Wanderung 32

Drifting down the Donau; Edging up the Elbe

March - April 2017


 

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March 27: Melk, Austria

During the night we passed through at least two locks and the weird whining noise that occurred during that transit awakened me for a while. But otherwise I slept well until morning when I rolled out of bed at 7 to have some breakfast. I had a freshly made omelet and croissants, a real treat for me. We had already moored at Melk, which is a small old town dating from 1357 which is build below a huge Baroque Benedictinerstift (English: Benedictine Monastery) that has replaced an even older Benedictine monastery dating from 1007.

We were driven in a bus up to the parking lot in front of the gate of the monastery, which lies atop a low bluff on the Danube River above the town of Melk. Our tour traversed the row of buildings on one side of the monastery, plus the library and church on the other side, but did not include the residential area where the 60 remaining monks lived, nor the area of connected buildings that now housed a monastic high school where about 900 students study topics such as religion, Greek and Latin, modern languages, mathematics and science, or music and arts.

The first set of rooms we toured had been turned into a very odd kind of Abbey museum that mixed some extremely modern, avant-garde types of symbolic art with ancient, Jewel encrusted and gilded artifacts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a combination which I found confusing. We were not allowed to take pictures, which was probably just as well.

At the end of that wall of buildings we came out onto the rear terrace in front of the church and the library, and that was rather a relief to me as the terrace was light, airy, and afforded great views of the town of Melk below and the Danube River valley further out. Very pretty.

We finished our tour with the library, which had a lot of old books, the oldest of which was a copy of the Venerable Bede's guidance for finding religious dates and the proper way to run a Benedictine monastery. That tome was so old that it predated the founding of the Abbey. The library was huge, and included some globes from the 1500s which had obvious inaccuracies such as picturing California as an island and omitting large parts of Canada.

The church was just covered in gilded figures, and came complete with two skeletons in clear glass coffins. Our guide described it as High Baroque style, but I would have said Roccoco style myself, and my personal opinion was that the whole thing was an exercise in wretched excess that just wasted huge amounts of time, money, manpower, and resources.

We chose to walk back to the ship through the town, and the solid plainness of the town of Melk was rather comforting after that overpowering church. Linda, Jerry, Debbie , Rob, and Monika and I meandered through the Main Street past city hall, a little fountain and a nice assortment of shops and cafes, some of which were however closed due to being so early in the season. We crossed the St Leopold bridge over an arm of the Danube to get to the landing where our ship was moored, and then went up for a quick lunch before we settled in for a couple hours of scenic cruising.

After lunch we followed the Danube through the bohemian mountains. The scenery was not as rugged as on the stretch from Passau to Linz, but still quite impressive, and the fact that the hills were interspersed with fields, farms, small towns, and above all, vineyards carved into the slope of the mountainsides, gave the landscape more interest. The program director of the Tor gave us a running commentary for over an hour, detailing the points of interest on either shore.

Many of these places involved old castles perched either on the shoreline, in a small town, or up on the bluffs above the river. Some of the castles were still intact and maintained either by rich families or by the state, but some of them were also derelict ruins of once mighty fortresses. Still, the stories were interesting and our cruise director kept up his discourse until we reached the town of Duernstein, where the castle had once held an imprisoned Richard III of England until the English paid the Austrian Duke a ransom that was sufficiently large to refurbish two entire villages in his domain.

Many folks disembarked in Duernstein to take a wine tasting tour as the surrounding region was covered not only with vineyards, but also with the associated wineries. Apparently, the Riesling variety of wine was developed in this region. But we had opted to skip that and chose to walk over to see the tiny town of Duernstein, which was a 1/4 mile back up the Danube from where our ship was now moored (1 on the map).

We walked the shoreline path to the Fischergasse (English: Fisherman Alley--5 on the map), which was a street that led directly to the Kloster Platz (English: Cloister Plaza), because there we hoped to find an entrance Into the Duernstein Monastery (4 on the map). It was a good plan and worked well except for a couple of small hitches. First, it the Fischergasse was a steep, cobblestoned alleyway and Lois had trouble with her footing. But Beth and Jerry supported her on either side and she made it up to the Kloster Platz without incident. There we found that the entrance to the inner courtyard of the monastery was indeed open, but the entrance to the rest of the monastery would not open until April 1, which was a shame because the monastery was housing some kind of art exhibition during the upcoming tourist season. Still we had a good look at some/of the Baroque decorations around the doorways and entrances of the monastery courtyard before continuing uphill to the Hauptstrasse (English: Main Street).


 

On Main Street we started investigating the small shops that were interspersed among the restaurants and pensions and residences that otherwise lined the street. As it was sunny and warm, idling along and shopping intermittently was relaxing. Monika bought apricot schnapps in a bottle shaped like a cello and an edelweiss necklace and earrings set--it reminded us of buying an edelweiss necklace in Salzburg back when we were driving a motorcycle around Europe in 1972. We scoured Main Street from one end to the other before finally leaving by Steiner Gate (6 on the map) and taking the bike path along the highway to get back to the ship.


 

The evening dinner was genuine Austrian cuisine of all sorts, and we used the occasion to celebrate Linda's birthday. Two strolling Bavarian musicians on an accordion and a guitar serenaded us with Austrian and Bavarian songs, and obligingly played "Happy Birthday" for Linda, which was very nice.



Copyright 2017 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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