How does one encapsulate a 16 day river cruise from Budapest
to Amsterdam, a 1,134-mile voyage along the Danube River, the Main-Danube
canal, and the Main and Rhine Rivers -- through 68 locks and past an untold
number of churches, castles, medieval towns, and a few major cities into one
coherent blog article? As information on
the sites we saw is readily available on the web, I decided to truncate my
write up, using some (and I do mean some) of the nearly 1,000 photographs I
took on the trip to tell the tale with more of a personal, impressionistic
view. I've also borrowed a little from
AmaWaterways for some of the summary information.
On Aug 31 we flew from JFK to Frankfurt, connecting to
Budapest, on two very nice flights on Lufthansa which served up some edible
airline food and provided a decent entertainment selection. I found John Wilson's Orchestra's Rodgers & Hammerstein at the Movies
there, and played it over and over again as it includes Richard Rodger's original
orchestration and my favorite waltz, the Carousel
Waltz. I had never heard Wilson's
album before and it was a surprise to find an English orchestra playing R&H
so faithfully. Time passed quickly with
the jet stream at our backs and we landed in Frankfurt before we knew it, and
smoothly made our connection to Budapest, made it to our hotel in the late
morning, so we had the rest of the day to explore the city (more on that
later).
The next day we boarded the beautiful AmaCerto, a relatively
new and luxurious ship built specifically for river cruising. As such, it is long -- some 440 feet -- with a beam of just 36 feet, just narrow enough
to allow about three inches between the walls of some of the locks we passed
through. It is unlike any ship we've been on.
Everything collapses on the deck including the bridge when we are on
waterways with low bridge clearance (five days in a row at one point). Our captain,
Tom Buining, or the second captain, his 23 year old son (who is about 6'5"
and bears some resemblance to Tab Hunter), sticks his head out of a little
hatch when passing under low bridges. 
The ship is powered by twin 1350hp Cats with plenty of stern
and bow thruster power to deal with the swift currents of the rivers when
docking or turning. The ship even has to plan where to take on their 320 tons
of fuel taking water depths and bridge heights into account. We were running
out of water after the last lock on the Danube, with only 6 inches under the
ship and the draft of the ship is just 4 feet -- the same as my 40' boat in
Connecticut! My conclusion is that a
river ship is a much tougher ship to handle than an ocean vessel. Imagine having to run most nights and parts
of days with the challenges of river traffic (very heavy in parts -- industrial
barges galore), the strong current, depth issues, navigating the multitude of
locks and trying to clear bridges. And
the Captain and his son do it themselves -- 6 hours on and 6 hours off for 14
plus days! I have a profound respect for
their abilities.
Naturally, the first day on board we met our fellow passengers,
one of the more interesting challenges on a river cruise vs. ocean-going
vessels. On the latter, there is always
a place to go if you want to be alone, or if a couple wants to eat by themselves. Not so on a river cruise. I called it forced socialization, just one
sitting for meals, one dining room (except for a very small specialty
restaurant, dinner only). There are
pluses and minuses to this, nice to meet some interesting couples but also
dreadful to sit with people who are traveling together in groups and you are
the third wheel.
There were only about 155 people onboard, nearly half from
Canada which I found surprising, nice people of course but many traveling in
groups. However, we found a few couples
with whom we were extremely compatible politically & socially so we tended
to dine with them. Amazing how fast a group of disparate strangers form into
cliques with one another and proceed to ignore everyone else. It's high school on an upper class, adult
scale.
One couple seemed to have such disdain for the rest of us that
they deliberately choose to eat alone at every meal, taking a table clearly set
up for four and commandeering it for themselves! We probably sat, though, with 1/4th of the
people, and have found most of the conversations begin with geography.....where
are you from? And then it either
continues with some mutual interest or just peters out in a natural course. Both
lunch and dinners were lubricated by wine every day, the wine following the
particular country we were in. I
defiantly enjoyed my diet Coke or just water, one person asking me why I
bothered to book a cruise where the wine flowed freely. Judging by how inebriated a few became (one
person actually fell down a flight of stairs on our first night on board in a
drunken stupor and had to be hospitalized in Budapest), I was fine with my
choice. I usually asked for a special
vintage of diet Coke which usually confused the waiter.
