In the last days of September 2008 three of my siblings and I plus partners enjoyed a family reunion which began with a boat cruise down the Rhine from Basel to Amsterdam. In June I posted a collection of photos on bicycles in Amsterdam. At the time I promised to do a post on our trip through the Rhine Gorge, famous for it’s castles. I thought that to do it now might make a good break from all the super serious stuff on climate change and similar topics. It might even distract BilB from thinking about power supply infrastructure.
There were four cameras at work and I do believe we captured every last castle. In January this year I had fun collating, editing and organising the photos from the trip while recovering from a small operation. The Rhine Gorge sequence was surprisingly difficult, partly because the cameras were all on wildly different time settings. Luckily one was on local time. Also you had to remember which side of the river some of the less memorable shots were from. It made all the difference as to whether you were coming or going. There were 196 images in all. The selection I’m posting here has 36 images and has all the castles in sequence going down the river.
I’m a bit concerned that it makes a long post, but if I just include the castles you get the wrong idea about the trip. There were probably as many churches as castles and both need to be put in a bit of context.
The Rhine Gorge trip lasted about 90 minutes setting out from Rüdesheim with which I associate the Germania statue with the inscription (translated) “In memory of the unanimous victorious uprising of the German People and of the reinstitution of the German Empire 1870-1871″.
The first photo is of sunrise leaving Rüdesheim. This time I’ve made the images 500 pixels wide instead of 600 so that they are not quite so much ‘in your face’.
The rest mostly don’t need any comment. We had a continuous commentary, of course, but I’ve forgotten most of it. They’d predicted a bit of rain which luckily stayed away. I can tell you though it was damned cold for a bunch of Aussies with a fresh breeze blowing up the river.
The next photo is typical of the attractive scenery apart from castles. There were masses of grapes on both banks of the river. I worried about erosion with the rows going straight downhill. My elder brother, the farmer, was astonished by the lack of erosion everywhere we went in Europe. In general the precipitation is gentler.
The grapes when picked still have to be brought out of the field by hand, which is one good reason for having the rows the way they are.
I’m not sure how many of the castles are open as tourist ventures. Some, including the next below, provide hotel accommodation. The original owner must have been comparatively wealthy in comparison with the upstream and downstream neighbours.
The next castle was one of the most attractive. If you’d zoomed in on it or if I’d cropped the photo it would look as it did in the middle ages.
But take a look at the long shot approaching the castle. We are very much in modern times. Not only is the landscape ‘developed’ but the Rhine itself is a very busy transport conduit. Apart from being lousy with tour boats which were double parked at times, there was a continuous stream of cargo vessels, many stacked with containers, plying the river.
Many of the churches were quite large for the village populations they must have originally served. We were told that building churches was like corporate advertising at the time, as much for show as utility.
In some places there was a railway line on both sides of the river with trains whizzing along. It just seemed there was an awful lot of stuff and people constantly on the move.
The next pic was one of mine that I was quite proud of. You had to anticipate the composition and then click at just the right moment. The boat was moving quite fast so the space between the buildings closed rapidly.
There are some scenes that city folk tend not to think worth recording. My sister-in-law from the farm was the only one to photograph these goats on the side of the hill.
Now we come to the famous Loreley. You are supposed to be able to see the maiden’s hair near the top of the rock. We were given copies of the song which I posted about at Saturday Salon. The number “554″ at the bottom is part of a location system right along the river. I think it means 554km from the mouth.
The Wikipedia entry says that “Loreley” and “Lorelei” are alternative spellings. The locals are in no doubt about the place name, but I think “Lorelei” is more common for the song.
My brother fiddled with the settings on the camera while the rest of us used the point and click method. Only my brother created works of art like this one looking back at Loreley.
Back to the castles.
I included the next one to illustrate the terraces you see on some quite steep hills. We never had an explanation, but my guess is that they were for summer vegetables, hence mostly bare going into winter.
Next that’s me with the beanie, plus my brother who is eight years younger and his wife. The “baby boomers” as we call them are good at foraging for things like hot chocolate laced with heaps of brandy when the need is great. Despite the relaxed appearance my brother and I were on camera duty and the camera time stamps show that we were both taking photos a minute or two after this photo was taken.
