Travel

Tassie Tango – The Brown Sign Boogie Part 4

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Strahan is the only port on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact it’s the only town of any significance on the west coast because if you go west from Tasmania, the first land fall is Argentina. So the weather has quite a long run-up before assaulting poor little Tassie. So why would anyone want to live here? I guess that’s one of the reasons the harshest penal colony in Australia’s colonial history was put on Sarah Island, a few miles away from Strahan in Macquarie Harbour. Now, with its infamous history well and truly behind it, it’s a picturesque little maritime town with terrible weather.

Strahan is also something of a holiday destination. When the CB and I lived in Zeehan (about 40km from Strahan) we were surprised (initially) to learn that some of the locals went to Strahan for their holidays. Some of them hadn’t been to the eastern side of Tassie and considered the north island of Australia to be “overseas”. Salt of the earth people but somewhat insular.

One of the country’s most famous rivers – the Gordon – empties into Macquarie Harbour which incidentally is 6 times as big as Sydney Harbour but has only a 60m wide access to the ocean hence the two lighthouses which attempted, not always successfully, to guide ships into and out of the harbour. Why you would attempt that at night is mystifying, but some did and suffered the consequences.

The Gordon is famous environmentally and by extension politically. You can look it up. Suffice to say it was almost dammed (not damned) but due to political intervention, wasn’t. So a boat trip to Hell’s Gates, the entrance to the harbour, and then down the Gordon was very much on the agenda. And they were serving booze from the get-go which was 9.00am once we were underway so the incentive to do an all day (or most day) tour was irresistible.

Hell’s Gates is very much as the name suggests. Having spent all of my working life in the mining industry I am here to tell you the people on the front of our 34m catamaran, when we passed through the Gates would have been required to wear life jackets, safety harnesses and hard-hats at least and no kids would have been allowed if a mine manager rather than a tour operator was running that boat. But the boat proprietors were obviously oblivious to the risks of having their clients flung to the deck or worse still, overboard as the boat bucked and tossed like a tasered kangaroo. Notwithstanding we all had a jolly good laugh afterwards then settled back for the trip to the Gordon River.

On our Gordon River cruise we had occasion to stop in the heritage area and do a 400m boardwalk through the impenetrable rain forest. While GF2 rushed off to find a spot to have a smoke in the strictly non-smoking dripping wet rain forest, GF1 was taking pictures of everything moss and fungus to add to her extensive photographic collection of such things, the size of which would fill a full set of Encyclopaedias Brittanica. I thought she would be the only person on the planet to engage in such activity. I was wrong. There are 50 or so others with similar interests and they were all on our boat.

Macquarie Harbour is also home to countless fish farms. All I remember about the operation of these things is the fish are the size of your little finger when introduced, are left for 12-18 months then when they are five or six kilos they’re sucked up by a pipe into a boat and despatched to your plate. Sucked up by a pipe – where are the vegans swimming out to these fish farms in the freezing water and chaining themselves to the easily accessible pipe infrastructures to protest this fish sucking. Surely this would be much more effective than invading an abattoir or a nicely temperate farm. Apparently not in the fairyland they occupy.

Tassie Tango – Doing the Brown Sign Boogie – Part 3

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The CB and I had ever so briefly been to Stanley many (many) years ago and it obviously never registered what a charming, picturesque place it is even if, like all other Tasmanian coastal towns it is exposed to elements which would have daunted the most intrepid of explorers.

I did most of the planning for this trip (after a suggestion from GF1) and up to now it’s been a resounding success which is just as well. Can you imagine (if you are a man) being in a car for hours on end with three disgruntled females. But I hadn’t expected the response to cute little Stanley. It was positively orgasmic. The place is full of neat, immaculately presented period houses and they all seem to have views to die for. As we were leaving yesterday, GF2 demanded the car be stopped so she could get out and buy a house. And then there’s The Nut, a large rock that sticks up out of the land (50%) and the sea (the other 50%) like a miniature Ayre’s Rock.

