Hallelujah! It has stopped raining. In fact, as I write this on a fantastic campsite on the famous Danube bends, a mile or more from the nearest road, I am almost in need of a sunhat!
But overnight the floodwaters in Passau lived up to expectations. They peaked at 7.8 m above normal on the Danube and 5.2 m above normal on the Inn. What this meant in real money was that we couldn’t get out of the front door of our hotel!
Passau is a lovely town, very small and narrow. But it is a real tourist magnet, with bus loads and huge boat loads of tourists blocking pavements and hotel beds. Despite this we spent a lovely morning wandering round and drinking coffee. But then it was time to get back to the cycling. Both bikes needed a good clean and more oil after yesterday’s adventures in farmer’s fields and it was fun doing this right outside the posh hotel with throngs of tourists milling past! Then we set off across the bridge over the Inn and on down the Danube on the south bank. After a couple of miles this took us into Austria, our fourth country and, by coincidence, almost exactly 1000 miles of cycling.
We have spent the afternoon in sunshine, pedalling gently down the river. After 25 miles or so the river abruptly turns round and heads back in the opposite direction for about a mile, before doing exactly the same thing again. I don’t know why it does so, but I can see some sandstone cliffs poking through the trees, and some limestone ones, so I think it that a lump of harder sandstone may have something to do with it! You might also think that such perverse behaviour might frustrate the interpid cyclist intent on reaching Vienna but, actually, cycling back the way we came, in such dramatic and beautiful circumstances was great fun!
The Danube bends are a famous beauty spot – not least because the riverside roads don’t come through here. The river banks are about 200 feet tall and heavily wooded. Just after the second bend, and in the middle of the nature reserve, is our present campsite at Inzell.
This is a truly beautiful spot. I remember finding it about a year ago when researching the trip and deciding that it was a place we must camp for the night. It has exceeded expectations.
But there is a postscript! We were warned, when we arrived, that they were expecting ‘40 to 60 Italian campers’ that evening and we had seen them, earlier in the day, cycling on the opposite bank. We pitched our tent in what we hoped would be a quiet corner of the smallish field and waited. But when the cyclists arrived, no tents were erected. Some time went by – and then a couple of large white camper vans made there way up the tiny access lane and into the field, parking up tight together. And then two more. And so on, until we realised that for every cyclist there was a huge white camper van and driver. Why didn’t we think of that? It turned out that it is possible to get 22 camper vans into the field – though highly entertaining in the recently-flooded and still wet bits – but it did somewhat take the edge off our rural idyll!
Helen’s track of the day: Fat Boy Slim, Demons, as a marker that the stresses of the last 12 months are well and truly behind me.With thanks to Daniel again for putting this on my playlist for the trip!