Koblenz

Lively kids at breakfast again. I could see that Germans like all kinds of herbal teas from the selection available near the hot water urn.

It was raining as I crossed the bridge to the station. There was uncertainty whether there would be services due to the threatened strike. An old lady at Cochem station checked with me which direction the train was going. She was from South Africa and travelling around Germany. At Koblenz station I bumped into her again. She told me that Bingen hostel was full of groups. So much for the idea of overnighting in Bingen. She didn't hold much hope for Bacharach either. Ah, youth groups, they are the scourge of indy travellers during high season.

The rain was starting to depress me. It didn't help that a train strike was threatened for Sunday which might make it difficult to get to Frankfurt Airport. It occurred to me that I could get my plane ticket brought forward by a couple of days. I needed to think about this. In the meantime I put my backpack in a locker and walked into the city to see the monument of Wilhelm I on horseback at the Deutsches Eck (German Corner) which stands at the confluence of the Mosel and Rhine. On the other side of the Rhine is Ehrenbreitstein where there is a hostel which I had considered staying a night in. No idea if it was full of groups. I would have to cross the Rhine if I wanted to do this.

The currents of the Mosel and Rhine are very strong and this cruise boat had to oversteer by a lot to go where it wanted.

In the town there is Münzplatz, where the mint used to be, and these statues depicting a market woman and a local official. They don't seem to be mentioned in the official tourism site.

Jesuit church.

Windows with fancy decorations.

A building with an old corner tower. If I recall correctly it's one of 4 towers at the crossroads like this, each slightly different.

Government buildings.

By this time I had made up my mind. I was tired and a bit homesick, and I didn't fancy sticking around for the train strike. I went to an Internet and call centre and looked up the phone number and address of my airline's Frankfurt office on the Web. Over the phone they said that it should be no problem to leave earlier, lots of seats, but come down to our offices. So I got a ticket to Frankfurt for 20€80. A bit of sticker shock, coming from Italy where trains are relatively cheap, but to be fair, it was a long distance up the Rhine then the Main. Also I was not eligible for any of the discounts offered to residents, or special offers.

90 minutes by train to Mainz. Lots of schoolchildren getting off and on the train. Going home from school or from trips, I wondered. Then 40 minutes on the S-Bahn. This passed Mainz Sud, the nearest stop to a possible hostel then passed Frankfurt airport where I would be returning to. The airlines offices were just around the corner from the Hauptbahnhof. Piece of cake and no charge to change the ticket to leave the next day. The deed done, I then had a fast-food lunch and sent my relatives a SMS to let them know I would be 2 days early.

I decided spend my last night in Germany in a hotel for a change. If I got one near the airport I could get shuttled between the hotel and airport both ways and avoid any issues with trains. I went back to Frankfurt International and asked the booking service to locate me one. An unsmiling woman consulted her book of addresses and found me one in a village near the airport called Sindlingen.

The hotel seemed to be run by Indian or Pakistani immigrants, and was perfectly serviceable with all the standard amenities. Lest you think Sindlingen is a bucolic location, it's on the edge of an industrial park and I had views of factories and chimneys from my window. It was probably rustic a long time ago, before the factories took over. The village is neat and quiet. It had good services and there was a supermarket just around the corner from the hotel. I couldn't resist buying a last bag of cherries there.

The sun peeked out to taunt me, on my last evening in Germany. But there were still black clouds in the sky and the forecast on the TV predicted bad weather until Saturday. The news also said that the train strikes were predicted to continue. I walked down the street and found a Vietnamese restaurant whose owners were actually Chinese. I chatted with them a bit over my meal, then went back to become a bed potato facing the TV.

Cochem

My friend had to go back to her hometown to work and I would go down the Mosel. (Yes, this is the region that gives its name to the wine.) I had decided to go straight to Cochem and perhaps take some river cruises from there.

After a leisurely breakfast we left for the station at 1030. My train was at 1130 so there was a lot of time. I bade my friend and her parents goodbye and I was off. It was drizzling all this time. About 1½ hours later I arrived at Cochem via Trier. The hostel was very easy to find and I left my backpack there while I went to explore the town.

The town lies the banks of the Mosel and the land rises steeply behind it. When I saw the pictures and maps of the region I was sure it would be picturesque and I was not disappointed. There was a cruise leaving for Belstein at 1330 but I wasn't sure if I wanted to take it, so I took lunch first. There were many tourist restaurants to choose from. And the usual coffee houses and souvenir shops. My friend's father had said that this was a popular town with the Dutch. Heh heh, maybe they like the novelty of seeing hills.

After lunch I decided to walk up the Reichsburg, the castle in the picture overlooking the town. From there I had a good vantage over the valley. The youth hostel is on the other bank of the river, near the further bridge.