And there’s penguins. Back along the coast a few kilometres there’s a place called Penguin but their attempt to corner the region’s penguin driven tourist economy failed when word got out that there are penguins all along the coast. Common as bums they are, but they still generate the sort of reaction generally reserved for tiny babies and puppies. So we duly went down to the sea wall / boat ramp / wharf a couple of nights ago to watch and listen as the juvenile penguins whinged and whined for their food like so many tiny babies.

The old pub in Stanley was a welcome respite after a few hours in the car and for an hour or so, we were the only ones there. “How’s the serenity” one might say if one was in an iconic Australian movie or in a quiet (when the bloody jukebox was on recess) country pub. But eventually we were joined by other tourists and perhaps the odd local.

Now we’re all of the friendly persuasion and are quite happy to converse with those of a similar bent. Unfortunately GF1 inadvertently opened a conversation with a gentleman who had ignored the two women he was with but was happy to talk at us with a relent that would have done the ever persevering Wylie Coyote proud. I tried to do a Road Runner on him to shut him up by saying I was holidaying with my three wives and this was the one time of the year they are allowed out in public, but he was unphased. Admittedly my “wives” were wearing jeans and skirts rather than freedom sacks and we were in a pub and we were drinking so my attempt at cultural intervention failed miserably. I should have said I was a Mormon.

But back to The Nut which so dominates this place. There’s a chairlift that takes you to the top which never gets more than a few feet off the ground. GF1 who doesn’t like heights, figured this was her kind of chairlift after the somewhat more challenging experience of the largest single span for a chairlift in the world over the Cataract Gorge in Launceston. During the 2km circumnavigation of the top of The Nut the clouds and rain moved in. This was more like the Tasmania we knew and loved in our three year Tasmanian sojourn many years ago.

Tassie Tango – Doing the Brown Sign Boogie – Part 2

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Up to last week, in my long(ish) and mostly satisfying life I estimate I had seen around four sea horses. This rather obvious deficiency was spectacularly righted when GF1 insisted we visit the sea horse farm at Beauty Point north of Launceston. Incidentally, and I digress, there was a general complaint among my female travelling companions regarding the fact that most if not all things in this part of the world are named after men. Then I pointed out that Beauty Point is in fact named after a female….cow. Hurt feelings were not assuaged I’m afraid.

Anyway I am now an expert on the reproductive ins and outs (if you’ll excuse the expression) of the seahorse. I know there are 54 species of seahorse of which 23 are in Australia. I’ve seen them in their thousands and they are exported to aquariums all over the world. I’ve even held one and let it twirl its long tail round my finger. But I still don’t know what you call a tank full of sea horses – a herd, a school, a posse, maybe a saddle of sea horses.

And who knew there were things such as hand fish which look like a miniature version of Thing from The Adams Family. They are almost extinct and of one species there are estimated to be only 70 adults left in the world, all of them in the Derwent River. When they sit on the river bed and don’t move much you’d think that would be an open invitation to predators to partake of the hand fish buffet. So it’s not surprising there aren’t many left.

Up to now the trip’s been mostly about animals (Tasmanian Devils, platypuses (platipi?), echidnas (hello Randall you cute little three legged critter), kangaroos, the aforementioned sea horses, wombats and assorted bird and snakes. Oh, and bridges – Richmond Bridge, Batman Bridge and the Hobart bridge that was hit by a barge many years ago, collapsing one of the spans. I had the t-shirt to prove it which in hindsight was a bit morbid and insensitive because there were fatalities. But we joke about everything provided there has been a respectable interval between tragedy and comedy. Why were the Japanese crying poor after the Fukushima tsunami. I saw one house with eight cars and four boats in the driveway. See what I mean.

Time to switch from animal to mineral and The Nut at Stanley.