But AMA generally did it up first class in their culinary
choices and execution. All the bread is
baked on board and that is my weakness.
Oh, for another piece of dark multi-grained Pumpernickel!
Getting back to couples, we generally sat with Mark and Edna
-- some 10 years younger than we, or Ronnie and Mary -- some 10 years
older. And then, another couple, Susan
and Dominick, about our age and with whom we had much in common.
Mark is a purser for a major airline, a dedicated tennis
player (I was too at one time). Edna was
with the airlines, but now is a librarian and so we had much in common with her
as well. They were very upbeat and fun
to be with.
Ronnie and Mary, on the other hand, were the mystery couple,
Ron never disclosing his last name, joking that he was with the witness
protection program. But we were
simpatico politically, enjoying discussions of music, particularly Sondheim,
and feelings about Germany and WW II.
Ron was a young boy in London during WW II and remembers his mother
throwing herself protectively on him while bombs were dropping and also watched
British soldiers getting strafed by German fighter pilots on a beach. As he said, "I have smelled death." Therefore, while we toured some of the German
cities, he would bristle at any attempt by the guide to whitewash national
culpability. He also took one of our
fellow passengers to task for declaring that it was a "shame" that
one of the quaint towns we visited was destroyed by allied bombing during the
last month of the war. It was a war!
I gave Ron a reading list as he would like to write his
memoirs. I gather he was a luminary in
the fashion industry, not only by the way he dressed (obviously NOT in my Lands
End ensemble) and given some of the people he knew well, such as Audrey
Hepburn. He too was fun to be with given
his droll sense of humor.
Actually, if there is one major take away for me with this
particular trip it was the elephant in the room of WW II. Everything has been rebuilt. Germany is thriving. And yet, there is that ugly history of not
only extreme German nationalism, but genocide (never heard that word mentioned
in the tours). As we transited the Rhine, I felt the presence of the War and my
father's involvement in it as a Signal Corps photographer. I've included this
photo of him in another part of my blog before, but it bears repeating. It was a photo taken of him -- and published
in Stars and Stripes at the time
-- as he filmed movements over the banks
of the Rhine, with the following caption: Even
if he doesn't savvy German, Sgt. Bob Hagelstein, Signal Corps camera-man from
Richmond Hill, Queens, for this Nazi sign on the banks of the Rhine at Neuss,
forbidding photography in the area.
Neuss is only about 25 miles north of Cologne, from which my
great grandparents immigrated in the 19th century. So, all along the Rhine I wondered where he
was active, but when we visited Cologne and went to the massive Cologne
Cathedral, I stood on the lower steps and said to Ann that I've seen this
before. When I returned, I looked at my
father's scrap book and sure enough there are photos of him at the bombed out
Cathedral. I include the before
and after photos here.
Regarding photos, I've attempted to include some of the
representative ones, day by day. They
are sometimes labeled only with the place. To identify each and every site,
particularly the names of the churches and castles would be an incredible
chore. I found that two weeks is a long
time for a river cruise and if we do one again it would be for a shorter
period, with perhaps a longer land based stop at either end. Some of the medieval towns have already
merged in my mind. Luckily I have the
photos to tell them apart but if we played a game of pick-up sticks with those
pix, I'd be hard pressed to get them in sequence! So here is some brief information, day by
day, with photos below
---------------------------
Day 1 ARRIVE BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
Mid morning we checked into a hotel overlooking the Danube
and the beautiful Parliament House, so we had good part of the day to walk
around town, and most sites were reachable by foot. Perhaps we walked about 4 or 5 miles total,
across the magnificent Chain Bridge into the main shopping and pedestrian
walking area, stopping for an espresso.
Ann even found a Marks & Spencer where she has bought her nighties
for almost 50 years, so the shopping began already.