And this is looking upriver. You can see some vineyards.

I declined to do the castle tour, though it seemed popular with tourists; this was the queue for the next session.

And this is the view from just outside the entrance.

I descended from the castle via another path (I dislike retracing my steps) and found myself back in the middle of the town.

It was time for a coffee break. I didn't finish pronouncing Schwartzwälder Kirschtorte before the waitress completed the name for me. Sure is a touristy town. But what I got wasn't that distinguished, despite the yummy cherries of the area; I'd had better Black Forest Cake in my home city.

Wandering down to the river bank I noticed a marker well above a person's height on a wall indicating the highest level of the December 1993 floods. Wow, that was some flood, these buildings would have been several metres under water.

As usual, a river attracts waterfowl.

By this time I was sure that I didn't want to take any cruises as the weather was off and on, the views would be about the same up and down the river, but maybe the towns might look a bit different.

I walked back across the bridge to the hostel and checked in. The dorm was very tidy and the ensuite bathroom was spacious. I was the first in the dorm, but a couple of German backpackers arrived later. Later they invited me to join them in drinks in town or similar. I was somewhat tired because of the gloomy weather and declined their kind offer. Maybe I should have been more sociable.

I decided to take dinner in the hostel to avoid having to walk into town again. So I found myself allocated a place in the dining room with a lot of noisy youngsters. They were well-mannered though. There seemed to be two groups in the hostel, a Berlitz English camp and an excursion group. The food was bland but nourishing enough. And that was my day in Cochem.

Merzig

Got up early and had cereal for breakfast in the kitchen. Gave Neeza some milk and some strokes. I wondered if she was that fat because she was housebound.

I was supposed to catch the train to Merzig where a friend was staying with her parents. I walked to the station and called from a public phone but the line was engaged. I tried several times over a half-hour with no luck. So I went back to the hostel and checked out of the room. I left my bag at the office, and checked my email. Nothing. By this time it was raining moderately and my raincoat was all wet. I went back to the station and tried calling again. Still engaged. I returned to the hostel, wrote an email saying that I couldn't get through and that I hoped to catch up with her some other year. I then had an early lunch of leftovers from the night before and left the hostel. Just before giving up and buying a train ticket down the Mosel, I tried calling again. I got through that time. It seemed the handset was accidentally off the cradle.

By the way, none of this was helped by the fact that DB (German Railways) was suffering a strike at the time, although most trains on my line were not affected, as yet.

I was picked up at Merzig station and taken to her parents' home where they had assigned me the upstairs bedroom. I came down for afternoon tea, well, I had tea and everybody else had coffee, and I had an interesting discussion with her father about world politics.

Later that evening we went out for dinner. Her father was upset by the slow service. He obsessed over it all the way home and being a gentleman, felt obliged to apologise to me on behalf of the restaurant when we got home. It hadn't bothered me in the least. We had a late coffee with a bit of wine and more conversation, and that was the end of the day. It had rained pretty much all day.

I only took one picture all day and this was it, the departures board at Trier station. It proves that there is a place called Perl, in Saarland, Germany (third line from bottom). Computer programmers will understand this, the rest of you can ignore this silly piece of trivia. I wonder if the inhabitants of that town are annoyed that it's hard to find their town in web searches.

Trier

Trier is also a somewhat obscure city, situated near the German border with Luxembourg. It however dates back to Roman times and the Porta Nigra is a reminder of its origins. It was 2000 years old in 1984. Unwittingly I seemed to have chosen destinations with hidden connections. Like the time I went to Cuba and then to the Canaries immediately after. It turned out that many Cubans had come from the Canaries, and also many Canarians are Cubans who left the country after the revolution and set up cigar manufacturing in the Canaries, no less. But I digress; that belongs to another blog.

I woke rather early and wondered if there was any breakfast served. I didn't think so and so it was, this hostel was a self-service place. I took some cereal from the communal food area and some milk from the common area in the fridge and made do with that. There was another occupant in the kitchen, a very plump cat called Neeza. Obviously she was very good at wheedling food from people; there was a note on the fridge reading: Please do not feed Neeza.

I decided to wait until the office opened to pay for my lodging. Also there was an Internet terminal. They were very nice people in the hostel office. Then I walked to the shopping centre next to the bus terminus and looked through the electrical supermarket and ended up buying a CD by Paolo Fresu and Richard Galliano. I'm not sure now why I didn't go sightseeing right away. Maybe I just got distracted after having not been much of a consumer for weeks.

The Porta Nigra was living up to its name. It looked like it needed a really good scrub. Of course that can't be done, it's world heritage, dirt and all.

The city streets and buildings are neat, in marked contrast to Italy. There were many schoolchildren wandering around, probably on excursion. Also many older tourists. There was a market underway in the square.

