A Danube Journey Day 7: Regensburg and the Danube Gorge

There is talk of life after the ship. Yesterday we were given instructions by our tour leader about what will happen on when we disembark and are bussed to Prague: something about orange ribbons for this group and yellow ribbons for the other.... No doubt it will all become clear when the time comes. At breakfast guests are discussing the experience and comparing the Danube with other river cruises they have done. Our conversation partners think this ship is second to none, but have reservations about the river itself. They found their Rhine cruise more rewarding because, they say, there is more of interest to enjoy on the banks, and more traffic on the river itself than on the Danube. 'Those long boring stretches of forest - the Danube is a plain Jane among rivers compared to the Rhine' says one.

Meanwhile, the ship has sailed on through the night towards Regensburg. We are at the northernmost point on the Danube. We pass the huge folly called Valhalla, a copy of the Parthenon of Athens transplanted to the north shore of the Danube. I break away from breakfast to photograph it from a cold and rainy top deck. Its white marble gleams incongruously amid the lush dripping vegetation. But it creates a nice undulating reflection in the water which may prove worth getting damp for. 

This old imperial city escaped destruction in the war, so it has one of the best medieval town centres in Germany. We are moored downstream of the famous old bridge, but it's wreathed with scaffolding while repairs are carried out. So we won't get the famous view back from the bridge to the towers and spires of the city. I have worked out a circular walking tour (saves €18 on the official one) so we set off to begin at the Cathedral.

The Dom is an exquisite building. Its twin open work gothic spires are very German: echoes of Ulm, Cologne and Strasbourg. It is largely untouched by the Baroque embellishments you come to expect in Bavaria. In a crypt, Romanesque foundations and a couple of beautiful piers survive. The nave's noble proportions create a sense of peacefulness and harmony: you don't want to speak aloud in this holy environment. The medieval stained glass is outstanding. At the west end, in the centre of the nave, a huge bronze depicts a 19th century bishop kneeling in front of the crucifix, in itself perhaps a bit too rhetorical in taste, but effective in suggesting a sense of scale in this soaring gothic space. 

What moves us most is a small rough sculpture on the wall near the west door. It shows two women embracing, one very pregnant. The kiss on the lips is an audacious but endearing way of expressing the love of these two women, who must be the Blessed Virgin and her cousin Elizabeth at the Visitation. This naive but charming sculpture looks medieval to me, but who can tell? It is in the darkest corner of the building, so impossible to photograph without a tripod, though I try to steady the camera against the angle of a pier opposite. But a troupe of school children passes by, and I abandon the attempt. The memory will be enough.

Outside the Dom, a big stage is being erected. This is for the Katholischen Tag, a weekend of church-based activities inspired by the Berlin Kirchentag. We walk on into the heart of the Altstadt. By the Lutheran parish church we buy figs from a market stall. We visit another church, St Emmeram's, an abbey church at the core of a cluster of former monastic buildings that are now museums. This fascinating building has work of every age from early medieval to Baroque, including a beautiful Romanesque crypt. Then to the so-called 'Scottish Church', founded by Irish missionaries at the time of Columbanus. It has an amazing Romanesque North door, now glassed in to preserve it from erosion by wind and weather. 

It is a joy to roam the streets of the old city. As we reach the river again, we come across another medieval church dedicated to St Oswald. It is a pity that it's locked: we would love to know whether this is our Northumbrian Oswald or some other. A streetside Google search provides the answer and a lot more information besides. This is indeed our saint whose head lies interred with Cuthbert in the shrine at Durham Cathedral. It appears that alone among the North Saxon saints, he had a following in continental Europe in the Middle Ages. This is not principally because he instigated and promoted the Christian mission to Northumbria, but on account of his holy, chivalrous life which became an emblem of how a Christian knight should behave. In the brutalised era of the crusades, the memory of such a saint was evidently treasured. In Regensburg Cathedral, one of the medieval windows shows him feeding the poor in an episode related by Bede. 

The afternoon sees us on the coach for Kelheim. On the way we pass the house belonging to Pope Benedict XVI. As Joseph Ratzinger, he was a professor of theology at Regensburg. The coach slows to a pious crawl as our guide (an observant catholic) tells us reverently about it. It is now a museum devoted to his papacy. We walk through the undistinguished town and are regaled with the achievements of Bavarian King Ludwig I whose statue we pass. My memory of Bavarian history is sketchy, and I am prone to confuse this Ludwig with the mad Wagnerite of Neuschwanstein, a mistake our guide warns us severely not to make. 

