I don’t feel that we did Passau justice. We had a two-night stay, rolling into town on Saturday night, jubilant and tired after hitting the 2,000m mark for the trip, and because of sleep, laundry and other on-the-road chores, we didn’t really get out and about much.
We share laundry-time with three North Americans who have escaped the $20 per garment rip-off on board their riverboat and found their way to a – thankfully open on a Sunday – laundromat at the same time as us. Lucky for them as they are pretty clueless how to go about things, so we get them sorted and chat for the hour or so it takes to turn our stinky cycling gear into freshness. They are travelling from Amsterdam to Budapest on a riverboat cruise, but had to do some bus-shuttling and riverboat swapping as there is not enough water between near Nuremburg and Passau for their riverboat to pass.
Though there always seems to be masses of water in the waterways we’ve passed on the trip, for the last few years there have been huge worries about waterways drying up in Europe.
In the few hours we have between chores and everything shutting down on Sunday night we take a walk around the old town, visit the massive cathedral that is decorated inside with beautiful frescoes and has a wedding-cake frosting interior look, and take a walk down to the point where the three rivers (Donau, Inn and Ilz) meet. The meeting of the rivers is fascinating. The green-coloured Inn is fast moving and dominant, the Donau a bit passive (though it gets the naming rights from here) and the Ilz is just a bit of a trickle over one side.
The confluence of the Donau and the Inn rivers at Passau. The top, fast moving river is the Inn.
There are riverboats lined up all alongside the old town – stacked in twos and too many to count.
Sometimes I wish to have stayed longer in a place. Passau is one of those places, but we no longer have time to dawdle. Budapest is calling.
Fresco in the catedralPassau cathedralPassau cathedralThe main organ in Passau cathedral – one of the biggest in the worldJust a doorway in PassauFlood markers on a street corner near the riverFort on the hill with some of the riverboatsBust of local poet/writer Emerenz Meier in front of some of the many riverboats
It’s a bit of a bogan of a day as we leave Bogen. The town is recovering from last night’s festival (which we of course missed being back in Regensburg) and we ride out confidently following the bike path. Until we get to an umleitung (a dreaded detour). When we consult our various maps, it turns out we’re nowhere near the EV6 route. Neither of us have any idea what happened, but we end up following the detour which end up somehow getting us back on EV6. I don’t know how.
Two Steps Forward Two Steps Back then Forward Again
If you stay just across the way from a cathedral, there’s a price to pay. At 6am the bells ring out, enough so I can feel a vibration in the air. It’s time to get up and participate in the world.
“Where are you heading today?” asks the woman in the bike shop.
“Regensburg,” we tell her.
She ponders a moment. “Oh, Regensburg,” she says in that way people have of repeating what you have said, where it sounds to you exactly what you said, but it is spoken in the manner of someone slightly scolding and correcting you.
She smiles. “You’re going to have a good day today, I think.”
Europe, as you know, is criss-crossed by trains. We see them everywhere, zipping along, zooming along, taking all manner of people to all manner of places.
There’s also a lot of level crossings. We’ve see plenty. We stayed right near a very busy one back in L’Isle-sur-le-Doubs. The thing about these European level crossings is that they close a very long time before the trains arrive. Much earlier than our few remaining level crossings in Melbourne. Many minutes earlier. Yet the very docile drivers in Europe put up with this and wait patiently. I suppose there isn’t much else to do.
It feels like a rinse and repeat of yesterday: church bells to start the day and a fast exit from town on flat paths. The bikes are still humming along and the bodies feeling pretty good. Perhaps we have come to that part of the trip, where all is well and remains well.
We’re passing through more farmland today. The two main crops are corn and wheat, followed closely by vast fields of spinach. The corn is interesting. There’s so much grown here and in France, but you never (rarely) see corn turning up on a plate. That’s because it is not human food; it is pig food. You often see pig turning up on a plate. They throw it in everything.
Corn, the food of a nation of pigs
The small farming villages are often quite … molodorous. In many villages we find there is a large and smelly barn, right in the centre of town, and with resident cows, even now in the height of summer. I’m not sure what is going on there. Are the cows so accustomed to living in barns they prefer to stay year round? Are there some “house cows” that stay living in the town during summer to provide milk? Are their buddies out in the field somewhere frolicking and enjoying the summer? So many questions.
We often see (and smell) great piles of what I can only imagine is the cow shit/straw compost that is generated during the long cold winters when the animals do all live in a barn. I want not to be a farm animal in Europe.
We also ride through pretty villages. There is great civic pride in all the villages, with baskets of flowers bursting with colour hung on bridges, fences, outside houses. The pretty villages most often have ornate and historical town gates and a cobbled central area that is often car free and lined with cafes, restaurants and bakeries. These are the kind of places we are stopping in for lunches, not the smelly farm villages.
Today is a busy day for cyclists. We have them coming at us from all angles. It’s the kind of day where you meet up with a cyclist, or a group of cyclists, and then leap frog them for the rest of the day. It’s sunny and a lovely day to be out.
We stop in Donauworth today for lunch, at a bakery where I get a vegie burger! I feel it a moral obligation to buy vegetarian food from these small places if available, so they’ll keep on making it. To be fair, most places have vegetarian food, even the restaurants we go to a night, and often in a separate section. For a pig-eating country where the vegetarian population is pretty low, that’s great!
We also share a poppy seed cake. Yum!
I regret that big lunch a short time later when we hit the hilly section of the ride. It seems to me those poppy seeds have all swelled up inside my stomach making it feel overfull as I heave myself and my bike over the series of “net down” hills.
