What with work and other commitments, Weina and I hadn't had a chance to spend a day together since Easter...
I like the middle Rhein Valley and hadn't spent a significant time in any of the little villages. Weina and I decided to visit Bacharach for the day -- by train.
Upon disembarking we passed a place where wine tasting was in progress, for 5 euro. We decided to pass that up and be real tourists, e.g. sight-see.
Because it was fairly early in the day, the motorcycle groups, cars, and few camping vans that would arrived later were missing...as were groups from the tour boats. Perfect timing on our part. The town http://www.loreley-info.com/eng/rhein-rhine/city-cities/bacharach.php has been in existence since the 9th century or earlier and has long been known for its vineyards.
We were hustled (by the owner) into eating (and drinking) at a cute little restaurant. The food didn't match her claims, but it would be impossible to fault the attention and friendly atmosphere.
We decided it was essential to trek up the hill -- up what seemed an infinite number of steps as well as trails -- to visit the Stahleck Castle. The castle has been around since before 1135, was blown up by the French in 1689, and rebuilt in the mid 1920's after which it served as a training area for Hitler youth and more rebuilding occurred in the mid 60s. Today part of it is a youth castle. It's pretty impressive.
Before heading up we decided to get permission...
and be fortified by religious splendor.
Good thing we did. It helped us make it past the gargoyles
And the awe inspiring Gothic ruins of Werner's Chapel -- an edifice memorializing a supposed 'saint' who, in 1287, was 'supposedly' murdered by the Jews for the use of his blood in passover.. This fear/belief/libel resulted in pogroms that wiped out the Jewish population of the middle Rhine and on to the Mosel. Without knowing the history, the ruin is still, especially on a cloudy day, an evocative, darkly fascinating place.
Stahleck Castle is .... well, so 'castle-like'. I find the walls, with vegetation growing in them and slots for bowmen well fitting to a lifetime of images from books and films. (Maybe not the flowers).
Weina tried scaling the walls. I wasn't as nimble as she, so we walked up the pathway and more stairs.
What gives me perhaps the strongest sense of age in places I visit here, is the way steps, and thresholds of rock are worn smooth and troughed by a thousand or more years of feet.
In Stahleck Castle.
Courtyard
Great view of the Rhein as major transport river -- one major reason for all the castles in this region.
Walking back down we had a great view of a lookout tower and the hillsides with the vineyards. Erosion is controlled with terracing by rock walls.
Bacharach has a plethora of half-timbered houses as well as stone walls surrounding the town.
It has, like so many other lovely places world-wide become a tourist haven and one sees the hybridity of cultures. Note the Tibetan flags....
Famous for its castles, the middle Rhine Valley makes an ideal place for an all-day field trip. As a guest at the Institutes Conference on Syrian, Palestinian and Lebonese Diasporas, I got to party on the boat with others from the dept as well as conference attendees.
View of the Rhein from the Niederwald Monument/Statue of Germania (1977-1883) built to memorialize the end of the Franco-Prussian War http://www.rudesheim-rhine.info/z-niederwald-monument.htm . We hopped on the boat here and commenced eating and drinking.
Anton Escher, the head of the Institute of Geography is an excellent host, and was helped by a host of students and lecturers.
Including Gregor, geographer and tennis player...
And Eva, who had been "volunteered" to film the conference,
And Lisa (on the right).
It is a pleasure to be around fun people. We went past the Lorelei and then back to Bacharach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacharach , a small medieval village. Some stayed and played. Some of us came back on the bus, but didn't make it past the Hauptbanhoff before we decided more food and drink across the road were the order of the evening. A totally fun day.
Fields of mustard. How did such glorious, vibrant yellow get turned into the dull 'shit'-muckle-de-dunn' colored condiment for hot dogs and hamburgers?
BOSCH, Stuttgart -- impression? Industrial city.
