Fairytales on the Rhine: Barges before bedtime !

After a couple of solid weeks on the road we have cycled ourselves into good condition. The first few weeks of any cycling tour are about working into a rhythm on and off the bike.

The Rhine River is a living beast: Hungrily cutting a swathe across Germany. Tearing up mountains, swallowing the landscape, creating deep gorges. It’s loud, raucous and merciless, this is a working river.

Bullet-like barges of incredible size loaded with gas, gravel and containers of goods of all types, push earnestly against the turgid flow.

The boy inside the man imagines the rich life of a river barge Captain, but then, the history of the Rhine does lend itself to fairytales.

At Oberwesel Camping they still had our details on file from when we camped here years ago. Down at the rivers edge where we camped, below the towering cliffs, the river echos, booming across the landscape. On the far eastern side of the river, below the escarpment, goods trains roar past looking like the Australian painter Jeffery Smart’s painting “Container train in the Landscape” has come bursting into life.

Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and any other homeless princesses, there’s a Castle on the Rhine waiting for you. Perhaps the castle comes with its own resident prince or princess to keep you company. Pfalzgrafenstein Castle, Rhinesrien Castle, Rhinefels Castle; history, romance and myth mingle easily here. At Loreley Rock they tell the ageless story of the Sirens, those beautiful and apparently dangerous women singing sailors to their death.

In Bingen we move away from the river into a fertile landscape of grain crops small garden allotments and poppy fields pulsating with life, at times the beauty is incomparable I forgive Cottonwood flowers falling on us like summer snow, even though the result is sometimes clogging up the bikes’ drive train adding to my daily maintenance.

The simple reality is , we are just two of hundreds of Sunday cyclists moving through the landscape, adding our own uncomplicated attraction to the expanding vista .