This is the highest point at which the Danube is navigable by big ships like ours. So we board a smaller vessel to sail up the Danube Gorge. On the cliff top Ludwig I's monument to Bavarian freedom dominates. It commemorates the casting off of the yoke of Napoleon, but as one writer wittily observes, it resembles nothing so much as a carved gasometer. The river gorge is impressive, though we have to wrap up warmly as a fierce wind is blowing down it. The Danube is forced between high limestone cliffs in a narrow defile whose rapids, and bandits, made this a treacherous stretch of river for sailors bringing goods downstream to sell in the markets of Regensburg. A Franciscan hermitage is cut into the rock, a fitting place of prayer at a dangerous place. A small statue of the watery martyr St John Nepomuk stands alone on the rock face cutting a strangely comforting profile. Then the boat rounds a bend, the cliffs recede and we enjoy our first sight of the Weltenberg Monastery.

It is the oldest monastic site in Bavaria, founded like the Cathedral in Regensburg in the age of the Irish monks like Columbanus. These well-travelled men knew about the Egyptian desert monks and modelled their own religious practices on theirs. And while the Baroque buildings of Weltenberg are a world away from the desert hermits, the riverine site reminds me strongly of hermitages I have seen by the wadis of the Middle East. The rain starts to come down. Inside the courtyard, the scene is more like a bear garden than a monastery. A cafe under canvas is busy with large throngs of visitors. The place's claim to fame is that it brews its version of brown ale and has done this longer than any other monastic brewery. 

We head for the church. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. But then the extraordinary splendour of this building begins to be revealed. It is one of the best Baroque churches in Germany, created for the Benedictines by the Asam brothers who designed the more famous Asamkirche in Munich. One was a sculptor, the other a painter. The church is an ellipse with a small narthex at one end and the altar at the other. It is dedicated to St George whose colourful legend has fed to the full the imagination of the artists. This church is a perfect theatre, a drama of Ecclesia Triumphans, as we were reminded in a painting on the ceiling where we came in. But it's also a theatre of the soul, and in the exuberant profusion of sculpture and painting the message is the same: take religion to heart, listen, hear, obey, and let this foretaste of heaven inspire you to live in preparation for it. 

Our guide is good at explaining the complex symbolic world of this church but it needs longer than 20 minutes to do justice to it. The rain is unremitting. The group is despondent: it has forgotten what rain is like. We had expected to see more of the monastery than just the church, fine though it is. But apart from the museum and the shop, this appears to be the Weltenburg experience. Everyone heads for the tea tent. We joke with our guides about the English weather. I go back to the church.  Another English-speaking group has arrived so I listen to their guide and notice how good the acoustic in this building is. She starts with a joke that I can't believe I've never heard before. What Saint is always depicted with his mother in law? St George of course. But I have to think about it for a second.

I try to capture the marvellous trompe l'oeil effect the artists have created on the cupola above my head. Only it isn't a cupola at all: the ceiling is almost flat. One of the Asam brothers is shown leaning over the rim smiling down at us as from a distant balcony. It's pure magical realism. But it's likely that my snap-shot (which I won't dignify with the title of photograph - it's done in too much haste) will flatten out the curvature that has been so carefully contrived in this illusion. And that prompts the further question about this brilliant but seductive art. What is truth, and what is illusion? I want to say that Baroque tells lies for the truth's sake - like all art, of course, but there is something particularly blatant about the way Baroque does it. Romanesque and gothic seem more truthful, somehow, because their piers, arcades and vaults disclose their structural principles - and yet a great Romanesque space like Durham Cathedral still contrives to make itself look bigger than it really is. It's not just a question of the aesthetic. When we're talking about church architecture, it's fundamentally a matter of theology and spirituality. It would take a Von Balthazar to do it justice. But here is a note to self: research the theology of Baroque when you get home. Try to understand the principles on which St Paul's Cathedral is built, for there are illusions a plenty in that greatest of English Baroque churches. 

