We had
followed the River Moselle, virtually from its source high in the Vosges
mountains, and across Lorraine through the cities of Nancy and Metz. The
plan for the final stage of this trip was to follow the river as it
meandered through Germany, changing its name to the Mosel, for a further
250 kms ultimately to its confluence with the Rhine at Koblenz. In
contrast with earlier weather, we were at last to be rewarded with some
glowing autumn
sunshine; so for this trip's final edition, we have 2 pages of
photographs.
Click on highlighted area
for details of Mosel
Valley
After another night of heavy rain, we left our
final camp in Lorraine on a heavily overcast morning, a chill autumn
wind rustling the trees and bringing down more leaves. Our route was to
take us through the SE corner-tip of Luxembourg, at Schengen, sandwiched
between France and Germany; the village had given its name to the Accord
declaring open 'Schengen' borders between EU states. The main street is
one continuous series of filling stations where vehicles queue for cheap
fuel at €0.87/litre. And 5 minutes after entering Luxembourg, we crossed
the Mosel into Germany.
But a
chastening shock awaited us. Weeks of heavy rain in the Vosges had
swollen the river beyond Metz 3
metres above normal levels, washing away trees, flooding surrounding
areas and closing roads. At Nennig just across the border, there should
have been 2 riverside campsites; both had been overwhelmed by the
swollen river, leaving waterlogged devastation and a generous covering
of stinking river-mud. That evening we retreated to higher ground
between the Mosel and Saar rivers at Saarberg, but what did this bode
for villages and campsites further downstream? Despite its setting in a
woodland valley, Campingplatz Waldfrieden was run by the most
surly,
ill-mannered and unresponsively unhelpful people ever encountered (were
they deliberately trying to live-out the sour-faced German stereotype,
we wondered); it is a place to be avoided at all costs. By contrast, at
Camping Treviris at Trier, we were greeted with smiling courtesy; the
campsite is not the most attractive, but to our relief, was safely above
river-level and within walking distance of this delightful city,
allegedly the oldest in Germany; a medieval inscription claims Ante
Romam Treviris stetit annis mille trecentis. 1,300 years before Rome
is a bit of a tall order, but Trier was certainly founded as a Roman
colony in 16 BC, and its Roman remains (imperial baths and palace and a
magnificently preserved amphitheatre) and the pre-Carolingian
Cathedral, are worthy testimony to its illustrious past. In lovely
autumn sunshine (yes sunshine!), we spent a happy afternoon admiring
the town with its busy market-place (Photos 1 and 2).
North of
Trier we reached Trittenheim, a classic Mosel wine-village, where the river traces a spectacular
meander, turning through 180 degrees. The large village is clustered
along the banks of the Mosel around the bridge at the apex of the
meander (Photo 3). The Mosel is still a busy river, with huge
barges transporting bulk coal to power stations further upstream and
tanker-barges ferrying oil and gas past the steep vine-covered
river-bank (Photo 4). This idyllic part of the central Mosel valley is wine
country par excellence, and here among the vines we stayed at Campingplatz Im Grünen
run by the Schuck family.
And the campsite with its lush turf certainly lived up to its
green-sounding name: it was a delightful setting, bounded by walnut
trees and the valley-bottom vines along the river bank, and overlooked
by the steep vine-covered slopes on the
far bank (Photo 5). It was
grape-harvesting time and the village was busy with tractors bringing in
the grapes. The following morning, while autumn mist still filled the
valley, we climbed up the high eastern bank overlooking the river and
village to examine the vines at close quarters. The steep vine-covered
slopes dropped at a staggering 60 degrees; how in today's
safety-conscious world were grapes harvested at such a hazardous angle?
