Cycling the Danube in Germany

on - 02/09/2018

I’ve made a bit of an error with finishing the writeup from my Black Sea bicycle tour last year. I’m finding I have lots of photos but not so many words to go alongside them. Posting as the holiday progresses is a vastly better way of tackling a travel blog. This post is quite long, so I’ve split up the cycle out of Germany to Switzerland into the next post.

From Austria it was straight over the border into the town of Passau in Germany. There wasn’t really anything to mark the change of country and it took another 10 minutes of cycling to realise that ‘oh the border was back there somewhere!’ Passau is my brother in law’s university town so we spent some time walking the narrow streets and enjoying the baroque architecture.

It was getting late when we left Passau so we camped a couple of miles from the city on the bank of the river. The river was really quiet the following day and in the evening we went for our customary swim. Thomas decided to take the challenge of swimming to the other side, he got about half way when the only boat we had seen all afternoon came along. I yelled at him to get out of the way and he quickly swam back.

We stopped off in the town of Straubing for a rest break and lunch.

I remember in our previous tour around the Baltic Sea I started off really wary of camping in public places, the first time it occurred to us I felt it was too risky and so we ended up in a £30 a night campsite on the coast. It feels odd to think how my attitude towards it has changed. In the photo below we were soaked through and cycled past this huge graveyard on a hill with a large meeting room in the middle. It was deserted so we decided to take shelter and wait for the weather to blow over, one hour turned into another and at some point, we decided to stay there. But not only stay, but also stay and sleep under the veranda of the building. A year ago that would have made me so nervous! Especially in Germany.

Somewhere in South West Germany, I was cycling along and suddenly really felt like a beer. It didn’t take long to realise the countryside stank of hops and tractors were harvesting the plants and taking them to a small farm in a nearby village where they sorted the hop from the stems.

It was another of those rainy days where we were both drenched and just wanted somewhere dry to camp (that didn’t cost money of course!). We were still cycling at 7pm when we found this bridge so we camped under it. In the morning there was a horrendous smell in the air and the only culprit was this place… ‘Sappi’. Just looked them up and they manufacture woodfibre. Not sure why it stank but it did.

The next evening we camped under another bridge, the ambience was a lot better though the weather was a lot worse.

The final bit of the tour through Germany before heading south was stopping at Sigmaringen castle. A beautiful castle until you see the hideous addition beneath the arch on the middle right.