We’re following a couple where she (a tiny she at at) is on a heavily loaded bike and he is cruising along with barely any luggage. It hardly seems fair, and we’re making up stories about why it is so. (I think he said, “If you’re going to bring that much stuff for two days you can carry it all yourself,” or, more charitably, she is an olympic cyclist doing heavy load training. Neil thinks she is on a long tour and he has just joined her for a day or so.) We come upon them parked at the side of the path and he leans over and gives her a kiss before she sets off … on a butt-nutter of a hill that Neil and I both walk up. We are coming to the conclusion that our bikes are not really geared for this type of touring (though we did do that trip over the low Tatras eight years ago on these same bikes, climbing over 1,000m on several days.)
It’s a relief to get over the hilly bit and then cruise into Neuburg an der Donau, which is a bit of a surprise package. We’re staying at a gasthaus which has a beer garden and restaurant (with an award-winning chef) … but it’s their “rest day” today. Rest days are a thing for most businesses here we are learning, but the actual day of rest can vary from business to business so there’s no way to plan.
Fortunately it’s the kind of gasthaus that has a beer fridge on an honour system so we’re table to have our end of day beer in the closed and empty beer garden which would be a great space if it wasn’t rest day.
There’s a town within the town here and as we go to explore the old, walled part of the town we see heaps of people all heading in the same direction, dressed up in traditional costume. There must be something going on!
We follow in the same direction and they are all converging somewhere that looks like a private function. We continue into the old town and it is all set up for a festival – which was on last weekend and will be on this coming weekend, but we will be well gone by then. It’s a bit hard to properly see the old town as there are rows of tents that will be humming with activity serving food and drinks and I’m sure there’ll be lots of entertainment. It’s a shame we will be moving on tomorrow.
We find a very deserted looking Italian restaurant where one of the waiters encourages us in with a big smile and a nod. We only plan to stop for a drink but they bring out the menus and we’re a bit trapped. The food is great though so it’s not a bad stop in great surroundings.
There are all manner of Fahrts here. This is the carousel variety.
It turns out the shindig tonight is an appeasement function for the residents of the old town. The festival goes for two weekends and late into the night which is a bit of inconvenience for the people who live here, so they get a party to try to keep them happy.
At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer pictures were taken in the closed and empty beer garden at our gasthaus.
What is it with church bells? I get the ringing on Sundays – calling the few people who still go to church. At the service we went to last night the pastor had to wait for the bells to finish before starting. But is it really necessary to have them going (presumably) all night? I certainly hear them at 5am, 5:15, 5:30, 5:45 …
And here’s a question. Europe is on 24 hour time format. Why is it then that a 3pm, the bells ring three times and not fifteen? There is always something to ponder.
Here it seems that everything is forbidden or mandatory
Neil McKinnon, July 2023
When we stay more than one night in any place we like to get an apartment. An apartment gives more space to spread out (and believe me, these compact-looking panniers you see in the bike pictures explode when opened), often a washing machine and a kitchen where we can make breakfast for the few days we are in one place.
The Danube river. We are going to be following it now until the end of the trip. We know this river: second longest in Europe (2850km), runs from Germany right through to the Black Sea. Neil and I rode around 1000km along the Danube in 2015 in what was, until now, our most epic bike trip.
But did you know that of the ten countries this river flows through, none of them call it the Danube? In Germany/Austria it is Donau, in Slovakia/Ukraine, Dunaj, in Hungary, Duna (my personal favourite), in Serbia/Croatia/Bulgaria, Dunav and in Romania/Moldova, Dunărea.
Yet we call it the Danube, as do the French (Le Danube – but I bet it doesn’t sound anything like the way we say it) while the Spanish and Italians call it Danubio. Why can’t everybody get together and call it the same damn thing?
Today is more of a commute day (getting from A to B) with a minimum of fuss. We have a rest day coming up in Ulm which is well-needed. We mark yet another milestone today – passing the 1000 mile mark. We are now in territory we’ve not been before, distance-wise.
Today is also a real-life example of “net down”: We end the day lower in altitude (478m) than when we started (540m), but it takes an awful lot of uphill to get there. It seems that every cute little village, with its cute church and cute houses and cute cobblestones, is set on a hill and we have to go up into and down out of each one of these villages.
Greetings from a day where not much really happened
There are heaps of cyclists out today. It is Saturday so people are out enjoying themselves. And lots of people are on e-bikes. There is one particularly nasty little hill that pops up with no warning and honestly it is almost vertical. Even Neil walks up this one. While we are clomping up it there is the unmistakable whirr of electric motors and two e-bikes sail up as if they are on a flat road. Not only that but a skinny road biker on a bike that must weigh less than a feather also rides up effortlessly.
E-bikes are great. They give people who would not ordinarily be out cycling the chance to do so, and being out cycling is better than sitting on a couch or driving a petrol guzzler around – right? One day perhaps I will be a proud e-bike owner.
But some e-bike riders can be a real nuisance. Today we are caught behind a group of e-bikers as they dawdle along a narrow and flat path which leaves no room to pass. At a traffic light Neil and I sneak past them only to find a hill around the next bend. As I’m working my way up slowly the e-bike group passes with the lead rider throwing me such a smug look that I want to poke a stick through his spokes. Failing that I wish him a flat battery and get on with my own job.
We arrive in Ulm in the late afternoon and I spy a Mexican restaurant right near the apartment where we are staying. That’s dinner sorted! We are staying right near the centre of town where it all seems quite lively with people going about their business beneath the looming Ulm Münster – known to be the tallest church in the world with a spire rising to more than 160m.
Ulm seems to be a fine place for a rest day. I shall make the most of resting ????
At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at a cafe in the Munsterplatz in Ulm with the Munster just barely visible in the background.