From this vantage point, we could look down across the
full sweep of the river's meander with Trittenheim spread out on
the far bank beyond the bridge (Photo 6). Most of the grapes,
particularly on the steeper slopes are harvested by hand (Photo 7)
but on the flatter valley-bottoms, machine-harvesting is increasingly
used (Photo 8). As we watched the harvesting at work, the
vigneron showed us the ripened grapes and explained to us the
significance of the 'Noble Rot': the Botrytis fungus attacks the grape
berries, and if the grapes are ripe and healthy, and the ambient
conditions are alternately damp and sunny as on Autumn
mornings, the 'Noble Rot' shrivels the grapes and concentrates the
natural sugar enabling top quality sweeter wines to be produced.
Looking at the wizened and mouldy-looking grapes, it seemed hard to believe that this was a
benevolent condition (see sub-picture on Photo 6). Trittenheim had been
a jewel.
Further
along the Mosel, we hoped to find more places like Trittenheim, but
where our map indicated campsites, these turned out to be sordidly fetid
mud-patches overcrowded with noisy holiday-making Germans seemingly
indifferent to such squalid surroundings. There was no option but to
continue on to Cochem in the hope that the town campsite was acceptable.
It wasn't. Again overcrowded with monstrous camping-cars packed in like
sardines, it was such an alien world, amid folk who seemed unable to
cope for even a brief week without bringing with them all their materialistic
accoutrements. While it was mildly entertaining watching them spending
long hours tuning in their gargantuan satellite dishes, the noise of TVs
blaring out the German moronic equivalent of Eastenders induced
paranoia. The indifference towards the impact of their noise on other
people seemed to epitomise today's loutish society. It was all a million
miles from the peacefully straightforward life-style we had chosen. But
Cochem it had to be, so that we could catch the train into Koblenz to
complete our Moselle pilgrimage. And what of Cochem? Well, the best you
could say was that the gloomy weather didn't help: having seen the
railway tunnel (according to the Tourist Office brochure, one of the
town's highlights), eaten a unprecedentedly mediocre lunch, and failed
to find a worthwhile shop for provisions, that summed up Cochem. A visit
to the Aldi 'supermarket' was the most underwhelming shopping experience
ever, despite the hoards of Germans flocking there. Such a
nutritionally impoverished race, their interminable diet of sausages and
sour cabbage perhaps explains their woeful 20th century history of
invading other civilised countries leaving a trail of atrocities in
their wake - they were simply searching for edible food!
Thankful to leave
Cochem behind, we reached the delightful
wine village of Pommern (Photo 9), and here we found not
only a peaceful campsite but also a railway-halt where the Koblenz
trains also stopped - what a wonderful attribute is hindsight. We had
made an appointment to visit one of the local producers, Rieslinghof Schützen-Mies,
whose wine we had previously drunk at Brodenbach.
We were received with
warm hospitality by the Winzermeister, Herr Günther Mies, and his wife
for an enjoyable tasting session in their sunlit courtyard (Photo 10),
and a visit to their cellars where this year's new wine was
fermenting vigorously. A box of their excellent Riesling added further
to our camper's already overladen burden. After stops at the beautiful
riverside villages of Beilstein (Photo 11) and Hatzenport (Photo
12), we reached Brodenbach. On a bright, blue-skied afternoon, with
the sun glinting across the Yacht-hafen (Photo 13), and the now
peaceful Mosel flowing gently by, it seemed so far from the dark, rather
forbidding place we had known when staying at Vogelsang ('Birdsong')
Camping in March on drives across the Continent on previous trips. It scarcely
seemed credible that this was the same river we had seen just over a
week ago in raging torrent. That evening, we walked back down to the
village for our customary drink at the Yacht-hafen bar, exactly as
always, preserved in a time warp, and as before we were welcomed with
goblets
of luscious Mosel wine. And in the morning, the mist wafted
mysteriously across the river (Photo 14) before the sun finally broke
through, transforming the cold, damp morning into a bright sunny autumn
day for our visit to some of the nearby Mosel villages (Photo 15),
and of course more sampling of their wines.
The climax
of our Mosel(le) peregrination was to visit its confluence with
the Rhine at Koblenz. The Mosel valley railway ambled around the
sweeping meanders past delightful river-side villages such as Pommern,
Müden, Moselkern, Burgen, Brodenbach, Alken, Oberfell, Lehmen,
Niederfell and Dieblich. With unsmiling Germanic efficiency, the
official (no other description would fit!) at the Koblenz Tourist Office issued us with city-plan and instructions as to what we should see in
his city. Ignoring all of this, we headed along to the Rhine embankment.
