Geoff Brock & Bruce Gamble
         
     
 

Passau
Well I gather that we are going to have to change ships! I have been bombarded with texts from WSM, my Daddy and the other bears, Walter and Colm who are all very worried at the prospect that I might end up with new cabin mates who may not treat me well. Apparently they have also been pestering G&B to seek assurances that I will get to the new ship safely with them, even if it takes physical force! What do they take me for? Don't they know that I am more than capable of taking care of myself and exploiting every opportunity to my advantage. For all they know, I could take up with a rich widow if I stay on this ship and that will take care of us all for evermore! Actually, Walter did suggest another scenario if all else failed. He had clearly had one too many sherries at lunch time and told me that I should nab one of the rich widows and demand a ransom. How very unsubtle!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sunday 27th April 2014
  

Today turned out to be quite a surprising one and a real highlight of our holiday.

We had breakfast slightly later than usual. We had already decided to take things easy and mooch about the pretty town of Passau, so there was no rush. The majority of our fellow travellers were up early for their longish excursion to Regensburg, which is where we should have been this morning, had our ship not been stopped short because of low water levels in the river ahead. A notice at reception stated that the "all aboard" time would be 17:30, although it was still very uncertain that we would be going anywhere even then.
Passau is in a beautiful setting at the junction of the Danube, Inn, and Ilz Rivers.

 
The Inn river (above) has a distinctive green colour caused by glacial melt.
The colour is more obvious in this picture of a Great Crested Grebe which was swimming in it.
 
We strolled about the old city taking in the sights. There were many narrow pedestrian streets and speciality shops selling traditional clothing. Why so many of them, we thought, and the prices weren't cheap either. We saw the markers on the buildings for the numerous floods caused by the three rivers. Some of the marks dated back to the early 16th century. In addition to horrible floods, old town Passau has seen the Romans, Charlemagne's troops, the crusaders, the Turks, and Napoleon's legions. For 600 years, Passau was the largest sovereign bishopric and the Bishops of Passau were very wealthy, powerful and independent of the emperor.

We began to spot the odd person, then groups of people, dressed in traditional costume.
Could today must be some sort of special occasion in the town, we wondered?
 
A thought for Willam Bear!
 
St. Stephan's Cathedral
 
 
Passau's cathedral has Europe's largest church organ, with 17,774 pipes and 233 registers.
Unfortunately, we couldn't go in to see it because of all the activity in and around the place.
By now, we were sure that something big was about to take place in the small town!
 
 
 
 
 
Lederhosen everywhere!
 
Our suspicions were confirmed. Something big WAS happening in Passau today. This was not some small, local parade. It was huge. There were visiting marchers from everywhere in Germany and beyond. We started to film the procession and after forty minutes of filming it still showed no sign of coming to an end! What a shame that our cruise director hadn't seen fit to tell everybody about such a major festival in Passau. As many people told us later, it would have persuaded them to stay put, rather than go all the way to Regensburg. When challenged, he told us that the coaches had been ordered and paid for and would otherwise have been empty... hmmm, not good enough, Mr Cruise Director.
While Bruce was taking the video, Geoff took these stills (which can be viewed as a slideshow).
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
And still it went on, in a different street!
 
 
 
 
 
By lunchtime, the procession seemed to be over and all the participants were going to pubs and restaurants to eat and to drink beer.

We returned to the ship for our lunch and were quite surprised to see that the notice at reception had been changed.

The "all aboard" time was now 14:30 instead of 17:30. It looked like the river level ahead was now deemed to be deep enough for us to proceed!
(but what about people who has seen the original sign and decided to leave the ship for a full day, we wondered?)

We decided to make the most of the two hours we had left and to do a bit more exploring.
We crossed the Danube via this bridge with a view to walking up the hill on the other side.
 
 
 
 

We didn't go all the way up the hill, but we got far enough to get some lovely views.

We met some of our fellow travellers en-route who were unaware of the revised sailing time.
They were very grateful to us for passing on the new information about our earlier than expected departure.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

At 2.30pm promptly, the Scenic Diamond sailed.
Later we had a special Bavarian feast.
We spent the rest of the day relaxing and enjoying the scenery.
 
 
Video: Kachlet Lock
 
 
The one bit of disappointing news that evening was that we would have to move to a new ship the following day. Our ship, the Scenic Diamond, was now 24 hours behind where it should have been. The plan for tomorrow was that we would arrive in Regensburg in the morning, where we would have time to explore. After lunch we would be taken by coach to Nuremberg for our planned city tour. Thereafter we would be taken to our new ship, the Scenic Sapphire in Nuremberg, from where our cruise would continue on schedule.
 
 
©Geoff Brock and Bruce Gamble