I never thought I'd be glad to see France and Paris, but I was when I got home last night. I guess Paris is home, where I've made myself comfortable, but it was also getting back to a culture with which I was familiar. Here, I know how to buy a train ticket, I know how to buy a croissant, I know where to find a good hot chocolate, I know what to say when I enter or leave a shop. It's remarkable how much I've learned in the part several weeks.
So yesterday morning I was out of the youth hostel by a quarter past seven to take the early-morning bus to the station for my connecting train to GERMANY! It was a lovely two-hour train trip from Luxembourg along the Moselle River to Koblenz, in the north-west of Germany. Arriving around mid-morning, I made the slow walk towards the centre of town and dropped in on the tourism office before moseying on over to where the Moselle meets the Rhine, in the tourist centre of Koblenz. I was slated to join a cruise along the Rhine at 2pm, so I had some time to spare. After a walk through the Basilica of Saint Castor and a quick lunch on the Rhine it was time to buy my ticket and board.
In trying to find at which pier to board the cruise ship, since the lady at the desk liked giving out wrong information, I made myself some new friends. Newlyweds Laura and Jeff from Georgia, USA, arrived at Koblenz HBF (Hauptbahnhof, or train station) around the same time I did, but for once I decided not to introduce myself to the token English speakers, though Jeff said later that it looked like I wanted to. The three of us did some laps of the Rhine waterfront before finally discovering the right pier just a few minutes before boarding and settled ourselves on the starboard side of the upper for'ard deck.
If you ever get a chance to, take a cruise on a river in Germany. It was amazing. We don't have rivers in Australia like there are in Germany, and it's interesting how it's informed the landscape and the culture. Sailing down the river is like driving down the main highway of Germany - everything was built around it. The Rhine winds through a long valley with tall mountains on either side, and towns have sprung up on either side of the river, with the Rhine supplying trade, food, tourism - whatever was needed. The architecture is different too. Most houses are whitewashed townhouses with exposed timbers, and to make up for the lack of gardens, certain areas of town are fenced off and allocated as gardens for townspeople to grow whatever they like. And atop every hill, overlooking the town below, there's a schloss, or castle, more than you can possibly count.
I went as far as the town of Sankt Goar, about three hours upstream from Koblenz, chatting and laughing with Jeff and Laura along the way. It really was a kind of magical experience, watching the imposing natural and man-made landscape slowly slipping past you on each side. Like I said, I stepped off at St. Goar and waved goodbye to Jeff and Laura, who were continuing on to Bacharach for the night. I spent half an hour wandering the township, which is right across the Rhine from its sister town St. Goarhausen, before the cruise ship going back to Koblenz arrived in St. Goar and I boarded for the trip back. I decided to eat dinner on the ship, since it was going to be past 8p by the time we arrived in Koblenz and I neither wanted to be hungry all night nor try and find some dinner between disembarking the ship and making my way to my bed in the youth hostel. After downing some spaghetti pesto, I sat on the upper foredeck wrapped thoroughly in my coat to defend against the wind and watched the night-lit German towns slip by in the darkness.
On arriving in Koblenz, I managed to make my way to the main bus depot from where I could take a bus to Ehrenbreitstein, the suburb of Koblenz across the river where the youth hostel sat within the Festung Ehrenbreitstein, the town fortress. I easily made the 8.30 bus that dropped me off outside the fortress on the west side of the Rhine. My feet spared the walk so far, I decided to put them to the test in hiking up to the fortress, since I figured the funny elevator-thingy going up to the Festung would be closed at this time of night. My feet didn't appreciate this decision, and neither did my dinner after a steep walk up some dark stone steps onto a road that I hoped was leading me to the youth hostel.
It did, in the end, but my sweaty self was in for another surprise. Lesson #2 of Youth Hostelling: ALWAYS confirm your reservation before you arrive. As the lovely young fellow on the desk soon discovered (also, one for the planning books: 'sprechen sie English?', meaning 'do you speak English?' is a wonderful phrase to know whilst in Germany), while my reservation email had been received, no-one had felt the need to act on it or reply! Furthermore, the hostel was full that night and he couldn't even squeeze me in without a reservation. Instead he called down to a cheap hotel at the base of the Festung, which was able to squeeze me in for the night. My mood didn't improve when the desk guy (who was pretty pissed about the reservation thing on my behalf) gave me directions to the hotel that included 'go down in the elevator' - apparently it's automatic and runs all night and day!
Long story short, sweaty, backpack-laden Caelli, too tired to be disgruntled like she should, ends up in a dingy hotel that was more expensive and not nearly as nice as a youth hostel. I didn't really have a choice - the chances of finding another cheap hotel that was still open and accepting guests at half past nine pm on a Sunday night that could be reached by cripple-foot or bus were slim. I decided to make the best of things and, curling up on the dubiously cleanliness of the excuse-for-a-pillow, went to sleep.
The next morning I dragged myself out of bed, cleaned and dressed myself and packed my bag to head down to breakfast. Suffice to say I've had better breakfasts in youth hostels - in fact, this under-did the worst youth hostel breakfast I've had. Having lost my drink bottle the day before, too, I drank deeply of whatever funny juice the woman there gave me and got out of there as quickly as I could. I bought a ticket for the Great Glass Elevator and headed on up to the Festung.
It wasn't as exciting as I'd hoped - it's a fortress, after all, so it's been damaged and rebuilt several times and was actually blown up entirely in the 1800s. Most of what can be seen on the inside of the fortress is only 200 years old and the insides of the buildings have been renovated to make them museums, youth hostels or administration, mostly. The views of Koblenz were spectacular, though, I'll credit that. After looking through the main areas within the large, confusing Festung walls, I wandered right out to the viewing platform at the tip of the Festung grounds before boarding the Seilbahn.
The Seilbahn is a cable car/skyway thing that operates from the Festung Ehrenbreitstein to the Rhine waterfront in Koblenz. For five minutes I got the most beautiful overhead views of the river and eye-level views of the town buildings in Koblenz. It's another must, just for the views.
By this point in my trip I was getting pretty tired from several poor nights' sleep and all the travelling and walking, and I was definitely about done with Germany for the time being, so stopping for some postcards along the way, I headed back to the HBF to buy the next cheapest ticket to Paris there was. It took a little conceding and clever thinking on my part, but we managed it. Within an hour I was on a train to Saarbrucken on the border with France. The little regional train spent two and a half hours winding on a land-bound version of Sunday's cruise through the Middle Rhine valleys.
I got around about two hours in Saarbrucken, but due to an intense fear of missing the TGV to Paris at 7pm, an inability to walk very far and a further inability to find anything exciting in walking distance, I ended up staying pretty close to the station, and wound up in one of the cafes having a bagel and hot chocolate for dinner. A few minutes after the departure time, as the night started to descend and the wind started to get cold, the TGV pulled up, dropped off its old passengers and set off for Paris. Two hours of sleeping, reading (but mostly sleeping) later I was home, if that's what Paris is now, pulling into Gare de l'Est, and within 40 minutes I was back in my own little apartment back in Le Bourget, tired, a little jaded, but having seen a little more of the world. In conclusion, my little weekend away has once again enforced the 1st Rule of Life (According to Caelli): sleep. It will all seem better in the morning.
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