Tassie Tango – Doing the Brown Sign Boogie – Part 1

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I could have started this travel saga by saying that I don’t know how or why I allowed myself to be talked into it and you would be none the wiser. But that would be disingenuous. I actually volunteered to embark on a 10 day holiday with three women. Admittedly one is the child bride and the other two, GF1 and GF2, are good friends who I’ve worked with and socialised with for many years so it won’t be heaven or hell but it will be a lot of fun

We’re now four days in and I haven’t had a chance to add to this because the days have been as packed as a porn stars jocks. And we’ve pretty much been left to our own devices as it’s Easter and Tasmania is closed apart from the touristy stuff. So driving has been quite leisurely and just as well because we didn’t want to be snapped by one of the four speed cameras in Hobart, the locations of which the hire car lady kindly revealed. I won’t reveal the name of the hire car company or the authorities may send Constable Dan Adams of Liawenee after her. That would give him something to do because the town he patrols has a grand total of no people apart from him. It’s that sort of public servant to public ratio which puts Tassie in the same mendicant status as Greece and California.

Politeness is a state-wide trait which makes the people a delight to interact with. We found the only French waiter who has been privileged enough to be given a working visa to wait tables in restaurants in Tasmania. His countrymen (and women presumably) would be permitted to scowl at diners in the less courteous parts of Melbourne and most of the city nosheries in Sydney, but not here because of the politeness directive. Luigi, as we christened him (Italian I know, but we’re on vacation so the normal rules don’t apply) was the Manuel (Spanish I know etc etc) of Hobart – bumbling, eager to please to the point of obsequiousness and somewhat forgetful. We ordered four entrees and four mains. Three entrees arrived together and three mains arrived together. A 75% strike rate in some activities, baseball for example, would be exceptional. When it comes to delivering meals in a high end restaurant it’s a 13 on the par 3 12th at Augusta National. But as soon as he was reminded in a very non-Fawlty Towers way, I might add, he immediately offered the missing meals free of charge. This offer was obviously accepted. That meant an extra 60 bucks for booze so were we happy – bet your life we were.

Just in case you were wondering about the brown sign reference, tourist signs are brown and GF1 was running shotgun on them. There are millions of them even in a tiny place like this so while we didn’t check them all out we did our share.

The Hollies – a Tribute to Time Served

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The child bride and I took off for the Gold Coast on Thursday. The last time we went, to see Status Quo (reported on here), we hadn’t planned the most efficient route and therefore encountered about 47 red lights. This time we did it right which is just as well because the CB drove. I’ve been feeling like death warmed up since Wednesday or as an old boss of mine used to say “half fucked and let go”.

But I wasn’t going to let that prevent us from seeing the Hollies so, as I said, the CB drove. Now I’m not going to comment on her driving because we are safely back at home now. Suffice to say, I don’t tail-gate, I don’t lane-hop and I manage to keep my road rage more or less under control. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, as a great philosopher once said.

We’ve been lucky enough to see most of our musical heroes from our yoof so while it was great to see the Hollies last night, I’m sure there’ll be other opportunities because they tour relentlessly. They are probably the longest surviving band in history having performed and toured every year since the formative year of 1962 and the eventual settlement of most of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame line-up in 1963. Bobby Elliot and Tony Hicks have been with the band since 1963 – no hiatuses (hiati?), no taking a year off to pursue individual projects. Now that’s stamina. Actually, we may not get to see them here again because as you can calculate, those two are getting on a bit.

After performing Bus Stop, Carrie Anne, He Ain’t Heavy etc etc etc for all of those years you’d expect them to be pretty tight. Of the other four band members, two have been there almost 30 years and the other two 15 years. So they are able to reproduce that typical sound. Peter Howarth, the lead singer said some heckler in the audience at a previous concert yelled out “I didn’t expect you to be this good”. That sound was honed back in the 60’s with some rather accomplished session musicians – how about Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Elton John.

And when they came on stage at the start, they were all dressed in white shirt, black tie, black trousers and shiny black shoes. The drummer had his top button undone and his tie was all over the place but that’s drummers for you. I haven’t seen performance uniforms like that since I went to see the Halle Orchestra in Manchester in 1973.