The ship is waiting for us at the entrance to the Rhine-Main-Donau canal. The original canal was an ambitious 19th century project deigned to allow cargo to be transported by water all the way from the North Sea to the Black Sea. But the narrow canal was unusable by the turn of the 20th century. The Nazis gave Europe her first motorways, and they also had ambitions to build a new canal across the watershed of Europe. It was only in the 1990s that the project was completed, a considerable engineering feat given the physical geography it had to traverse. So here is where we bid farewell to the Danube. The ship heads through the first lock less than a mile from the canal mouth. It's time for the farewell gala reception and dinner. The ship's crew are brought out one by one to be loudly applauded, and it is true that from bridge to galley, they have been outstanding. We say farewell to our fellow-passengers lucky enough to be cruising all the way to Amsterdam. Tomorrow we shall be back on dry land and head for Prague.

A Danube Journey Day 4: Vienna

Buses will take us into Vienna. This tour is included in the cruise, which means that most people will be doing it. While we wait, there is talk about the food on board; not everything is to everyone's satisfaction. Maybe these are hardened cruise-cognoscenti. We are surprised: to us, everything seems pretty good. The meals are ample, with plenty of healthy options. Just for the record: there is coffee and pastries for early risers, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and sandwiches, dinner and late night collations. But as I noticed yesterday, the normalising of this on-board total community makes us pay attention to the immediate and give it precedence over everything else. That includes the rhythm of meal times. I've often heard it said that food becomes an obsession when there is too little of it. The same is true when there is too much: it punctuates the day in a way that dominates life, perhaps because on a cruise boat, between excursions, there is not a lot to do but think about the next meal. Daily life is as ritualised as a Benedictine monastery. And even the excursions have something of a ritualised quality about them. Duty must be done: the key sites glimpsed (I don't say visited), the key photos taken as evidence that obligation was fulfilled; but there must not be too much of it. Tour companies understand exactly how much heritage, art and history the English tourist will put up with, and never exceed it by a hairbreadth.

We have worked out a tactic for excursions. Most of our fellow cruisers are ready ahead of time and hasten to get on the buses. But we have discovered that if we wait for the last bus of 3 or 4, it is inevitably less than half full.  This makes for a more pleasant journey and a more relaxed sightseeing group, easier to control in a crowded city centre. 

But 'doing' a city like Vienna in under 3 hours is a challenge. How does a leader try to do something intelligent in that absurdly brief time? I can't help thinking that visitors ought to be stretched a little more on trips like this, at least enough for us to feel we've earned the next meal. Most of all, it's a discourtesy to the great city herself. I wonder what value we place on heritage if this is the best effort we can achieve. True, our guide, whose day-job is to create theatre sets and who evidently loves this city, tells us a lot about Vienna's sublime architecture, stops frequently to point out who designed or lived in this building or that, then laughs apologetically and says that of course this wasn't part of the tour. Apart from his dismissive take on religion, he is trying to convey something of the rich complexity of this city, perhaps even hinting at the shadow that lies somewhere near its heart. But it can't be done in the time. And it is lost on most of us who inhabit simpler worlds untroubled by Freud and psychoanalysis, the paradoxes of baroque, the decay of the imperial dream and the Viennese' beautiful death-wish. 

We are shown the site of the house where Mozart lived at the end of his life. A Masonic hall is almost opposite (our guide doesn't mention The Magic Flute but its Masonic theme surely owes something to the dying composer's near neighbour). At the Cathedral, we are given 10 minutes inside, and that too is a concession, 'not part of the tour'. We walk through the Hofburg, have a minute or two on the Habsburgs, mention the Spanish Riding School and nod in the direction of Empress Maria Theresa.  The highlight of the morning may prove to have been Kaffee und Kuchen at the Café Central. Enjoyable, but it is not as if anyone is hungry for Viennese chocolate cake or Apfelstrudel. 

After a brief morning's excitements in Vienna, life on board settles back into its gentle routine. There is an ice-cream tea to look forward to, and Norman our Geordie entertainer is organising sports-lite on deck. There are two locks to navigate, and a thundery shower causes a frisson of excited comment. The top deck where positions had been taken up in the sunshine empties. I have it all to myself and try and capture the gorgeous skyscapes on my camera. 

Cue excursus on cruising and photography. The light is marvellous, as every water-borne painter and photographer knows. 'Luminous' is a cliché but there isn't a better word. Sky and water make an unbeatable combination, and I am keen to do it justice. The great thing is that the gentle movement of the boat allows compositions to take shape on front of your very eyes (I mean the viewfinder). You observe some feature in the landscape - an onion-shaped church tower against a forested background, a hill-top castle, the uncompromising starkness of a lock - and allow different compositions to settle in the viewfinder as the perspective slowly changes. You can take a dozen images from the same spot, see which has worked best and delete the rest.

