growing vast quantities of maize.
The villages came and went and apart from all having a giant fire station,
they also all have a Donaustraße. If we could do the stats, I suspect that
over 10% of the time on this trip we have been on one Donaustraße or another.
What shall we call this street? Dunno, it’s close to the Danube, let’s call
it Donaustraße.
It was shaping up to be lovely day with good weather and great bike paths but
it was about to get an even better. We stumbled across (rolled across?) the
Donauplanetenweg. The last
10km of the bike path into Vilshofen has been set up as a 1:1billion scale
model of the solar system. Here’s Uranus…sorry, couldn’t resist it.
That silver doorknob thing is Uranus at a 1:1bn scale.
Uranus is 2,800,000,000 kilometers from the sun and so on this scale, it’s
2.8km from the model of the sun. Its equatorial diameter is 51,000km and so on
a 1:1bn scale, it’s a little over 5cm across. Hence the doorknob size.
Another 1.5km (or 1.5 billion kilometers) closer to the sun is Saturn. Once
again, all done perfectly to scale.
It’s a long way from Uranus to Saturn. Still all done to scale.
The Earth and, about 38cm away is the moon.
On the more upbeat side, it’s amazing that we managed to send something a bit
bigger than a fridge (Voyager 1) which on this scale is about 1nm — about the
size of a couple of water molecules — from the Earth out to Jupiter and Saturn
and then on out of the solar system.
And for completeness, here is the Sun.
Enough space. Here are some happy cyclists.
Extra happy due to the Donauplanetenweg.
The Danube started to get more industrial and we saw more barges and the first pleasure cruisers which ply their trade from Passau all the way down to Vienna or Budapest. Getting into Passau was the usual slightly shambolic riverside paths and junctions but sooner than expected we were at our hotel. Unsurprisingly, our room wasn’t ready at 11:30 and so we changed out of our sweaty cycle kit and had a shower in the hotel sauna which was a somewhat creepy place.
Not quite sure what this sauna is trying to be…
There’s a lot to see in Passau. First up was the baroque St Stephan’s
Cathedral which was stupendous. It is also home to the largest cathedral organ
in the world with 17,974 pipes and 233 registers it is a unique technical
marvel.
Some organ facts: the largest organ pipe is over 11m long and weighs 306kg and resonates at 16Hz which is the lowest audible range for the human ear and the smallest is 6mm and produces 16,000Hz (which is well beyond the hearing range of most adult humans). There’s over 12km of cables!
There is actually a larger organ in Los Angeles but that sort of doesn’t count
since it was constructed 20 years ago rather than 200 years ago. Unfortunately we
missed the 12 noon organ recital by a few minutes and I imagine it was quite a
sound.
Like a lot of Germany cathedrals we have seen, the giant organ is currently being renovated so it
hidden behind scaffolding. The roof of the cathedral was not hidden and it was
fabulous.
Baroque opulence. You can see why old Martin Luther might have had a
point.
As we left the cathedral it started to pour. A huge thundercloud burst
overhead and we were forced into the
Glass Museum. To
be fair, it is a very extensive display of thousands of bits of glass work
from the Bavarian region mostly from the late 18th and 19th centuries but,
even for somebody who loves a mad museum, this was maybe a step too far.
However, in the Glass Museum’s favour, it was dry and paying 10€ each was cheaper than buying an umbrella.
Thousands of cups, glasses, bowls. All different. All very boring.
There was just one interesting case out of the scores of cases containing almost identical bits of glassware.
Glow in the dark glassware!
I know I said that the Donauplanetenweg was the end of space but…
The goal of all this wandering through Passau was to reach the
Dreiflüsseeck.Passau sits on a peninsula which sticks out into the
point where the Danube joins the Inn (of Insbrucke fame) and another smaller
river called the Ilz all join to form a very much larger Danube. Hence the
“Three-river-corner”.
This was unexpected
The glass museum was opened in 1985 by Neil Armstrong! The first man
on the moon came all the way to Passau to open the glass museum. Who knew
that Neil Armstrong loved random bits of glass work so much?
By the time we’d read everything about glass in Bavaria in the 19th century,
been gently irradiated by green fluorescence and marvelled at one of the
most famous human beings of the 20th century coming to Passau — with his
wife — to open a glass museum, the rain had stopped.
Outside the Rathaus, a couple were getting married which seemed to involve a
lot of flower petals and cutting two huge holes in a sheet. Very nice it
was too.
Quite romantic and lovely.
The Inn brings down sediment from the alps and is frequently slightly milky in
colour.
This is the three-river-corner. You can just see the milky Inn water.
It is very hard to see this when you’re at river level so here’s a picture
taken from above © Wikipedia
Geography writ large.
After some wandering around the twisty, winding streets of the old town, we
got back to our hotel, washed our kit and prepped for the following day. I did
a quick 5 minute smash-and-grab raid on T K Maxx buying pants, socks, shorts
and a t-shirt for less than 50 Euros and binned my existing ones. I don’t seem
to be able to fit more than one outfit in the bean whereas Dr T appears to
have a complete wardrobe of varied and fashionable items in an identically sized bean. It’s a
mystery.
This was a lovely day. Nice cycling, a really great town to visit and we found
a cool Syrian restaurant in the evening and ate very tasty Mezze. Although we
had steeled ourselves for 13 days of slabs of pork with potatoes, we seem to
be doing very well with interesting international cuisine in Germany.
The next few days are going to be a bit tougher. Three 100km plus days back to
back stopping in Linz, Melk and then Vienna. We’ll take it easy and get there
in the end.
The Stats:
- Distance: 55km 😀. If only every day was like this.
- Climbing: from here on in, the climbing is negligable so we’ll drop this from the stats
- Average speed: 20km/h 🙂. Some gravel, lots of road junctions.
- Bikes: 😐. They seem to be holding up.
- Soft tissues: 😐. They seem to be holding up. By this point most bits are numb anyway.
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