Europe @ 2.4 km/h (23 page)

This evening I’m off to the jazz pub Papa Joe’s Klimperkasten. A Cologne institution, Papa Joe’s has been around since the early Seventies. Two working pianolas endow the joint with period atmosphere but, work as hard as they might, they cannot upstage another pair, a singing accordionist and a trombonist who have merely to raise their eyebrows, wink or leer to raise a laugh. You can even criticise their clothes sense without hurting their feelings. They don’t care all that much, but then neither would you if you were made of wood.

646-651 km

The challenge of finding an affordable hotel in Bonn looked likely to drag on for hours, but then I had a lucky break. Upon asking at a three-star establishment that would normally have been too expensive for a long-distance traveller, I waited while the receptionist went to see the owner. She returned with good news. Not only could I stay, but he had insisted I be given ‘the nicest room in the house’.

This was an owner I had to meet. Leading me into his office, the receptionist introduced me to Herbert Bottger, a 60-year-old who beamed at me broadly from his wheelchair. Herr Bottger wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘I got my injury in Australia,’ he told me. He had lived there in the early Seventies and broken his spine on a return visit, in a car accident near Carnarvon, two years before the suicide attempt that left me a paraplegic. From time to time he returns to Australia, where his adult son still lives.

A leaflet on Bonn obtained from reception makes this city sound distinctly unsafe. At least five times in its 2000-year history all or most of it has been razed to the ground. Our friends the Norsemen burned it down in 811, and again eleven years later, just to make sure.

The most popular town boss was Elector Clemens August (1723-1761) who, we are told, ‘danced himself to death’. (No explanation is provided, but his sad fate can surely serve as a lesson to us all.)

Ludwig van Beethoven was born here in December 1770. On the street outside Beethovenhaus, which has been a museum since 1885, I gaze up at the first-floor room, hoping against hope that he might be in. Not a sound. The ticket seller on the ground floor — seeing that I wouldn’t take no or ‘His spirit is all around you’ for an answer — says the upstairs apartments are inaccessible to wheelchairs but, not to worry, the great man is always in the backyard. In a way she is right: there, in the garden, is the bronze bust of a shaggy-haired composer.

It is five o’clock now and it would be inexcusable if I left and just missed him. So, rather than idle, I go a-wandering into the parlour. Strange to say, it is full of empty seats arrayed in rows, as if in readiness for a concert, all facing the front of the room where a pianoforte stands with its lid auspiciously raised. Suddenly, music sweeps across the room, raising the hairs on the back of my neck a double octave, as it appears to be emanating from the piano. Now I’m no expert on classical music but that’s Beethoven, make no mistake.

When the last chord has announced its departure, I follow suit. True, my last glimpse is of a CD player behind the window curtain, but the music has left me in no mood to quibble. By six I am back on the pavement, a completely satisfied — and not a little spooked — audience of one.

659 km

Koblenz is a meeting place. Here, people from all over Germany meet to admire a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I on horseback and here, at Deutsches Eck (German Corner), the fast-flowing, coffee-coloured Rhine meets the slow-flowing and (Homer had the word for it) wine-dark Moselle.

663-664 km

‘Typical German,’ spat Hans, who owns the hotel where I’m staying in Koblenz, when a guest pushed past us this morning and occupied the hotel lift I’d been waiting for. I don’t think Hans said it to placate my wounded feelings, but rather because he finds his compatriots are often single-mindedly selfish.

But at lunchtime, seated at a mahogany table in one of the hotel’s bay window alcoves, I met a German of the opposite type: Johannes Weikamp, 81, a priest from Schonstatt, about 10 km out of Koblenz. Patre Weikamp, who did missionary work in South Africa for two decades and last year notched up 55 years as a priest, told me, ‘I have Parkinson’s. It is a very strange change’. And in his tremulous voice I thought I detected a dread of the future, of the wolf lying in wait along his path through the forest.

667-671 km

So fierce is the rivalry between Düsseldorf and Köln that it puts the odd divergence of view between Sydney and Melbourne in the shade. The rupture can occur over a beer. In Köln they drink Kölsch, in Düsseldorf Alt. Or at Karneval time, when in Köln they shout ‘Alaaf!’ but in Düsseldorf the cry is ‘Helau!’ Since both seem untranslatable into English, they must mean pretty much the same thing. Unless you hail from Düsseldorf or Köln …

Apparently the only thing that unites these cities is the Rhine. I will spend today, the midpoint of my journey across Europe, aboard a KD Line ship, after carting my luggage piece by piece 600 metres from the hotel down to the jetty. KD, in case you hadn’t guessed, stands for Köln-Düsseldorfer. Our ship, the
Stolzenfels
, was named after one of the many castles, or
Schlösser
, we will see today. This one, its turrets rising like periscopes out of dark green woods, was built as a customs fortress in 1250, destroyed in the 17th-century Palatinate War of Succession (the rights and wrongs of which I still have no fixed opinion on) and rebuilt in the 19th century.

Where I board at Koblenz, the Rhine is 200 metres wide. The number of kilometres upstream from the Swiss border, where the river enters Germany just north of Basel, is written on riverside markers spaced at kilometre intervals.