We didn’t get an explanation of what this pattern on the hillside signified.
There were stretches around Loreley and later where there were no castles in view.
That’s it folks! By my count there were only about 15 castles but it seemed heaps more. The next stop was Koblenz where the Moselle meets the Rhine and whence, together with Rüdesheim, they also run Rhine Gorge tours.
Consider me suitably distracted. I am a huge narrowboat enthusiast, but to do the Seine,Rhine cruise is a lifelong, unfulfilled, passion. Your image collection is both delightful and appreciated.
Inspirational! I’m a castle/cathedral nut, and I have got to get me to central Europe some day.
Many thanks – brings back dim memories of a similar trip down the Rhine some 35 years ago.
I loves me castles. The amount of effort, engineering and inguenity that went into them, with nothing more complicated than a block and tackle, is amazing. (well it helped to have a feudal system going as well).
But back to climate change – I can’t find the link right now, but the pragmatic Dutch are allocating approximately 80 000 hectares of Rhine floodplain to return to a semi-wild state to cope with major floods due to climate change. This will also dwarf the areas thaey currently have set aside for conservation reserves.
Fascinating. In some ways like a trip through an ancient fairy-land. Thanks for the delight, Brian.
wilful, I gather that flooding can be a problem now and is normally caused by a burst of warm weather on The Alps rather than precipitation. So I wonder what the pattern is going to be with 2C warming. Huge spring floods with water levels low in the autumn?
The Rhine seems to me quite fast flowing, though I lack experience of comparable streams. So the water that moves down the river would be quite large.
yes brian I think you have the basics. It is about flash floods from the Alps, and fewer glaciers (not sure how they’re relevant, this is from memory).
I have a fantasy trip I’d love to do, up the Danube from Rumania, along the Europa canal and into the Rhine.
Though the Volga-Baltic waterway would also be awesome.
Wonderful shots. We did the Rhine tour a few years ago and my husband, like you, took heaps of photos. Unfortunately his camera was stolen on the train between Germany and Holland, so we were never able to enjoy the fruits of his labour except in our memories. These wonderful images here revive them for me. Thank you.
wilful, the original idea was to do Amsterdam to Prague or the reverse, but longer and more expensive. My wife keeps talking about boat trips in Russia.
The food was excellent and you didn’t have the constant packing and unpacking you have on a bus trip. There were heaps of mostly half-day excursions, guided or you could poke about by yourself. It was fantastic to just come back to the cabin and relax.
One of our cautions was how well we would get on with each other as sibling with partners, having lived separate lives. My wife attended a Teachers Union briefing on tripping where she heard stories about people pushing their partners off bridges. One woman when the tour party assembled in the bus failed to speak up when her husband was missing. Apparently she was sick of his jokes (he thought he was the life of the party) and intentionally left him behind.
I’m glad to say that for us it worked the other way. We had another week together in Toronto where my sister lives and the further we went the better we got on.
I occasionally raise the spectre of travelling with my brother and sister-in-law to my wife. The discussion doesn’t go terribly far.
So, can we reflect on the cognitive dissonance of international travel by highly climate change informed people? Not that I’m pointing fingers, we went to Bali in June. It’s a big struggle though. Although there’s no way you could have experienced what you did see via teleremote, at what point do we have to say ‘enough’?
Elisabeth and others, my pleasure, and very disappointing about the loss of the camera. I’ve got heaps more and as time goes by you never know. The way I do it takes heaps of time, though. I resize each one and then have to upload it separately. Last night there were congestion problems and lots of the upload attempts failed.
Last January, when I had time, I did a lot of work editing the photos using basic Picasa editing. Many of them needed straightening and most needed a bit of extra light.
wilful, the climate change thing sits heavily with us. Last year we really didn’t have an option especially since the whole thing got legs from a comment made by my wife. Our finances don’t permit much in the immediate future and we always purchase offsets, but I don’t have a great deal of faith in them.
Sorry, I regret my comment anyway, we have more than enough climate change threads going.
If you care to invest the time (I believe it’s a steep learning curve), The GIMP is a free ‘version of photoshop’.
I mostly just use picasa, my needs are limited.