I saw a stall with cherries for 6€ a kilo. That was more than I used to pay down south, but these were a different variety, very plump and inviting so I bought ½ kilo.

A touch of colour on a slightly gray day.

This is one face of Trier Cathedral (Dom).

By this time I needed lunch so I walked back to the station where I had seen a kebap shop. Turkish shops are good places to get a cheap meal in Germany. After that an apricot danish from a pastry shop a couple of doors away.

I bought some food at the Kaufland in the shopping centre. Boy they sure do have a lot of cheap wines. Just shows the great buying power of large supermarket chains. Then I took the food back to the hostel where I ate half the cherries (yum!) and saved the other half.

In the afternoon I ventured out again, visiting different streets.

This Apotheke building took my fancy.

One thing puzzled me and that was how to visit towns downstream on the Mosel. The trains didn't go to Berncastel-Kues or Traban-Trarbach. At the tourist office they gave me the timetable of bus line 333. But this was only between the towns of Neumagen and B-K. At the hostel, they printed for me the timetable for another section. Finally I got onto the Internet and looked at the regional transport timetables and understood. Like the blind men and the elephant, they had each given me part of the answer. The bus route is in 4 sections. The Mosel is sinous and its valley deep, so the trains do not reach the smaller towns, only bus services do. It looked like if I wanted to go to the hostel at Traban-Trarbach, I should take the train to Bulay and then backtrack by bus.

At about 1830 I woke from my nap feeling peckish so I started cooking dinner. I was having corned beef with hash potatoes and an omlette. There were a couple of girls in the kitchen making ravioli who sounded like they might be Quebecois. Poor girls, I must have made the kitchen stink of beef. I made too much so I packed the leftovers in foil. I surreptitiously gave a couple of morsels to Neeza.

As I was cooking, it started raining heavily. The weather forecast on the TV said more rain was expected. Well that put paid to my idea of an evening stroll in the city, despite it being still light at 2200. Nothing for it but to read a book and write in the diary, then go to bed.

Treviso

I had to be in Treviso to catch a Ryanair flight to Frankfurt in the evening. Ryanair's tactic is to use regional airports that are close to major cities. So for example, Treviso is advertised as Venice, Frankfurt Hahn (a former military airport about 100km out of Frankfurt) is advertised as Frankfurt, and Girona is advertised as Barcelona. In Ryanair's defense, they do negotiate for or arrange shuttle services to the major cities.

The Chinese couple in the room last night looked odd. They had big suitcases with them and didn't look like backpackers. Maybe they were planning to set up yet another variety store. Then again they may have been tourists, I saw them consulting maps. Who knows?

I copied some details for Treviso from the guidebook and then abandoned it in the hostel. The book was actually 12 years old from a previous trip and the information about establishments was out of date. City sights had been the same for centuries of course.

I decided to take an earlier train to avoid the heat. But I only ended up killing time at Mestre and taking the exact train to Treviso that I had originally decided on. There were lots of people at Mestre, moving in or out of Venezia. At Treviso, I noted the bus stand for the airport, then parked my backpack in storage. I wondered if I was imagining it, but the Trevisiani I dealt with seemed a bit jumpy. Maybe they didn't like working on a Sunday morning.

Treviso is a prosperous city, being the headquarters of clothing giant Benetton, appliance manufacturer DeLonghi, and other names. I found the main Piazza dei Signori easily. Many people were out having a coffee and enjoying the day.

This looks like a nice lunch doesn't it? However it's actually an ice-cream desert made to look like a spaghetti dish. For lunch I went to Treviso's Brek, mostly to avoid looking too hard for a restaurant. The milanese was too salty, but the Nastro Azzurro beer was ok. Incidentally Northern Italy and Austria claim the milanese or schnitzel respectively as their cuisine. I suppose it isn't too hard to come up with the idea of pounding a filet of meat flat, coating it with bread crumbs and frying it.

At the supermarket I encountered these fascinating Saturn Peaches. They looked like they had been sat on, but they were heavenly so I went back and bought some more. At that time I didn't know what they were called, but I have since discovered that they are called pan tao in China. Other names include donut peach. They have gained popularity in recent years as people look for variety and I saw some recently in Sydney.

I took a walk on the outside of the old city walls to spend time. Treviso claims it has canals like Venezia's. In their dreams. Not a patch on Venezia. The river Sile is grotty in places. However it is a pleasant walk.

I retrieved my backpack and hopped onto the airport bus. It was warm and I figured that there would be air-conditioning in the airport. The airport is just 3km out of the city. That close; this I had to see. The bus left before the scheduled time. Or maybe it was the previous service, late. This was Italy, so who knows?