The crowd was the Status Quo crowd and the Eagles crowd – SKI’s (spending the kid’s inheritance), COB’s (cashed up bogans), GLAM’s (greying, leisured, affluent, married) and GOFER’s (genial old farts enjoying retirement). We were six rows from the front so I’m speculating on those who were behind up but I’m pretty confident in my CUOA (compulsive use of acronyms).

So as I said, I’ve not been well, in fact I’m not well now so this post is not quite as hilariously funny and irreverent as previous ones. The concert was a welcome distraction but I hit the wall a few hours later and woke up at 4.30am thinking I was sleeping on the inside of a water bed. Hopefully a course of antibiotics will do the trick. Personally, I think it was the mouthful of bacteria I experienced during a tooth extraction two weeks ago. Maybe the course of antibiotics that followed didn’t complete the job. Let’s hope (well you don’t have to but I certainly do) this course does the trick.

It’s all I can do to tap on these keys at the moment but it just goes to show – if the desire and incentive are there, adrenaline will get you though.

Flat Out in Holland

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I’ve just spent a few days in Holland. If John Denver was still around he’d hate the place. Searching for a Rocky Mountain High (the Rocky Mountain bit, not the high bit – that’s everywhere) here would be like looking for a massage with a happy ending at a Puritan League meeting. The only hills here are inverted – when you go down into a tunnel and come up and out the other side.

I got here on Finnair, which I’ve never used before. After decades of travel it’s unusual for me to experience a new (to me) airline despite the fact that new airlines are springing up all over the place all of the time. Perhaps that’s because you’d avoid most of the new budget outfits like the plague.

But Finnair was great. One disappointment, if you could call it that, was that the cabin crew in the part of the plane I was in were all Asian (bogus racism alert!!!!!!). We did leave from Singapore so maybe it was the local crew but I expected at least one or two cool blondes. But I’m not complaining. Pick an Asian airline, any one – Cathay Pacific, Singapore, Malaysian, Korean Air etc – and all of their people are guaranteed to know the difference between offering a service and being your servant. That can’t be said about certain Australian, US and British airlines, some of whose fussbudgets would prefer to throw that drink in your lap as serve it to you with a smile (which should always be reciprocated – free piece of advice there). But in this case it could certainly be said about Finnair.

We landed in Helsinki on the way to Amsterdam and I saw snow for the first time in years. I also wore a coat and a scarf when I got off the plane there and later in Amsterdam also for the first time in years. The first day in Holland was bitterly cold. The sort or cold where you could snap off an ear and not feel a thing. I was reminded of the last time the CB and I were in Europe in winter on vacation and vowed and declared never to do it again. This was business though so I guess it didn’t count. And it was November so not officially winter unless the EU has redefined the seasons in accordance with some transgender, marriage equality, climate change directive from the UN to spite the Brits because of Brexit. Or something.

Like another flat place we visited recently – Denmark – there seem to be more bicycles than cars, especially in and around the town centres. I was in Haarlem and there were bike lanes everywhere. For the uninitiated this is a real hazard and the bells don’t help because they can be ringing all around you or not at all as the case may be. When my colleagues and I ventured outside we were constantly hauling each other out of the way of whispering, wurring, scarf trailing missiles. It was like a practice run for the future world of electric cars. They’ll have to be fitted with diesel engines so we can hear them coming.

On my way home it was Finnair again to Helsinki then on to Hong Kong then Brisbane. I had been fortunate in that my contracted employer has stumped up for biz class so I settled into my cubicle, contemplating the glass of Perrier (champagne, not water) on my little side table and hoped the bunch of Australian women who were screeching and cackling on the other side of the cabin didn’t do something really embarrassing that reflected badly on me. My inner snob is emerging; I’m a very intolerant traveller. By all means get pissed, I do it all the time, but leave the bogan on the cruise you just got off or wherever it is you’ve been.

Shit, I didn’t think I had that level of nastiness in me. Must be because I am currently immersed in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir. The old adage “the word is mightier than the sword” was written for him although he would have considered it trite and a cliché despite the fact that his word-sword and especially his spoken words were uncompromisingly and ruthlessly rapier sharp. He quotes William Safire as saying “clichés should be avoided like the plague”. Quite so. I use present tense in the previous sentence because it’s in his book and past tense in the sentence before that because tragically, he is no longer with us. But he is preserved forever in print and in the formaldehyde of YouTube.