Although the Alsace Wine Road had followed the broad Rhine valley, this
was our first sighting this trip of the mighty waterway, which, judging
from the number
of
huge barges, is still an important European trade-route. In the garden
of the former Elector's palace along the river-bank, an allegorical
statue portrayed Vater Rhein as a bearded old man embracing a rather
nubile and decidedly naked young Mutter Mosel (see right). And a little
further along the embankment, we reached the prow-shaped spit of land
which protrudes into the confluence of the 2 rivers (see left), the
so-called German Corner (Deutsches Eck). But
having travelled virtually the whole 544 km of the Mosel(le), and
witnessed the river in its wildest spate, this final phase was something
of an anticlimax; what were we expecting? With not even a whimper,
the waters of Mutter Mosel were lost into those of Vater Rhein (Photo 16).
And imperiously dominating this peaceful natural setting was a
monstrously oversized equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I (whose
grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II inflicted WW1 on the world), set on an unsightly blackened granite monolithic plinth (see
right). With its grotesquely exaggerated proportions and domineering tone,
the statue seemed an apt symbol of the Germanic national character. It
was destroyed in 1945 as the Allies crossed the Rhine, but reinstated in
1993; was this the ultimate gesture of daft political correctness? On
such a note, we felt we had reached the culmination of this current
trip, and turned for the railway station.
The
following morning, as the autumn mist lifted above the pines at
Vogelsang Camping and wafted across the Mosel, we left Brodenbach to
begin our drive across Belgium back towards Calais. This had been a
markedly different trip from others: despite being shorter in distance,
(we shall have travelled only 2,800 miles), it had been distinctly less
relaxing. The seemingly endless wet and gloomy weather eclipsed
any recollection of the glorious summer days along the Alsace Wine Road and
the refreshing autumn sunshine along the Mosel. Paul's hospitalisation
at Reims was a thankfully brief but unwelcome intrusion into the trip -
remember, always carry your E111s. Although we felt that the time spent
at the Somme and Verdun represented a fundamental obligation to that
generation who at such personal cost resisted German aggression, the
psychological impact was profound - as of course it should be. Perhaps
we should suggest that Mr Blair makes a week in the Somme mud an obligatory part of the National Curriculum - and you thought He had a
monopoly on silly ideas! But the most pessimistic memory was the
over-commercialisation of French rural campsites with 'creeping staticism' crowding out visiting emplacements. Where do you go to avoid
the overcrowding and 'mobile materialism' and escape the seemingly
omni-present noise of satellite TVs to which western Homo Philistinus is self-indulgently addicted? The number of memorably
idyllic campsites with hospitably welcoming owners and peaceful
environment could be counted on less than one hand. But to offset that
wretched fact, we have been privileged to meet along the way some
delightfully empathetic fellow-travellers with whom to share experiences
and to keep in touch by email.
And 2007 ? .... plans are already afoot for a trip
to remoter parts; as usual, no clues at this stage. Before that however,
there's a busy winter ahead, as the backlog of log-writing and
photo-editing grows longer. We do hope you have enjoyed sharing our
travels via the web site, and for those who have emailed us, we thank
you for your welcome companionship. Stay tuned ....