I am especially aware of this today as we glide past the Benedictine monastery of Klosterneuberg. It is one of famous baroque abbeys of Austria, like Melk which we shall visit later. Alongside is the even more famous palace. The twin spires of the Abbey and the palace's green copper domes can be seen up and downstream for many miles. But unfortunately (for photographers on cruise ships), the course of the river was changed when it was dredged to allow big-ship navigation in the industrial era, and this means that when the monastery is at its nearest it can only just be glimpsed through a screen of trees. You have to pick your moment if you want a shot of the twin spires. So I gauge likely gaps in the canopy, and manage to get some images. They are not masterpieces, but maybe one will show well enough when uploaded to the computer. 

Dinner will be soon. This is the cue for a good moment on the top deck. It quickly empties again as our travelling companions disappear below deck to prepare for this high point of the day. I am left, as I imagine, quite alone. But then I see that there is an elderly woman leaning over the starboard side gazing into the distance. The air is warm and calm, and the only sounds are the lapping of the river against the bows, and the bird song that breaks out from time to time. I do not think I had noticed her before today. I am touched by her stillness and her contemplative way of looking. I am moved to photograph her without her knowing, and then feel that some social contact is called for as a sort of surrogate permission. 

She is travelling alone, she says, because she prefers solitude. She is enjoying the new experiences, the sights and sounds of the cruise but thinks it is too easy to chatter about nothing at all, collapse into mental and spiritual indolence encouraged by too much to eat and a surfeit of needless wallpaper music. I warm to this woman's independent spirit, her inner freedom not to fall too easily into the role of 'tourist'. She helps me to see why I hate myself when I don the required accoutrement (big camera round my neck etc) and play this tourism game. When I led a pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine in 2000, I was the only member of a large group not to take (or even possess) a camera. I kept a journal instead. That gave me the independence I looked for. But on this cruise, my behaviour is more conventional. I am simply another tourist, like everyone else, even if I want to be a pilgrim. This moment draws me back into one of what I believe is one of the reasons why travelling is not only enjoyable but nourishing: we glimpse new horizons, have our imagination stretched, gain new insights, and understand others and ourselves better. Ought it not to symbolise our lifelong journey into God, like the disciples walking the Emmaus Road on he first Easter Day? I have craved beautiful churches to spend time in, like a thirsty soul craves water, but this radiant evening shows me how any aspect of this Danube journey can be the same 'time of gifts'.

As we dine, great cumulus clouds tower above us. Their coppery edges presage another storm. When it comes, it is dramatic and brings torrential rain. Looking out from the comfort of the ship, we see crew members running on the dark quayside, bent double in the storm, lashing the vessel to its night mooring. We have arrived at Dürnstein. 

A Danube Journey Day 3: Bratislava to Vienna

Books and travel literature are a must for every voyager. At least, I assume this: how much more can be gleaned from visiting new places when a reliable guide prepares you for them - and then helps you to remember them well. Egeria, that well-travelled woman of late antiquity, knew this when she wrote her famous guide to the holy sites of the Middle East to encourage Christian pilgrims. Artaud's guide to the pilgrimage to Compostela is another medieval example. When you are cruising and have only a few hours to spend in each site, possibly never to return in your lifetime, a good guide helps to make the most of a brief visit. 

So I've brought with me two books on the Danube. Neither is a guide book in the strict sense; both are more in the nature of cultural histories and geographies, but I've found that their take on the river is stimulating and suggestive. Claudio Magris' book Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea is an eccentric piece of writing, but it sparkles brilliantly with insights laced with quotations from writers ancient and modern. Here is a man who loves the river and the lands it flows through, not least in the way he sees so much in its course that speaks in a symbolic way about the issues of our time. The other book acknowledges its debt to Magris while staying more in the mainstream (as it were) of travel writing, Andrew Beattie's The Danube: A Cultural History. But it too is serious literature rather than a descriptive travelogue, and I've learned much from it. And I've also brought Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic A Time of Gifts which I loved when I read it years ago, and want to revisit for its Danube chapters. 