You can’t complain about lie flat seats these days….but I’m going to. As I said previously, Finnair is great but, and this is really pushing it, you really need to lie on your right side because the space where your feet go sort of curves to the right. So if you lie on your left side you’re feet are against the curve and it’s like having your shoes on the wrong feet because the end bit is rather narrow. But this is Venezuelan President-for-life, Nicholas Maduro complaining that his steak is medium when it should be well-done so I shall shut up.

If anything of interest was going to happen between Helsinki and Brisbane, I would have let you know.

It didn’t.

 

Rheinube River Ramble Part 12 – Random Observations

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After a month in Europe, long flights home and a decent night’s sleep, the CB and I are back in the land of the living. Here are a few final thoughts, in no particular order, to wrap things up.

In Nuremberg we had a look at the place where Hitler conducted his rallies and made those infamous fist waving speeches to the then adoring masses. It’s been preserved so we never forget what went on there. As a music lover I like the idea that it’s now used for rock concerts. I don’t know if Iron Maiden have performed there but seeing Bruce Dickinson in his redcoat tunic waving the Union Jack while singing The Trooper and leaping about in the spot where Hitler once stood appeals to my irony gene.

We saw numerous castles on our travels. I love castles. Inverlochy Castle in Scotland was used for protection back in the 13th century. This involves fighting. I am photographing the defensive capabilities of the castle – the moat, the battlements, the walls, the ingenious ways they had in those days to trap or kill attackers. The CB is photographing bluebells growing out of the walls.

I’ve previously reported in Widows and Walking Sticks and other previous posts that we have been travelling with a bunch who are about a generation removed from us – up, not down. And there are a lot of single ladies amongst them. So while Cuz1 and I have been focussed on getting the next round in, Cuz2 and the CB have been more concerned with who’s doing what to whom. A bit crude I know but when we are talking about an average age of about 80 it takes on a whole new dimension. They had the male and female tour guides sorted on day one despite a left-field intervention from another of my cousins in Vienna which I won’t outline here but some of the other “connections” were ……… I don’t know why I’m talking about this and will stop immediately.

We’ve encountered many, many famous people on our travels this past month ranging from Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome and philosopher extraordinaire to Ferenc Puskas, Hungary’s and one of the world’s most famous footballers who was given a cathedral burial. We saw Oscar Schindler and Ralph Wallenberg, Gothe and Richard the Lionheart. There was Zsa Zsa Gabor and Conrad Hilton and various Habsburg kings and queens. We caught up with Mozart, Beethoven, the various Strausses, Haydn and Schubert in Vienna and Richard Wagner in Germany. It seemed like every town, big or small, had a claim to fame usually involving a figure from the history books. And that’s a big reason why the CB and I love visiting Europe.

Of course getting from Aus to Europe can be a pain and readers of one of the earlier Rheinube episodes will be aware that British Airways fell rather dramatically in my estimation when they put the CB and I in the middle two seats of the four in a 2-4-2 configuration. They redeemed themselves by giving us an aisle seat and a middle seat with no one in the other middle seat coming back the other way. It was looking dodgy there for a while BA.

Then when we showed our boarding passes at the Qantas lounge in Singapore the nice Qantas gentleman said they had different boarding passes for us and went to consult with a colleague. They were different but not in the way I hoped and at this point expected. Rather than an upgrade, they were switched from paper to cardboard and the seat numbers didn’t change. Hoo-bloody-ray. Maybe Alan Joyce knows I think he’s a social justice warrior wanker who should confine himself to running an airline when wearing his Qantas hat. I’m a Qantas shareholder and he doesn’t speak for me when he says Qantas believes this or Qantas believes that (insert favourite lefty cause).