Camera prices are fantastic at the moment. Want to ditch our video camera and small snapper and get a combined effort.
wilful, in the case of the Rhine gorge, easily the most photographed segment, I had to integrate 196 shots in one sequence from four cameras discarding only the obvious duds and go from there. I ended up with one river cruise overview and 15 “specials” on the various outings, so I’ve now got a lot of stuff in pretty good shape. That was only the river trip part. I lucked onto some cheap memory sticks in a sale and used these to share with the family.
With the Rhine Gorge I ended up with 166 useful images that weren’t exactly duplicates, so selection was a big problem from there. From memory I spent the greater part of three days on the Rhine Gorge. It’s a problem that comes from these modern digital cameras. You can end up with too much stuff to be useful in showing it to people.
VERY Interesting!
Wishwe had done that trip.
We went through the Black Forest and it snowed.
They call those pathetic little outposts “castles”, do they?
You could capture any of them with half a dozen guys armed only with small knives for peeling fruit.
This is what a real castle looks like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Crac_des_chevaliers_syria.jpeg
Paulus, I guess it was just a building style. The Heidelberg Schloss, which we also visited, once had a moat, at least on one side. The French came through late in the 17th century and whilst burning the city made an awful mess of the castle.
We also visited the Nüremberg Schloss after the boat trip. This is the back of it. You need an aerial wide shot to photograph the front. It has high two-metre thick walls on the city side and a moat around part of it. We were told it was successfully defended in a siege, in part because of a well that went down to a stream, from memory, some 450 metres below the ground and couldn’t be poisoned.
Ruth R, we had an afternoon trip to the Black Forest out of Strassbourg on the first day. It rained. We visited a museum of old houses which was fascinating and included a mill powered by a mill stream, which they started up for us. We had afternoon tea at a place that sold all kinds of clocks next to a giant cuckoo clock.
A couple of those downstream castles looked vacant Brian. Ever the opportunist, I saw myself plus aussie ‘know-how’ fashioning a bolthole for my big european venture. In your dreams son. Your photos will have to do and they do very well. Many thanks
Owning a castle could be a drain on the pocket, methinks, and almost impossible to live in without major expenditure.
As a tourist venture, I’m sure there is plenty of competition and you could easily burn a lot of dough
Lovely pictures and a great post Brian. Thanks for all the informative posts over the past year.
For anybody with a dream of owning their own castle, France is probably the place to go. There are thousands of chateaux dotted all over the landscape, with those in need of some TLC able to be picked up comparatively cheaply. These days, most are operated as restaurant/hotels and in the off-season can be stayed in for less than the price of a cruddy Paris hotel. Back in July, we drove from Paris (where we are living) to Provence. We returned via the Auvergne, which is simply stunning, and stayed in the turret of a converted chateau with a breathtaking view over the local mountains.
Something that is also quite common in France is purchasing land on the grounds of a chateau to build a holiday home. In return you often get access to the amenities of the chateau included in the purchase price. For example, in the place we stayed in the Auvergne you could purchase around 5000 sqm for about 75000 euro. The low price reflects not the beauty of the region, but is relative economic backwardness and less developed transport links. Still, it was only a 4 hour drive to Paris and 30 minutes from Vichy, the Nazi capital during the occupation.
I should probably say this on another thread, but to all those with whom I’ve constructively and productively debated a variety of topics over the past year, I wish you a good start to the new year.
I’m fortunate enough to be seeing in the new year in Baden Baden with my wife and two year old son.It is an old spa town in the north of the schwarzwald with lots of beautiful, crisp, classically designed buildings and lovely picturesque walks.
We crossed the Rhine by car from France yesterday and I was impressed by the river’s vastness and productivity. A wonderful book about river journeys is “Danube” by Claudio Magris. The author journeys down the river from its source in Bavaria to its Black Sea mouth and along the way tells fascinating stories of the history, politics, geography and people of the towns and regions along the way. It is probably the best book in the travel genre I have ever read.
For Australians, especially non-indigenous Australians, it can sometimes be hard to understand the cultural importance of river systems in the “Old World” and in particular how bound up they are in the foundation myths of the peoples that inhabit the lands they flow through. A wonderful book that explores this and similar themes related to forests and mountains is “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.
D’artagnon’s castle/chateau is for sale.
