Bavaria, Germany: A five-country pleasure cruise across Europe to the Rhine-Danube Canal

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Bavaria, Germany: A five-country pleasure cruise across Europe to the Rhine-Danube Canal

By Alison Stewart
The Amabella: The entire cross-continental journey offers 68 locks and 600 bridges.

The Amabella: The entire cross-continental journey offers 68 locks and 600 bridges.Credit: APT

It's not for the claustrophobic. In the beginning, there's light, but slowly, with a great screech of metal, we descend into darkness as if into a gigantic concrete coffin whose slimy walls are only centimetres from our river ship.

Metre by metre we sink, the equivalent height of a three-storey building, until the moss-covered walls fade to black and we are wedged in blindness for what seems an eternity. Our concrete coffin is 12-metres wide, only 50 centimetres wider than our ship. Massive metal gates trap us fore and aft. It's hard not to tremble at the weight of water that presses on the gate behind us.

Finally, after up to 30 minutes, the huge metal jaws of the guillotine-style, 126-tonne lock gate in front of us open and we are released from another giant lock.

There are the charming locks of the French countryside and then there are these – the 16 concrete behemoths of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal.

They range in height from a relatively modest 5.3 metres, to 17, then 19, then almost 25 metres for the three highest that hunker down on either side of Europe's continental divide. These monsters bear the Wagnerian-sounding names – Leerstetten, Eckersmuhlen and Hilpoltstein.

Credit: Shuttershock

Open your cabin curtains at night at your peril during the traverse for you will face nothing but a grim wall of devilish concrete, accompanied by a shrieking soundtrack as the metal guides within the lock's concrete walls guide the ship up or down.

The job of the locks is to heave ships up and over the divide from the Danube River and drop them down again into the Main and Rhine rivers. At 406 metres, the continental divide is the highest point on earth reached by watercraft travelling from sea level.

Its name suggests a narrow waterway high in the Alps where ships have somehow been deposited to sail between snow-bedecked peaks overlooked by Gothic castles and the dark woods of Brothers Grimm fairytales.

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Credit: Shutterstock

Our continental divide is nothing so dramatic, though there are bucolic green fields, mist-shrouded coniferous and deciduous forests, happy ducks, late-summer ripening cornfields and birdsong aplenty. (The divide itself should be marked, you imagine, by a great monument. Instead, there's a humble granite wall with "I love you baby" graffiti-ed on the west-facing side).

What we are effectively doing however, is climbing a giant's watery stairway, if not to heaven, then at least to the highest navigable point of the Bavarian Plateau.

This 171-kilometre-long canal through Bavaria from Kelheim to Bamberg, which remained a frustrating dream of kings and emperors for 1200 years, is the single most important stretch of water on our 1880-kilometre, five-country pleasure cruise across Europe. It takes about seven hours to negotiate at a maximum allowed speed of 12 km/h and 122 bridges cross it.

Credit: Shutterstock

No rivers, of course, cross the watershed but the Danube and the Main/Rhine rivers come tantalisingly close – 1.5 kilometres, before coquettishly curling away from one another. Then there are geographical impediments like the 1000-metre Swabian Alps and swampy ground that bedevilled the likes of Charlemagne in 793AD and Germany's Ludwig I in 1835 when they tried a spot of canal building.

So it's a remarkable feat of engineering that has enabled our river ship, the 135-metre-long AmaBella, to climb the stairs of the Danube, going upstream from Budapest to a watery pinnacle, then traversing the European watershed before stepping downhill along the Rhine all the way to Amsterdam. It makes possible a journey from the Black Sea to the North Sea.

In fact, so difficult was the task, it was a stop-start affair that took 32 years. The RMD Canal only opened in 1992 and has probably been a huge factor in the boom in cross-continental river cruising.

We are on APT's 15-day Magnificent Europe river cruise that traverses a wide swathe of the continent from east to west, a watery grand tour through Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.

One of the highlights for me is this canal, which has appealed ever since I read A.J. Mackinnon's The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow. It's a charming account of how he journeyed from Shropshire to the Black Sea, not on one of these luxury river ships but in his little sailing/rowing boat.

Though he travelled in the opposite direction to the AmaBella, entering the canal at Bamberg, his "long sought-after goal" of crossing the divide struck a chord. His mum's tales of the canal caused him to imagine a waterway edging along precipices between glacial peaks with flights of staircases, which is how such an image entered my own imagination.

The locks he encountered "resembled your average-sized Soviet hydroelectric plant", and far from being allowed to tack on to powered vessels passing through, he was forced by the lock masters to haul little Jack de Crow onto a "bootwagen" alongside the lock and wheel her across.

He complained but, observing the size of the locks, perhaps to be penned in a concrete cavern with a swaying, grinding ship might not be for the faint-hearted (mind you, rowing from Shropshire to the Black Sea was probably not for the faint-hearted either).

Dining in style on the Amabella.

Dining in style on the Amabella.Credit: APT

Lock-fever mounts as we travel upstream along the Danube, entering the gorgeous stretch of the Altmuhl, where campers bask in the late summer light. Our cruise director Nevena Robertova hands out multiple sheets on locks and ports of call, technical information about the canal, names and heights of locks, and the main lounge is packed to hear historian Daniel Guertler explain the canal's history and workings.

Supplying water to the canal was the biggest problem. Every drop is pumped from the Danube from five pumping stations and each lock operates through an ingenious series of reservoir pools that utilise both gravity and pumps.

Canal locks use sliding gates while Danube and Rhine locks use swinging gates. The canal closes twice a year for maintenance and it freezes in winter. Its original purpose was cargo transport but this has been superseded by the thousands of river cruise ships that use it annually. And the canal environs are increasingly used for recreation – camping, cycling, swimming and hiking.

Someone asks Daniel what would happen if the AmaBella happens to spring a leak and sink. He cheerily advises us to sip a cocktail in the main lounge and wait to be rescued. The canal is only four metres deep and 55 metres wide at its widest. We also have the weird experience of sailing over rivers and roads in aqueducts high above Bavaria, the longest being 250 metres.

Our captain has admonished us to keep our heads and limbs inside the ship during lock negotiations but even in the dead of night as we enter and leave locks, cabin lights pop on and figures appear on balconies. The occasional naughty hand sneaks out to touch a lock wall (cold and slimy, I'm told).

River boats of all stripes line up to pass the locks. It takes a skilful and alert captain. Our sundeck (and its very pleasant heated swimming pool) is closed for the duration of the canal as low bridges threaten to slice the top off the ship. Even the wheelhouse retracts.

All up, the entire cross-continental journey offers 68 locks and 600 bridges. Nevena tells us the first locks will be excitement central, the last will be ho-hum. My take on locks is that if you're sick of locks, you're sick of life itself.

TRIP NOTES

FLY

Singapore Airlines flies daily to Budapest and Amsterdam from Sydney and Melbourne. See singaporeair.com/

CRUISE

Magnificent Europe 15-day Budapest-Amsterdam and reverse 2018 cruises cost from $7695 per person with a Fly Free deal for booking before November 30, 2017. Tours operate from March to December. See aptouring.com.au

MORE

traveller.com.au/cruises/river-cruises

Alison Stewart was a guest of APT

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