But a
chastening shock awaited us. Weeks of heavy rain in the Vosges had
swollen the river beyond Metz 3
metres above normal levels, washing away trees, flooding surrounding
areas and closing roads. At Nennig just across the border, there should
have been 2 riverside campsites; both had been overwhelmed by the
swollen river, leaving waterlogged devastation and a generous covering
of stinking river-mud. That evening we retreated to higher ground
between the Mosel and Saar rivers at Saarberg, but what did this bode
for villages and campsites further downstream? Despite its setting in a
woodland valley, Campingplatz Waldfrieden was run by the most
surly,
ill-mannered and unresponsively unhelpful people ever encountered (were
they deliberately trying to live-out the sour-faced German stereotype,
we wondered); it is a place to be avoided at all costs. By contrast, at
Camping Treviris at Trier, we were greeted with smiling courtesy; the
campsite is not the most attractive, but to our relief, was safely above
river-level and within walking distance of this delightful city,
allegedly the oldest in Germany; a medieval inscription claims Ante
Romam Treviris stetit annis mille trecentis. 1,300 years before Rome
is a bit of a tall order, but Trier was certainly founded as a Roman
colony in 16 BC, and its Roman remains (imperial baths and palace and a
magnificently preserved amphitheatre) and the pre-Carolingian
Cathedral, are worthy testimony to its illustrious past. In lovely
autumn sunshine (yes sunshine!), we spent a happy afternoon admiring
the town with its busy market-place (Photos 1 and 2).
North of
Trier we reached Trittenheim, a classic Mosel wine-village, where the river traces a spectacular
meander, turning through 180 degrees. The large village is clustered
along the banks of the Mosel around the bridge at the apex of the
meander (Photo 3). The Mosel is still a busy river, with huge
barges transporting bulk coal to power stations further upstream and
tanker-barges ferrying oil and gas past the steep vine-covered
river-bank (Photo 4). This idyllic part of the central Mosel valley is wine
country par excellence, and here among the vines we stayed at Campingplatz Im Grünen
run by the Schuck family.
And the campsite with its lush turf certainly lived up to its
green-sounding name: it was a delightful setting, bounded by walnut
trees and the valley-bottom vines along the river bank, and overlooked
by the steep vine-covered slopes on the
far bank (Photo 5). It was
grape-harvesting time and the village was busy with tractors bringing in
the grapes. The following morning, while autumn mist still filled the
valley, we climbed up the high eastern bank overlooking the river and
village to examine the vines at close quarters. The steep vine-covered
slopes dropped at a staggering 60 degrees; how in today's
safety-conscious world were grapes harvested at such a hazardous angle?
From this vantage point, we could look down across the
full sweep of the river's meander with Trittenheim spread out on
the far bank beyond the bridge (Photo 6). Most of the grapes,
particularly on the steeper slopes are harvested by hand (Photo 7)
but on the flatter valley-bottoms, machine-harvesting is increasingly
used (Photo 8). As we watched the harvesting at work, the
vigneron showed us the ripened grapes and explained to us the
significance of the 'Noble Rot': the Botrytis fungus attacks the grape
berries, and if the grapes are ripe and healthy, and the ambient
conditions are alternately damp and sunny as on Autumn
mornings, the 'Noble Rot' shrivels the grapes and concentrates the
natural sugar enabling top quality sweeter wines to be produced.
Looking at the wizened and mouldy-looking grapes, it seemed hard to believe that this was a
benevolent condition (see sub-picture on Photo 6). Trittenheim had been
a jewel.
Further
along the Mosel, we hoped to find more places like Trittenheim, but
where our map indicated campsites, these turned out to be sordidly fetid
mud-patches overcrowded with noisy holiday-making Germans seemingly
indifferent to such squalid surroundings. There was no option but to
continue on to Cochem in the hope that the town campsite was acceptable.
It wasn't. Again overcrowded with monstrous camping-cars packed in like
sardines, it was such an alien world, amid folk who seemed unable to
cope for even a brief week without bringing with them all their materialistic
accoutrements. While it was mildly entertaining watching them spending
long hours tuning in their gargantuan satellite dishes, the noise of TVs
blaring out the German moronic equivalent of Eastenders induced
paranoia. The indifference towards the impact of their noise on other
people seemed to epitomise today's loutish society. It was all a million
miles from the peacefully straightforward life-style we had chosen. But
Cochem it had to be, so that we could catch the train into Koblenz to
complete our Moselle pilgrimage. And what of Cochem? Well, the best you
could say was that the gloomy weather didn't help: having seen the
railway tunnel (according to the Tourist Office brochure, one of the
town's highlights), eaten a unprecedentedly mediocre lunch, and failed
to find a worthwhile shop for provisions, that summed up Cochem. A visit
to the Aldi 'supermarket' was the most underwhelming shopping experience
ever, despite the hoards of Germans flocking there. Such a
nutritionally impoverished race, their interminable diet of sausages and
sour cabbage perhaps explains their woeful 20th century history of
invading other civilised countries leaving a trail of atrocities in
their wake - they were simply searching for edible food!