And finally we were very fortunate to have travelled with such fun loving, and booze loving companions in Cuz1 and Cuz2. When intentions (having a good time mainly) are perfectly aligned you can’t go wrong. Any hint of disunity prior to departure however will be magnified especially in the close confines of a boat or a coach as someone I know recently discovered. Not us. We had a blast and intend doing it again and if you hang around long enough and I don’t get sick of doing this you’ll read about it here first.

The Rheinube River Ramble Part 11

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Well Budapest, what can I say? What a wonderful place. You are now my official favourite city. Take an insomnia pill New York. Wipe that sanctimonious smirk off your face Paris. Turn off that phone Hong Kong. There’s a new kid in town.

Vienna was inspiring with its beautiful palaces and it’s magical, musical past. But it’s flat and organised. A touch of dishevelment and hints of a more “colourful” past plus a few hills make for greater interest. Vienna certainly has interesting history being front and centre with Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed not long after by it’s capitulation to nazism. And it’s suburbs are as graffitied as any other city. But Budapest is coming out of something no city, no country, no people should be made to suffer and the transition is incomplete but the potential is obvious. Maybe the same can be said for Bucharest and Sofia and any number of places which experienced the same cold, dead-hand of totalitarianism, but today we are focussing on Budapest.

Budapest has the Danube. Many places have the Danube as it’s Europe’s second longest river behind the Volga which is entirely in Russia so doesn’t really count. And the best place to showcase a city from, in my humble opinion, is a river and if that river happens to be the Danube then all the better. Many of Budapest’s most outstanding landmarks are visible in all of their glory from the river. And there are plenty of them which you can read about in any number of books and blogs, but not this one.

Our tour guide advised us that the happiest day in Budapest’s long history (they celebrated 1000 years in 1896) was the day in 1991 when the Soviet army left. Then the hard work began because what hadn’t been trashed had been neglected to a criminal extent. Restoration work is proceeding apace but unfortunately the economy hasn’t progressed since the communists were kicked out, to the extent that sufficient funds are available to restore everything. So you get this strange phenomenon of a street of beautifully restored palaces and five story town houses interspersed with potentially and previously beautiful buildings sporting crumbling masonry, exposed bricks and collapsing facades. And they are filthy.

Now, the majority of restoration work is done as a condition of sale of the particular building. So if a hotel chain or a bank or any other business buys a run-down building, they are required to do the restoration themselves, in some cases it would appear, simply to make them habitable. How’s that, you millennial, socialist weenies? Capitalism is cleaning up the mess your communist fellow-travellers left when they scuttled back to their mythical land of fairness and equality where everyone lives happily ever after.

Meanwhile back in the real world you can still see bullet holes from World War 2 and more recently from the uprising of 1956 when the plucky Magyars tried to toss out the Soviets only to be crushed. A small part of this was reenacted in the pool at the Melbourne Olympics when Hungary played the Soviet Union in water polo – the “Blood in the Water” match won by Hungary 4-0.

These are the reasons why Budapest is such a wonderful place. It has a magnificent smorgasbord of attractions, it has reminders of its tragic past and it is demonstrating its determination to eradicate, but not forget that past.

The Rheinube River Ramble Part 10

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Meal times have generally resembled reenactments of the Battle of Agincourt with sharpened elbows and strategically positioned hips replacing long bows and cavalry. Now that we are in a hotel in Vienna instead of on the boat it’s even more so. This hotel doesn’t seem to check or even care who comes in for breakfast. People just seem to wander in off the street. Consequently the buffet is an ugly free-for-all of epic proportions.

This is in complete contrast, I might add, to the incredible elegance of the city centre, the focus of architectural splendour and more statues than you can imagine. I’ve commented on this previously but it’s worth repeating. Comparing what the artisans of the Renaissance and Baroque and other creative periods of relatively recent history turned out, with the “art” our pampered luvvies produce isn’t chalk and cheese. It’s the Sistine Chapel and finger painting.

I’ve always been more sport than art but will give credit where credit’s due. I can appreciate talent and creativity and I kind of like the idea of a sculptor’s life work and centuries-lasting legacy being half a dozen statues adorning a gob-smackingly splendid palace.