One of those happy coincidences that can occur to the long-distance traveller arises this morning. As the
Stolzenfels
skims grandly along, prompting me to wonder what aspect of this experience I could possibly enjoy more, I read these words penned by Rabelais,
¹⁹
‘The trees on the banks appear to be moving. Yet it is not they that move but we, with the movement of the boat.’ He was a very sharp observer, old Rabelais — and his impression rings just as true in Mitteleuropa as it ever did in France.

The cruise is a delight. An offshore breeze is blowing and the temperature on this sunny day, in the low 20s, is unseasonally warm for this wet, wet year. What is more, at one point I have the boat almost to myself. In the shadow of St Goarshausen, the largest castle ruin on the Rhine, the hamlet of St Goar is the most picturesque sight I’ve seen since Norway; and there have been more than a few of them. About 2.30 pm we come to fabled Lorelei, all appreciation of which is tarnished by the woman in front of me — and a German, no less — speaking aloud into her mobile phone. It is all I can do to resist leaning forward, detaching the instrument forcibly from her left ear and tossing it triumphantly into the swirling waters below.

Kilometre 541 places us at 50º 2' 32" N, according to a GPS unit consulted by Horst Sfering, a technologically fixated tourist from Munster. Minutes later, Horst’s GPS registers that we have crossed the 50th parallel of latitude and are now at 49º 59.9986' N. Perhaps it’s my newfound heritage stirring, but I find myself sharing this German love of precision. A little calculation shows we are — or then were — 3 metres, less than a second’s sailing time, south of the invisible line.

Just after 7 pm we tie up at Wiesbaden and, truth to tell, I’m apprehensive now. There is no taxi rank at the quay, and it’s several kilometres to the other side of town. This time the ‘successful traveller’ would have been stranded if not for a remarkable stroke of luck in the person of Peter Jaeger, a veteran journalist who has spent 46 years writing for
Stars & Stripes
, the newspaper of the US forces based here. At the pier to meet a friend who failed to show up, he offers me a lift to Wiesbaden’s hostel, or
jugendherberge
, about ten minutes away by the direct route.

But that is not the route we take. Peter is passionate about Wiesbaden’s architecture, particularly its neo-Classical heritage, most of which is original (bombs destroyed 40 per cent of the Aldstadt, or Old Town, in World War II, he tells me, but nothing outside the city ring-road). It is after eight when at last we reach the obscurely located hostel, and Peter slopes off to check that reception is still open. The car windows had been wound down to give me a better camera shot from a hill overlooking the city, and now the dark clouds unleash a full-scale
Sturm und Drang
performance. I scrabble in vain to find the right switch and when he returns, ten minutes later, Peter finds the ashtrays full of water and me well on the way to being drenched.

677-682 km

Fresh off the InterCity Express from Mainz, it doesn’t take me long to decide that Freiburg, like Bremen, is one of my favourite towns in all of Europe. The relaxed atmosphere of this modern city, which has made the transition from medieval university town without losing any of its character, wins me over immediately. Of course, part of Freiburg’s appeal stems from its proximity to mystical Schwarzwald, the Black Forest.

683-685 km

Saw a swastika worn in public this morning. An astounding sight, at least in the more enlightened west of the country, given that the symbol is banned in Germany. It was cunningly done, though, the top half of the symbol obscured by a one-finger ‘salute’, an emblem on the arm of a youth’s jacket, and he looking the neo-Nazi part, it must be said. But the whole design could be taken (as I’m sure he would have explained to the police if stopped and questioned) as giving Nazism the finger. On the other hand it might be construed as ‘I’m a neo-Nazi, fuck you’. I didn’t linger to ask which message
he
meant by it.

Augustinermuseum. It sounds less like a place worth seeing than a diary note on how I’ve been spending my time lately. August in a museum. But it is well worth the visit. A recent lift-out published by the local newspaper justly headlined this must-see attraction with its many treasures
Das Wunder
(The Marvel)
von Freiburg.

Housed in a former Augustinian monastery are a stunning collection of medieval artworks that would have touched the heart of Midas — among them reliquaries and orbs of gold, and a golden platter with two gold egg cups standing on it. Seeing such treasures stored up ‘where moth and rust corrupt’ naturally arouses a strong distaste when the wealth they represent could have done much to alleviate poverty. But we who gaze in awe at these marvellous things have the Augustinians to thank for both their aesthetic taste and their acquisitiveness.

687-690 km

Time to go a-wandering off into the Black Forest. I’ve booked ahead to a log cabin in Hebelhof with its own mountain-viewing terrace. Having discovered from experience that I can often stay in seemingly unsuitable premises — the only adaptation necessary being to the mindset of the hotelkeeper or guesthouse proprietor in question — I omitted to mention the small matter of my wheelchair.

The man who greeted me on arrival, Thomas, was taken aback. His first response, rather than an outright no, was amusing in retrospect, translated by his daughter as ‘I’ll have to talk to the owner’. It turned out Thomas
was
the owner.