As it was Sunday we were able to observe the local Budapestians
at leisure. We strolled around like
locals. At night we ate at a
neighborhood restaurant where Ann enjoyed a Hungarian beer served in its
traditional wooden holder. In some
respects, Budapest reminded us of St. Petersburg because the buildings on the
river and their architectural shroud of Socialist realism. It seems that Hungry has never fully
recovered from the Soviet occupation.
Day 2 EMBARKATION Most of this day was spent
exploring the ship, unpacking in our stateroom, and then in the evening meeting
our fellow travelers at a welcome dinner.
Day 3 BUDAPEST,
HUNGARY
In the morning, we slept in, missing the ship's very early sightseeing
tour -- most of which we had seen the day before. I wanted to go to the market, see the people,
which I find more interesting than endless churches and some historical
sites. The highlight of the day was
actually in the evening when the ship departed for Bratislava -- a special
“Illuminations Cruise” past the city’s stunning river front.
Day 4 BRATISLAVA,
SLOVAKIA
We enjoyed a scenic cruise to Bratislava, arriving early
afternoon and there we took a walking tour with a very funny, engaging
Bratislavian of the Old Town Hall, Mirbach Palace and St. Martin's Cathedral. Later
in the day we had some free time for espresso at one of the pretty cafes.
Day 5 VIENNA,
AUSTRIA
Day 6 DÜRNSTEIN -
MELK
We reached the Wachau Valley early in the morning, stopping in
Durnstein, a charming town, taking a walking tour down medieval cobblestone
streets past 16th-century town houses and wine taverns. High above the town, were
the ruins of a castle where Richard the Lionhearted was once imprisoned. After
lunch, the ship cruised to Melk for a guided tour of the town’s Benedictine
Abbey, one of Europe's largest baroque monasteries and the inspiration for the Umberto
Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. Photography
was strictly forbidden in the library, even without a flash, but our tour guide
whispered in my ear, seeing my particular interest in the library, "take a
few pictures without the flash quickly as the guard just left the room." I
did. One
photograph shows the flood levels over the centuries in Melk, on the
Danube. Note the level on left from last
April
Day 7 PASSAU,
GERMANY
The ship continued its cruise through scenic Upper Austria
to Passau, a 2,000-year-old city noted for its Gothic and Italian Baroque
architecture. Passau is known as the "City of Three Rivers," because
the Danube is joined at Passau by the Inn from the south and the Ilz from the
north. A late afternoon walking tour of Passau took us along the cobblestone
streets of the Old Town, where the old city fortifications could be seen and
St. Stephan’s Cathedral, home to the largest pipe organ in the world. This is yet another town my father was in
during the war, going there at the end of the war and then to Berchtesgaden
where he toured Hitler's "Eagle's Nest." (I'll have to write a
separate entry for that one of these days.)
Day 8 REGENSBURG
Early in the afternoon we arrived in Regensburg, one of
Germany's best-preserved medieval cities. The guided tour revealed the city's
architectural highlights, including the Old Town Hall and the Porta Praetoria -
gates to a Roman fort built in 179 AD. Next to the old stone bridge there is
the Wurstkuchl -- a sausage kitchen -- dating back to 1135. Here is an endless battle as to which town
has the best and oldest sausage restaurant, Regensberg or Nuremberg. As can be easily seen, the women working here
practically kill themselves in the heat to cook these special wursts and so I
waited patiently in a very long line to purchase this local specialty. By the way, the sandwich Ann and I shared was
delicious, especially slathered with their secret recipe mustard! Back to more
serious matters, the Regensburg David and Goliath Mural, which has been lightly
re-touched, dates back to the 16th century. Remarkable.