Speaking of legacies, Vienna is like many European cities which have retained or rebuilt their historical legacy. Various wars, not least World War 2, have conspired to destroy it but the good burghers of Vienna and countless other places across Europe have toiled to faithfully rebuild and replicate what was destroyed with spectacularly successful results. If only that hard work, dedication and vision could be replicated in the management of …….. well, everything these days. Making sure the stones of St Stephen’s Cathedral were put back in the right order was a politically correct – free process I expect.

These days our competitive nature is channeled into sport and politics and diving for the last croissant. Centuries ago the peasantry were competing for clean water and life beyond the next bout of hand-to-hand combat. The aristocracy however were in the death-grip of a my palace is bigger than your palace construct-a-thon. Because of this we have good reason (amongst others) to visit Vienna and Budapest and Paris and St Petersburg and London. Spending your money on buildings rather than swords allowed the people to eat and the men to not die even more prematurely and that’s got to be a good thing even if more could have been spent on “elf” and “edumacation” as every good wealth redistributor will tell you.

We just crossed the border into Hungary. There’s a lot to admire about the Hungarians in the current open-border craziness that Frau Merkel and her EU co-conspirators have inflicted on all of continental Europe. And it appears there’s an element of rat cunning flowing through their stoic patriotism. We made a comfort stop at a services place on the highway to Budapest and discovered that it cost a euro to use the convenience. After the complaining subsided, I read the fine print on the ticket the machine spits out after you insert your money. Most people don’t even see this ticket emerge or ignore it but it is redeemable for one euro if you buy something in the shop. How is that? A toilet driven economy.

The Rheinube River Ramble Part 9 – Widows and Walking Sticks

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A lot of people got off the boat and a lot less got on in Nuremberg and apart from Cuz1, Cuz2, the CB and me, most of our shipmates are now single women or men with walking impediments. The single women are not reflective of a Contiki tour, I might add. They are more your “grab a granny” at the local disco. Actually, that’s a real stretch as well. But some of them drink a lot and laugh a lot – enough said.

There’s something fundamentally different about the south of Germany compared with the north. It took me a while to put my finger on it and the hot weather should have provided a clue. The CB and I have been to northern Germany and I have previously commented on the plethora of windmills littering the landscape like so much sewerage in a mediaeval river. Down here there aren’t anywhere near as many. A good start. But thousands of acres of perfectly good farming land are coated with environmentally poisonous solar panels. We’ve heard tour guides say old (very old in many cases) buildings had to be protected from acid rain and the Danube flooding Passau in 2013 was due to global warming therefore renewable energy blah blah blah and it’s probably Trump’s fault. I didn’t have the heart to ask him what caused the even bigger flood in 1501. Anyway we won’t go down that well worn path until next time.

Unfortunately the Danube River is about 3 metres below where it usually is (and about 16 metres below where it was in 1501) so none of the river boats or cargo barges are running in the Passau / Vienna region. There are 120 stuck at one end and 140 at the other end so we are coaching it to Vienna then on to Budapest. Obviously global warming hasn’t been as bad this year as it was in 2013 if you consider rain to be the key. If sunshine is the key it’s climate change not global warming and this year has been worse than 2013, I think (couldn’t help myself). No point complaining and Saga, the travel company, has done a sterling job re-jigging the itinerary.

It wasn’t what we signed up for but Vienna and Budapest are the last two stops and the highlights of the trip for all four of us. Not everyone feels the same however. Remember the opening line of Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch – one of the most iconic comedy routines in history – “I wish to register a complaint”? Well some people can’t help themselves and if the Parrot Sketch was written today it would be a public service broadcast.

The other unfortunate thing about missing the last four or five days of cruising is that it was to be through the best scenery – the bits they show on the TV ads where fairy tale castles are perched on Madonna’s bra – shaped mountains. Again, Saga has compensated for this by driving us through or to the towns we would have sailed through. So we got to have lunch next to what’s left of the castle Richard the Lionheart was locked up in in 1192 in Durnstein. He would have had a great view through his dungeon slit though.