Thankful to leave
Cochem behind, we reached the delightful
wine village of Pommern (Photo 9), and here we found not
only a peaceful campsite but also a railway-halt where the Koblenz
trains also stopped - what a wonderful attribute is hindsight. We had
made an appointment to visit one of the local producers, Rieslinghof Schützen-Mies,
whose wine we had previously drunk at Brodenbach.
We were received with
warm hospitality by the Winzermeister, Herr Günther Mies, and his wife
for an enjoyable tasting session in their sunlit courtyard (Photo 10),
and a visit to their cellars where this year's new wine was
fermenting vigorously. A box of their excellent Riesling added further
to our camper's already overladen burden. After stops at the beautiful
riverside villages of Beilstein (Photo 11) and Hatzenport (Photo
12), we reached Brodenbach. On a bright, blue-skied afternoon, with
the sun glinting across the Yacht-hafen (Photo 13), and the now
peaceful Mosel flowing gently by, it seemed so far from the dark, rather
forbidding place we had known when staying at Vogelsang ('Birdsong')
Camping in March on drives across the Continent on previous trips. It scarcely
seemed credible that this was the same river we had seen just over a
week ago in raging torrent. That evening, we walked back down to the
village for our customary drink at the Yacht-hafen bar, exactly as
always, preserved in a time warp, and as before we were welcomed with
goblets
of luscious Mosel wine. And in the morning, the mist wafted
mysteriously across the river (Photo 14) before the sun finally broke
through, transforming the cold, damp morning into a bright sunny autumn
day for our visit to some of the nearby Mosel villages (Photo 15),
and of course more sampling of their wines.
The climax
of our Mosel(le) peregrination was to visit its confluence with
the Rhine at Koblenz. The Mosel valley railway ambled around the
sweeping meanders past delightful river-side villages such as Pommern,
Müden, Moselkern, Burgen, Brodenbach, Alken, Oberfell, Lehmen,
Niederfell and Dieblich. With unsmiling Germanic efficiency, the
official (no other description would fit!) at the Koblenz Tourist Office issued us with city-plan and instructions as to what we should see in
his city. Ignoring all of this, we headed along to the Rhine embankment.
Although the Alsace Wine Road had followed the broad Rhine valley, this
was our first sighting this trip of the mighty waterway, which, judging
from the number
of
huge barges, is still an important European trade-route. In the garden
of the former Elector's palace along the river-bank, an allegorical
statue portrayed Vater Rhein as a bearded old man embracing a rather
nubile and decidedly naked young Mutter Mosel (see right). And a little
further along the embankment, we reached the prow-shaped spit of land
which protrudes into the confluence of the 2 rivers (see left), the
so-called German Corner (Deutsches Eck). But
having travelled virtually the whole 544 km of the Mosel(le), and
witnessed the river in its wildest spate, this final phase was something
of an anticlimax; what were we expecting? With not even a whimper,
the waters of Mutter Mosel were lost into those of Vater Rhein (Photo 16).
And imperiously dominating this peaceful natural setting was a
monstrously oversized equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I (whose
grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II inflicted WW1 on the world), set on an unsightly blackened granite monolithic plinth (see
right). With its grotesquely exaggerated proportions and domineering tone,
the statue seemed an apt symbol of the Germanic national character. It
was destroyed in 1945 as the Allies crossed the Rhine, but reinstated in
1993; was this the ultimate gesture of daft political correctness? On
such a note, we felt we had reached the culmination of this current
trip, and turned for the railway station.