Day 9 NUREMBERG
In the morning we entered the Main-Danube Canal and had a
leisurely cruise through the beautiful Altmühl Valley. The Main-Danube Canal
traverses the Franconian Alps via 16 locks, a marvel of modern engineering as
at one point the locks lifted us to 1,332 feet above sea level and the
following lock is the largest in terms of depth, dropping us 81 feet. We also went
past the Continental Divide after the 11th lock in this particular system In Nuremberg we opted to take the “Medieval
Nuremberg” tour and later regretted not joining the “WWII” tour that visited
the Zeppelin field where Hitler held his Nazi rallies and the Justice Palace
where the War Crimes Tribunal sat in 1946. My former psychology professor,
Gustav Gilbert was the leading psychiatrist there, writing the Nuremberg Diary. We felt that we'd never
get back to this town, so thought the city tour would be best, but that was a
mistake.
Suddenly, while we were in the middle of the Main-Danube
canal, the German lockmasters announced a strike and all river boats had to tie
off at a dock. But our Captain was clever, hearing a rumor that the strike
would be lifted at midnight, so he decided to get in queue at the next lock
before then, and there we sat until sometime in the middle of the night when we
finally made it through. We were on the move again, although a little behind
schedule, but not seriously at least. He made up time each day.
Day 10 BAMBERG
Here we had a morning walking tour of Bamberg, which was declared
a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, seeing the Cathedral, the Old Town Hall
that straddles the river, and the serpentine streets lined with charming
houses. Somehow Bamberg was mostly untouched by WW II bombing raids so most of
the city's buildings are originals.
Day 11 KITZINGEN -
WÜRZBURG Shame on us. We arrived in Kitzingen for an early morning
tour, one that involved busing, the ship meeting the bus at Wurzburg for more
bus tours, so we decided to enjoy the leisurely cruise on board and take a
break. It seemed that we never had a
moment for ourselves until then, so finally we got some reading done as the
scenery passed by, including a nudist colony, not a pretty sight.
Day 12 WERTHEIM -
MILTENBERG Early in the morning I heard
jets, as we passed the Frankfurt Airport, into which I had flown dozens of
times to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Never in my dreams did I think I'd be cruising by the airport on the
Main river in the distant future. In the morning we enjoyed a walking tour of
Wertheim, a town that has retained much of its medieval charm and character at
the confluence of the Main and Tauber Rivers.
I'm certain my father was there during WW II during the
closing weeks of the war and this warrants a brief aside, a few selected passages
from his letter of April 11, 1945 to his brother, my Uncle Phil:
The future looks very bright in this theater of
operations, the final collapse of Germany can very well be by the end of this
month -- definitely I think, by the end of May.
When that joyful day comes, all our hopes and desires about coming home
will be greater. I only hope that if I
must go to the Pacific Theatre of Operations I will at least get a furlough to
home....Now that spring is here this little town we are quartered in has an atmosphere
of peace and quiet -- like some little village out in Long Island if it wasn't
for firing of weapons less than eight miles to the front, I'd feel all's well
again. This town is one of the few that
has been spared of destruction, The
civilians that are here aren't hostile and they move freely about during the
day. Next door to our house is a
blacksmith -- who seems to be busy shoeing horses and oxen. The farmers are back on their land tilling
and plowing, growing the needs of their conquered people. The little children roam about some staring
at GI's and have already learned to ask for candy and gum. I'm a sentimental guy when it comes to the
children and I hate to pass them up....With the on rush of the Allies into
Germany, hordes of people are without homes.
The Germans can shift for themselves in this respect but the forces --
laborers of Russia, Poland, Belgium and other lands are a different problem for
us -- they are so overjoyed at being freed, but it's our problem to house and
clothe and feed them...Due to the particular sector of operations, I can't
disclose to anyone, as yet, just exactly what I'm doing or what is going
on. Between the limited amount of time
for letter writing and censorship my letters are vague and few. The picture of me in the Stars and Stripes I
see was received home with joy. I didn't
even know it was published. It would
have been a much better photograph if the Rhine River, which was less than
twenty five yards in front of me, could have been included -- but at that
particular time the surroundings were very hot with fire of all sorts....So,
Phil, until my next letter, so long for awhile.
My love to Mom and Pop and of course my darling wife and son. Love, Robert