Bessie, the emotionally vacuous GPS, did a good job of guiding me through the maze of German highway system.I got rather fond of her…especially when she would shut up on those 50 or 103 km stretches.I think my book/movie script will be “No Road for Old Women” – the autobahn. I would be going 160 km/hr and need to pull into the “slow” lane because someone was rear-ending me making me seem to be standing still. I think I’ve had enough adrenaline to last me for a day or two.Bessie is my reduced price, reward for waiting 50 minutes in the sun on the corner of Albert-Schweitzer Strasse and Dalheimer Weg . Why, I ask, did it take 50 minutes and two calls before the Enterprise pickup came?
After five of six and a half hours driving, I am exhausted, wondering about my decision to drive to Garmisch. Maybe I should have stayed in Mainz?
Then -- the evening light! Spring green oak leaves and uncut fields. Winding roads and wayside Inns and hamlets, beautiful Guernsey cows, black conifers, hairpin curves and mountains…..glorious, glorious mountains and alpen glow…. True alpen glow in the Alps. I understand why, when Stefan thought of Garmishe-Partenkirchen, he kept sighing and had such a wistful expression.
Christiane leads me to an attic room with a balcony and tells me where I can find wine and good food.
With crucified Christ, smirking Mona Lisa, and a naked Cupid as company, I eat fresh trout, salad and baked potato. The waiter asks, “ Are you finished already.” I catch myself from answering, “With such a strangely juxtaposed company, not to mention the ceiling lamps, breast shaped with green nipples and the fleur de leis design torch between Christ and Mona Lisa….who wouldn’t finish their wine and food quickly??”
The gibbous moon is half up as I walk home. I must sleep now.
First Full Day
Tonight I ate with a wild boar. He was bronze, still wild though. Wild, as was the thumping of the rain on the awning, drowning out spoken words and periodically splooshing onto the cobblestones when awnings overflowed.An elderly Indian couple stood against a corrugated metal thief-proof door at the jewelry shop, mindless of lightening and thunder. A young boy ran through the rain to secure a large umbrella for his dad and small sister standing in the doorway. Waiters gathered cloth cushions while most of us continued eating, drinking, and enjoying the storm. The rain pounded maple leaves and whirly-gig seed pods against the white canvas roof. Loveliest of silhouettes.
This morning I headed to Partnachklamm Gorge and ended up making an ascent of the mighty Zutspige. As I looked for the Partnach bus, I realized that if there was a chance of sun anytime today, I should chance the mountain -- as the gorge is misty wet anyway. A trolley, bus, cable car, and then gondola aided my ascent.
Gone are the days when I climb mountain tops unaided or abetted.But then, I was in company of a whole slough of people who also got there the easy way -- to a three story complex on a mountain top. The gondola moved into its slot like a space pod attaching to the mother ship.
I would like to say that the Sierra match the Alps. But I can’t. My Sierra Nevada are, perhaps, a miniaturized version.The lush greenness below treeline amazes me.
The new green of deciduous larch, deeper, older green of fir, and lower -- oaks with a heavy understory of fern and herbaceous growth are interspersed with rocks covered in brown, orange, and green mosses and wildflowers. The dark dense forests melts into sheer rock cliffs, glaciers, avalanche shoots, and snow. Clouds swirl and form around the cable car and then later the restaurant at the top of the universe, only to dissipate a few minutes later.
Thunder clouds form and reform with piercing shafts of sun creating stark contrasts on cliff faces and ridgelines.
Below the deep green Eisee with small islands’ shallow waters shows the turquoise of glacial milk. A yellow band of pine pollen stretches the length of the lake looking like a peninsula.
Greenpeace kids climb to the cross on the top the Zugspitze and shout down to their friends. I and others walk across a moraine to a chapel planted on the mountain’s shoulder while soldiers on maneuvers wait among empty tables and benches outside the lower restaurant.