However, there doesn't seem to be much conversation on board about the places we are due to see. I find this lack of curiosity odd. I have seen one other guest reading a guide book to the Danube, and some others poring over the map in the lobby. Did I imagine that everyone would be sitting on deck reading Patrick Leigh Fermor and discussing the Ottoman Empire, Empress Maria Theresa, Austro-Hungarian politics, the Cold War, and the Danube's natural history and geology? It feels as though this little shipboard society is more interested in what is going on in our own midst. Our city is the ship itself: its passengers and crew, its daily routines and out-of-the-ordinary events: these are of much interest to everyone. I watch myself being drawn into this little world, hear myself taking part in its quotidian discourse. It's like being in one of Irving Goffman's 'total communities' where everyone lives, eats and sleeps behind the same walls. In these conditions people start behaving in distinctive ways. Prisons and psychiatric institutions were his famous examples, but a boarding school or a cruise ship (or as I found in another life, a theological college) could be others: anywhere that can become the proverbial goldfish bowl.

Bratislava is the next port of call. Beattie says that as a state capital city it's the poor relation of the others and its charms quickly wear thin. However, we find that it has pleasures to offer, even if these are modest compared to Budapest. A guide takes us up to the castle, the city's must-see tourist site, thought what must be seen is the view rather than the building itself. It has four tall turrets at the corners, hence its nickname of 'Bratislava's Upturned Table', an echo of St John's, Smith Square in London which is affectionately known as 'Queen Anne's Footstool'. It is Cistercian in its pure white simplicity. But the view is extraordinary. It embraces the paradoxes of the ex-Eastern Bloc countries. Across the Danube from the historic quarter are line after line of Soviet-style apartment blocks, from here presenting a dystopian vision of grim uniformity and decay. The bridge spanning the river has an enormous turret from which the load is cantilevered, straining back against the river-bank Atlas-like, as if to rise to the challenge of supporting this monumental weight. There is a revolving restaurant on top, from which the seamy south side of the river will be seen to even better effect.

The modern Slovak state parliamentary building is next to the castle. In front of the flight of stairs leading up to it, a forecourt is marked out by stone bishops' mitres embedded into the setts, a reminder that this was, and perhaps still is, a staunchly catholic nation that survived the years of cold-war oppression (and, its citizens might add, being yoked together in an unwanted late marriage with the Czech Lands). Not even in palatine Durham are mitres used so playfully. 

We walk down through the old town. By St Michael's gate, the bronze figure of St John Nepomuk smiles down at us. He is one of central Europe's great heroes: more of him in Prague. The streets are charming and animated. In leafy squares fountains cool the air. In the main piazza a wooden Trojan horse, a temporary art installation,offers a humorous foil to the spire of the Jesuit church. A Napoleonic soldier sculpted in bronze leans nonchalantly against a bench while tourists take it in turns to be photographed next to him. I decide to find my way to the Cathedral. A few metres outside the west door, traffic on a 4-lane highway obtrudes its century into quiet cobbled streets where priests roam in cassocks. The church itself has a beautiful green copper spire, and a fine flamboyant gothic interior. In the crypt, a colombarium holds the ashes of the worthy departed - and probably the quite ordinary too, judging by the naïve script with which their names are roughly inscribed on their final resting-places. 

The stretch of river from Bratislava to Vienna is punctuated by two main events. The first is the so-called Porta Hungarica, where the Danube leaves (as we are sailing upstream) the Eastern European lands and enters Austria. The castle of Devlin stands proudly on a bluff guarding this strategic gateway. In the middle of this beautiful medieval site, a functional 1960s or 70s building obtrudes crassly like the classic carbuncle. It looks derelict, but you never know in Eastern Europe. Was it, is it, a hotel or restaurant run by Intourist or its Czech equivalent? Or a frontier post perhaps? - for here, the Iron Curtain once crossed the river, and there were gantries for armed guards stationed at regular intervals in the forests along the northern bank facing Austria. 

Now we are back in the west. It is hard not to notice how much tidier the river banks are, how much greener. This is Lower Austria, the homeland of Haydn whose music echoes with the peasant melodies and rhythms of Slovakia. The country is uneventful. But near Vienna, we encounter our first lock. In fact, this is not the first on our voyage: that happened in the middle of the night downstream of Bratislava. We were dimly aware of lights and noise outside but missed the action. These giant locks on the Danube are a far cry from the intimate affairs you find on the Grand Union or Llangollen Canals. Some are a quarter of a mile long, and wide enough to contain two huge cargo boats side by side. What they lack in charm they possess in sheer monumentality. A vast quantity of water flows in and out of these locks every time they are used, but there is no detectable turbulence; the only movement you sense is the gentle rise of the boat up the lock. It is like being in a well-maintained lift. It calls for precision to line up our port side as close as possible to the concrete wall of the lock; so well is it done that you could not drop a scone down the gap. It is all managed electronically, while the captain, an inscrutable Russian, keeps a careful eye on proceedings, smoking a cigarette. 

