Day Four - Marksburg and the Rhine Castles

Today we started by docking in Koblenz where the Rhine converges with the Moselle River which contains a large statue of William I from 1897 to comemorate the unification of Germany.  It also contains three panels from the Berlin Wall for the same reason.  From there, we took a brief bus ride to the base of the mountain on which Marksburg Castle was originally built in the 12 century.  It is the only castle on the Rhine that was not destroyed by war and seige, but did have some decay from negligence that required renovations.  To reach the entrance to the castle walls, you must climb a switchback path at a 45 degree angle until you reach the outer walls of the castle.  Looking at the castle from the river, it is amazing that we made it up there and it no wonder that it was never destroyed by war.

From there, we made our way to the sun deck of the ship to get great seats for the cruise through a castle-filled section of the Rhine called the Rhine Gorge.  Every time we came around a curve in the river, we saw a castle, a castle ruins, a medieval church, an old town, or a combination of all of them together!

Every castle or town had a story attached to it that Rene, our program director, was happy to share.  I took more pictures than I can count while everyone else helped me by taking notes of the stories of each location.  There was the story of the brothers - both in love with the same girl - that end in a duel and a death by broken heart.  There was the zigzag area of the river that caused the crashes of many ships and was blamed on the siren song of a girl that was believed to sit on top of a cliff and sing.  The cliff is the Lorelei, named after her because of the legend that when she caused the death of a German prince and the people were going to capture her, the Rhine created a wave that rose to the top of the cliff and washed her into the river forever.


We had a great time with the cruising and spent many hours on the top of the ship watching the castles as well as the varied landscape.  There were so many vineyards alongthe river and up along the sides of the gorge.  I saw many ways to use terrace farming in this land.  There was one mountaintop that appeared strange to us because it was being stripped of land with heavy equipment carrying large piles of rock down the mountain.  Rene explained that the mountain is not actually German property.  It belongs to the Netherlands after the German sold it to the Netherlands for one Deutschmark in 1953 after the devasting flooding so that the land could be used to build up the sinking landscape.  While it was not pretty to see - in fact, it was quite sad to see the mark on the land - it was an act of charity in an attempt to save the Rhine that impacts them all.

We learned that the Rhine has long been an important method of moving goods and that the towns along the river were often very wealthy because of the trade they could share farther inland.  Today, after completing a series of canals and widening the river in many areas, cargo and passenger ships can sail from the North Sea to Black Sea.  The most common goods transported are coal, oil, sand, gravel, and container ships.  It was like a super highway on water!

Tomorrow we will tour Heidelberg and Speyer, so I better get some sleep!