The cog train comes only every hour. Returning, the tunnel is twenty minutes of dark. A dark broken by the cog train lights and each car’s TV screens forcing unwanted short advertising films for the ‘park’. Films where snowboarders, about to lose their pants, slide off pipes or metal ramps turn180 degrees and land again in the snow. Advertisement for the restaurant at the top, for ski packages, for….a brief history film discusses building the tunnel and the early commercial ventures for tourism on the Zugspitze – it all started in 1928…actively anyway.
On the trolley going back, meadows are filled with farm sheds. Wooden buildings, log sheds, sheds for storing hay for the cows and sheep and some, now, for farm machinery. They lie scattered across the meadow, like ranchettes on 5 acre parcels. Here though, perhaps each farmer has one half hectare of meadow for hay growing.
Day Two -- Partnachklamm
Descriptors, photos, movies, sound recordings all fail. Awesome. In the true sense of the word. Overwhelming sound of water crashing through the narrow cleft, waterfalls streaming from cliff edges between the green of spring leaves, grasses, conifers, down, down to the water worn walls of the gorge. Walking through the dwarves’ tunnel grasping the cable along the wall because I can see only blackness. Roaring and a darkness broken then by the faint light from the next window chiseled into the tunnel wall -- window onto rushing, swirling waters. Parnachklamm. I could be heading to the mines or Moria. Emerald greens, and diamond water drops.
I keep my camera under my coat when I’m not trying and trying to capture a millionth of what I am seeing and hearing. Too much! I give up trying to capture the experience by camera or video.
Nothing can record the vibrations in the air, the humidity, cold water drops in my face, and hair, the feel of chiseled rock and smooth cold cable. My boots get wet. Walking through the gorge is similar in ways to combination caving, and rafting – only by foot.
I walk for more than three hours not counting the gondola ride to above the in above the gorge as a place to start my way in. Alpine fields, farm sheds, souvenir stores, homes, and Inns surround Partnachklamm. How can such a humanized landscape be so wild and so unnerving for someone afraid of dark or heights or the roar of water -- and so exhilarating for one who is not?
Evening Thoughts
It was still raining this morning. Then by ten the clouds lifted enough to see it snowed on the mountains last night. Cold today. I walked to the bahnhoff. Two young people suggested I try the city bus. I did and was taken to the 1936 Olympic ski stadium that hosts proud naked statues and behind the stadium, the ski jump waiting for this winters’ heavy snows.
Bavaria appears to be Catholic... What cultural markers could possibly lead me to that conclusion?
It’s been a long time since I walked home in the rain… coat zipped up over my chin, seeking dry spots under the overhanging roofs. Listening to leaves being hit by incessant drops, feeling the cold spatters on my forehead, running behind my glasses into my eyes. My boots leak. My coat doesn’t’ keep out the rain. I feel cold seeping and spreading up my forearm.
I know drinking wine and reading a novel are a way of helping suppress the awareness that of all the people in the restaurant, I am alone. A table of 8 friends behind me speaking quietly in German, A young American couple plot out tomorrows adventures using a guidebook and map at the table next to me. A family, with a toddler coughing croupily, and three friends sit by the window. All is subdued and polite. I read about betrayal and deceit, blind unswerving loyalty and newfound purpose (in the book my fun-sons gave me for Mother’s Day). I drink my Riesling and eat steak from Argentina and a baked potato probably grown in Bavaria.My life is good at this moment.
I guess I prefer the painting of a house of cards, stenciled rabbits around the room, deer horns and giant wooden hearts tied to the latticework with red and white gingham ribbons to the baroque decadency of Mona Lisa’s smirk and cupid’s navel and groin….maybe not. Still, a pleasant evening. Now back in my room, the rain has stopped.
The peaks that seem to rise from the meadow were visible as I headed down town. Mists obscured parts of them, but I could see the snow path zigzag chute to the summit. I understand where the poster of the paintings I have of my mountain and of the castle in the middle of the river in the cave could have come from. I’ve seen what could have been their inspirations today. I’m fortunate to have an opportunity at some point in my life to be teasing out the concepts of pattern, copy, and originations in my life. Now those posters of paintings of places will have a new layer of memory added to them.