And so we glide into Vienna. Or at any rate, its outskirts. Vienna is not like Budapest or Bratislava, making the most of its privileged riparian position. I have been to Vienna before, and never set eyes on the Danube. We are moored in the village of Nussdorf. Along the bank, a busy highway is supported on stilts, while S-Bahn commuter trains rush past. Here the Danube feels almost forgotten, a side-show to the true delights of Vienna's cultured city-centre which feels a long way from this backwater. On the north side of the river, away from the historic old town to the south, skyscrapers present the image of a contemporary capital city with an active commercial and intellectual life. Headquarters of international organisations have their home here. Vienna has been accused of being locked nostalgically into its imperial past. If that was true once, it is not true today.

   

Each night in the season, there is a concert in some historic venue in town, geared to the needs of tourists like us. 'Viennese' means Mozart and Strauss, a miscellany of favourites that always includes the Blue Danube Waltz. At €33 each, we give it a miss and spend €2.40 on tram tickets into the city centre. Riding trams is among the pleasures of European cities, and increasingly, UK cities too. I am proud to have been dean in a place (Sheffield) where there is a tram-stop named after the building it stops by - 'Cathedral'. Tram D takes us on to the Ring, the boulevard that encircles the centre along the line of the former city walls. The great buildings follow one another with bewildering speed. We get out at the Opera and walk along the Kästnerstrasse, one of Vienna's best shopping streets. It is pedestrianised, and thousands of people of every age are out in the mild evening air shopping (the stores are open though it is past 8pm), eating, drinking, enjoying street music and film, or simply wandering. It is exhilarating. 

A vast crowd is surging round the Cathedral. Inside, some kind of event is going on that involves coloured light and lively music. We fight our way in. A friendly young priest says Wilkommen. Hundreds of people of all ages are moving around the great space, some singing, sitting quietly, lighting candles. Coloured lights play over the gothic interior illuminating it in brilliant reds and greens and golds. We discover that this is the 'Nacht der Kirchen' when churches are open all night offering hospitality, music, arts, discussion and liturgy. The surging crowd looks largely like prosperous Western Europeans, presumably highly secularised, yet they seem to be rediscovering and joyfully celebrating their catholic roots, at least for the evening. Is it a Kirchentag or a Back to Church Night? If we tried this in Anglican cathedrals, would English people's vestigial Anglicanism come flooding back in the way it does in catholic Austria? It raises intriguing questions about implicit or 'folk' religion and how to tap into its potential. 

A Danube Journey Day 2: Budapest and setting sail

We are taken in buses round the sights of Budapest. Originally two cities like Manchester and Salford or Newcastle and Gateshead, I am having trouble remembering which one I am in. I decide that 'Pest is not West but is best' will do as a mnemonic.

But we must begin with the river itself. First, its colour. If ever there was an epithet based on wishful thinking, it is that the Danube is 'blue'. 'Beautiful', yes, but the colour is a consistent milk-chocolate, like a tidal estuary. This is always the case, it seems, but especially at this time of year when it is swollen by snowmelt. Someone tells us that Don-au is etymologically related to 'dun', as in cow, which says it all. Then there is its flow. It is nearly 200 yards wide at Budapest, yet this river does not drift languidly through the city like the London Thames. It is astonishingly fast, beating energetically against the boats and the landing stage. The Danube has spirit, more like a huge mountain torrent than a stately river that takes its time to travel. It does not intend to linger anywhere for long, not even in its greatest cities.

Our tour guide enthuses about the city. We are bombarded with facts about its history and monuments, too much to take in as the bus does its circuit. We get out at the Place of Heroes, a monumental piazza full of equine sculpture that celebrates Hungary's warriors. The bronzes are very fine and make a magnificent group. One of our group wanders off and there is worry about what has happened to him. A few telephone calls, and a couple of circuits of the piazza and he is reunited with us. Couriers must be used to this sort of thing, but when their charges include elderly people with minds of their own, it must make escorting a school group seem like child's play (as it were). 

