Passau
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.
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.