Seriously.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertyinfrance/6916385/Property-in-France-chateau-that-inspired-The-Three-Musketeers-for-sale.html
Just wonderful Brian. I even managed to get Leo to the computer to view them ON HIS OWN! And he managed. This earth has so much wonder and beauty. So glad you shared it round. Man has been clever so much of the time, the building of all these great castles is quite an amazing feat, and a pity we can also spoil it even more quickly. In comparison to the city high rises, the castles, pyramids etc. take the cake in my book.
Greetings, Lyn.
When Leo and I packed into the second row of a scrum together in the seconds all those years ago computers and the internet were in the far distant future. I got my first one when I was 57, so there’s hope for the old dog yet!
Actually the cathedrals and churches really got to me even more than castles and the persistence of the Germans for example in Nüremberg, which was hit something dreadful by the bombing, but they’ve put them all back the way they were.
Paul @ 20, I’ll start putting gold coins in a jar straight away
At $US1100 per ounce you will only need 7000 of them (gold coins) to make the deal. Can I come and visit when you are move in?
Aunty Lyn sent me your and her NEW YEAR Greetings, including this link. I went to Germany and Poland in Sept 2004 with David Zweck’s Tour Group and we began with a cruise on the Rhine, probably exactly the same as yours. They misplaced our luggage at Heathrow and it wasn’t until after the cruise that we got back to our hotel at Rudesheim and was reunited with the luggage! I use single-use cameras which NEVER get stolen.
We visited the GERMANIA Monument and the inscription hides the ultra-militaristic European mindset: Prussia crushed France in 1870 and unilaterally declared itself to be a Reich (Empire) in the conquered Palace of Versailles. That’s why the monument faces towards France which is just over the horizon. The “unanimous victorious uprising” was in fact imperialistic expansionism, which all came crashing down in 1945, to the everlasting shame of us Germans.
I remember being shocked by the high level of smog, the day I was there.
The symbol on the hillside is UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE. Don’t know if the Rhine Gorge is protected by WORLD HERITAGE or if this is just supporting the idea.
Five years later, I can still hear the annoying rattling jangling noise of the constant railway traffic on both sides of the river. And, above, the ugly crisscrossing contrials. But then Germany has 80+ million and its neighbours are equally overpopulated. When Australia’s population reaches 80 million, … perish the thought!!
The fact that you are all wearing dark glasses or tinted specs reminds me that I suffered from the glare reflected off the water. That of course is why the vineyards were planted on the slopes: the glare helps the grapes to ripen.
Thanks for bringing back so many memories, cousin. Hope you and your family have a Prosperous and, better still, Interesting New Year! (I leave for Europe on the 18 Jan, to visit my paternal ancestoral places in Ireland and England.)
Good to hear, Noel. Hope all goes well with you and yours and an enjoyable trip coming up.
There was a smoky haze most days and on the Rhine Gorge section. Using Picasa editing I was able to eliminate most of it by injecting a bit more light, so the pictures in a way are better than reality.
Re Heathrow, we used Star Alliance rather than Oneworld. The airlines we used were Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Canada and Air New Zealand. The advantage was that we avoided Heathrow, New York and Los Angeles. The disadvantage was returning over the Pacific via Auckland.
The big hub airports we used were Singapore (magnificent) and Frankfurt (well-organised). In Frankfurt we had about a 10 minute bus ride from where we landed from Nüremberg to the terminus, then had to walk ages and left from gate 67 or something. Large but quite unproblematic.
Last year I read Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia which is quite sympathetic to Prussia. France was a major power. Brandenburg during the Thirty Years War got sick of other countries like Sweden doing as they pleased in their territory and got organised. Prussia steadily got more and more organised and in the end consolidated Germany by bashing up the Austrians and then the French. I think the French dished out plenty in their time, so the Germania thing is perhaps understandable.
Anyway I decided I’d identify as Silesian rather than as Prussian on my father’s side. As chance would have it we met a Silesian on the boat who’s family fled to Canada just after WW2 and it turns out that my friend in Erlangen’s father came from Silesia before the war. Silesia, of course, was snaffled by Prussia off the Austrians in 1742.
I must send you what I found out about the history of our name.
Cheers