We glimpse baroque facades, serious 19th century civic buildings, and a fascinating profusion of Art Nouveau and Déco. Structures from the Victorian age include Eiffel's characterful railway station and his elephant house at the zoo. There is too much 20th century socialist realism, much of it already looking the worse for wear. Yet the eclectic ensemble works, produces its own aesthetic of monumental buildings that create a largely harmonious whole. The next stop is the Fishermen's Bastion with its famed vista of the city. Like Montmartre, it shares the acropolis with a great church, St Matthias. Dedicated to Our Lady, it is named after one of Budapest's warriors who restrained the Ottomans from invading the city. When Hungary finally succumbed, it served for a while as one of the city's mosques; inevitably, it was drastically restored when it reverted to Christianity. Nevertheless (and despite the entrance fee) it is a noble building with a triforium successfully converted to a treasury museum full of beautiful things. 

  

From this summit, we can appreciate why Budapest is called the 'pearl of the Danube'. The panorama of the great river and its architecture is magnificent, with the Parliament building, directly inspired by the Palace of Westminster, resplendent. We pass an icon shop where we buy Hungarian crosses for the children. We wonder what to do with the our remaining 2000 Hungarian Forints. It sounds a lot but only amounts to a few pounds. If we ever come back to Budapest, they will no doubt have joined the euro by then. The charity box it will be then, or tips for the crew on board ship.

At lunch time we weigh anchor. Though we didn't arrive here by river as you are supposed to, at least we leave it that way. The bridges, churches and Parliament building are in a perfectly judged relationship with the river, as noble as London and Paris and perhaps better as the river has the width to set off monumental architecture to real effect; and also because there seems to have been some coherence in planning the development of the river frontages. They didn't just happen.

Upstream, we are back among the suburbs with rows of unlovely high-rise Soviet apartment blocks softened by shrubs on the river bank. Then it is forests, interspersed with the occasional dacha and its jetty, lost among a million trees. How empty this country must be. After lunch, people arrange themselves on deck to enjoy the sunshine. Paperback novels, magazines, and yesterday's papers are brought out. The afternoon settles into summer torpor, the gentle bass drone of the ship's engines offset by the trebles of bird song and the water lapping against the bows. We sense that it's the enjoyably lazy, sunny, life on board, rather than visiting interesting places, that is the real object of cruising. 

At Vac, the river has split into two for a while. A rusting car-ferry waits by the landing stage for passengers to carry to the other side. Baroque towers jostle for position on the skyline over the coloured frontages and red roofs of pretty houses. Only the prison jars with its uncompromising walls, barbed wire and observation towers. It was once an elite boarding school for girls founded by Empress Maria Theresa. In the Nazi and Cold War periods it earned an unenvied reputation as being one of the most dreaded places in Hungary. It is still a state penitentiary. Beyond, the river enters the Danube Bend that we saw from the aeroplane. This is a beautiful stretch of water where wooded hills force the river into a defile. The highlight is the ecclesiastical city of Esztergom, seat of the archbishopric of Hungary. The neo-classical cathedral sits on an acropolis directly above the river. It makes a fine sight that gets cameras clicking; whether it is more mausoleum than place of mystical wonder divides the travel writers. Perhaps it's one of those buildings you admire rather than love. 

As we go to bed, we see lights and towering cranes and the silhouettes of warehouses and industrial plants and docks. It must be the rust belt of Komárno. It looks faintly sinister by night, and possibly no better by daylight. On a river journey, you both see and don't see what you are passing by. You are close enough and move sufficiently slowly to take in a good deal more than, say, a passing motorist can do. But unless you actually stop, there is the odd feeling of glimpsing a chimera that comes and goes, emerges out of the future and recedes into the past. And afterwards, the chain of dream-like memories coalesces, melts into an impression of forests and hills and sky, and of course the river, this ceaseless traveller called the Danube that is like my own consciousness, and like time itself, an ever-flowing stream.

A Danube Journey Day 1: arriving at Budapest

I hope I don't regret this. I am posting a day by day blog of our recent cruise through Central Europe up the River Danube. We began in Budapest and ended in Nuremberg from where we travelled overland to Prague. This was a long-planned holiday organised by a well-known touring company. I wrote this blog as we travelled, without checking facts or sources. It is pure stream-of-consciousness. If you have done a similar journey and visited the places I describe, you may like to compare notes. I've tried to reflect as well as describe, for travel has a wonderful way of raising questions; but inevitably it will feel rough-hewn and perhaps a bit hasty. So much for the health warning. Here goes with Day 1. 