In fact Treviso airport was so undistinguished that I missed it. From the road it looked like a medium sized hotel or office building. I only realised this when the bus reached the end of the run. Never mind, I had heaps of time; I'll just stay on the bus for the return trip. The bus driver said, good-humouredly, why didn't you tell me you wanted to get off at the airport? Non importa, ho tempo, I said.

Ryanair, like other budget airlines, has tricks to squeeze more money from customers. The basic ticket is often a great bargain, but then you have to add on charges and taxes. A surcharge might be levied for non-partner credit cards. A basic 15kg luggage allowance has to be purchased in advance. Paying at the airport or wanting more allowance will cost more. You have to pay more if you want priority seating. If you want food or drink you have to buy it. There was even talk of charging for using the plane's toilet. Still, some ticket prices are incredible, starting at 1€. I have to say I am in favour of cheap no-frills services but some of the money-extraction ideas are risible and petty.

Another thing these airlines do is build a lot of leeway into their schedule so that when they arrive early, this is hailed as great service and boosts their statistics. This was what happened—we arrived early at Frankfurt Hahn. To no avail though, the shuttle to Trier did not leave until the scheduled time. I got into the hostel about 2200. I had told them in advance that I would be late so they had left my room key on a hook. Then I went out and had some fast food for dinner. I had eaten a sandwich on the plane so I hadn't starved. It was a cool 19C and drizzling mildly when I arrived at Hahn. Well, that's the end of the sunny weather, I thought. I had no idea how right I was to be in the days to come.

Sorry for the air base

While wandering around Vicenza I came across this notice outside a construction site.

Vicenza is home to a US air base, just outside the city. In February 1998, a military plane flown by US pilots flew far too low and sliced the cable supporting the gondolas of an aerial tramway of a ski field. The plane suffered damage but returned to its base, which was Aviano, not Vicenza. The gondola was far less fortunate. All 20 occupants, 19 tourists and 1 operator, all Europeans, were killed in the 80 metre plunge.

The pilots were not tried in Italy but in the US and were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide. In a second court-martial they were found guilty of obstruction of justice by destroying a videotape recording from the plane and dismissed from service. The fact that the NATO treaty had precedence over Italian laws and the acquittal verdict stirred much anger in Italy and Europe in general and strained the NATO alliance.

So it was not surprising that the presence of a US air base in Vicenza still got some locals hot under the collar.

Vicenza

I had considered visiting Venezia again in the day, but after last night's adventure, I decided to pass that up. It's magnificent and everybody should visit it at least once, but it really is a theme park, because it exists purely for arts and tourism. The glory days of La Serenissima were back in history. It's said that many locals have to live outside and commute to work. Instead I decided to visit Vicenza, the city of Palladio.

At the station I found that the trains to Vicenza were actually buses leaving from outside the station. This wasn't apparent in the timetables. And as luck would have it, I got the milk run, which took minor roads and stopped everywhere. Still, I was in no hurry and I got a good tour of the countryside.

At Vicenza, a short walk took me to the gates opening up on Corso Palladio. Even I, with no eye for architecture, could discern that Palladio's buildings are indeed well-proportioned, but unfortunately it was impossible to step far back enough to take undistorted pictures of any but a few, such as the Duomo.

It was an attractive city, but it felt forlorn and not as lively as Padova. That it was Saturday and that the weather was warm might have had something to do with it. Perhaps some people had chosen to shop, and the rest were relaxing at home.

I had a nice asparagus pizza for lunch, washed down with a glass of chardonnay. Now I'm bound to feel drowsy afterwards, I thought, never mind, I can nap in the train. Desert was irresistible cherries.

I ate them in this garden just behind the market.

The train back to Padova was delayed. Why was I not surprised? Back in the hostel, I showered and used up my phone card calling home since I would be leaving Italy the next day.

I went to Brek for the third time, because of the fresh food, the air-conditioning (it was a warm day) and the absence of a cover charge, which many establishments tack on. Then I digested dinner sitting in the piazza. An Italian kid noticed me eating cherries and asked his mother where I had got them.

When it was cooler, I walked to the end of the main street which opened up onto a park. I saw in passing that some wit had altered a street sign from Via Rogati to Via Drogati (I don't know what the Rogati were but Drogati means drug addicts). It really wasn't as dangerous as suggested, but I'm sure that like any city, Padova had some.

From the vans packing up and the detriti on the ground it looked like there had been a market with clothing stalls. In Italy I noticed many clothing shops and stalls run by Chinese. Do Italians really buy that much apparel? Imagine China conquering the world through clothing and variety stores.

There was a fountain and townsfolk out for their passeggiate.

I walked back to the piazza, found myself a gelato desert, and enjoyed the night air until it was late, then called it a night.