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We can see the Danube as the plane comes in to land at Budapest. It swings round to the south in a great loop, the Danube Bend, having travelled from west to east since its birth in the Black Forest many hundreds of miles from here.

First impressions of a strange country begin at the airport. For the nation's capital, Budapest airport is surprisingly intimate: more like Newcastle than Birmingham or Manchester, let alone Heathrow. I notice the signs - bilingual of course, but what a language Hungarian is: all those consonants, and accents in strange places. There are no etymological landmarks, no familiar roots by which to triangulate and work out meanings. They say it's one of the most difficult languages in the world, like Basque, Turkish, or Finnish (to which it is related). By contrast, in downstream Romania, they speak the debased Latin of a former Roman province - easy enough to get by, they say, if you have a smattering of French or Italian.

We are rounded up and shepherded into a couple of buses. The drive into the city centre takes us  through the kind of colourless suburbs you come to expect in post-Soviet bloc countries. It reminds me of Moscow, whose vast banlieue seemed twenty years ago to be leached of vitality, where it was hard not to think that daily life was unremittingly hard work. 

Our courier gives us an informative whistle-stop tour of the history and culture of Hungary. The thrust of it is the extent to which these lands have been subject to the domination of others - centuries of Mongol, Ottoman and Hapsburg rule. There was a brief taste of freedom following the end of the Great War, but then the regime unwisely allied itself with the Axis powers and found itself under the the jackboot of the Third Reich. The Nazis invaded in 1944. Budapest suffered badly, especially its Jewish population. The Soviet era and the Cold War followed, and only in 1990 did Hungary once again become its own nation, a modern democratic republic and, since 2004, a member of the EU. Somehow, the suburbs wear this sense of exhaustion after a long, depressing history. 

Yet the centre comes as a beautiful surprise. Here there is liveliness, a sense of history, a palpable  intellectual and cultural presence, noble buildings (on a truly grand scale) and above all the river itself. I've read that of all the cities on the Danube, Budapest is the one that most takes the river to its heart and has organised its life around it. That feels like a good reason for starting our journey here. 

So we embark on the Regina Rheni II. (I almost said Regina Coeli - after all it is Eastertide.) She is tethered alongside a boulevard where there are trams, and a park, and what looks like a contemporary arts centre that reminds us of the Sage in Gateshead, and people out running and strolling and playing with their children in the evening sunshine. These river cruise ships are not huge compared with the immense vessels that ply the seas carrying upwards of a thousand passengers - we are only 150 so it is all quite intimate by comparison - but she is still a long ship, 110 metres, low-slung and sleek. Why the 'Queen of the Rhine' rather than the Danube? Because she was built and is registered in Holland, and works the entire length of the journey across the watershed of Europe from here to the North Sea via the Main Canal and the Rhine.

 

We find we have been upgraded to a cabin on the top deck. Such things rarely happen to us, so it is a nice surprise. Can they have known that we are celebrating our ruby wedding? It seems not: there has simply been some problem with a damp carpet in the cabin we were allocated. At dinner, there is the usual awkwardness of introductions: who we are, where we come from etc., all carefully establishing the rules of engagement of this new-formed floating community. We discuss the routines and rituals of shipboard life. Some cognoscenti do this kind of thing regularly and know the ins and outs of cruising etiquette. They compare travellers' tales about the Rhine, the Rhone, the Volga and the Nile. No one on our table has done the Danube before, so we cruising virgins are on the same deck as our fellow-travellers as far as the river itself is concerned. 

As we gather in the lounge for the introductory briefing, there is an excited babble of conversation. The meeting strikes an upbeat note, because it is obviously required that holidaymakers be cheerful, but with overtones of the school trip thrown in. Are there hints that managing a crowd of more mature adults with differing levels of physical ability can have its challenges? We are promised partying the next day. My introvert side starts protesting. I wonder how I shall cope with the bonhomie of it all. 

We are assigned to a table where we shall have our main meals with the same companions throughout the week's voyage. This is where the hazards of cruising are greatest, where real trepidation is felt. No planning goes into the lottery of table allocation, no checking of compatibility. How do you know if you can sustain polite, let alone interesting or stimulating, conversation at lunch and dinner day after day with people you have never met, with whom you are randomly thrown together at the whim of the restaurant floor manager? Time alone will tell.