October 7, 2012
Wobbling with the beery people: Passau-Munich
THREE RIVERS come together in Passau. And they don't tell you straight away which is which. And since at least two have bike paths, and both are signposted only to local destinations, it wouldn't be hard to pick the wrong one.
Which is what you think I did. Except that I didn't. Well, not for long, anyway. Maybe a hundred metres and a single bridge before I realised I was on the Inn and not the Danube. The Danube is on the other side of town.
Back in Macedonia, if your memory goes that far, you'll remember a delightful couple from Munich who were heading for the Albanian coast before returning to Germany. I had an invitation to visit them and the plan was to follow the Danube as far as Deggendorf and then turn off down another river, again with a path, that would lead into the middle of Munich. It was a a dog-leg but it's a measure of what lengths I'll go to to avoid buying a map.
A terribly serious woman ran the hotel where I stayed in Passau. I can't fault her for her excellent English but I can for her obsession at not quite answering questions. So, when I asked if Munich was north or south of the Danube - another outcome of my penny-pinching attitude to buying a map I thought I didn't need - she wouldn't say. She didn't know but she didn't like to say so in front of a foreigner. So the conversation went on the lines of:
"What is an elephant?"
"It eats buns."
"Yes, but what is it?"
"Africa."
"Yes, yes, but..."
Except, and I point this out for those who have been for a hard ride today and may not be at the height of lucidity, we weren't talking about elephants. That was just an illustration.
In the end, she printed a faint and spidery diagram from her computer which showed a wiggly line from Deggendorf to Munich and represented the river and its path. I hope I didn't seem less than grateful for something I had long worked out for myself. I think I must have done, though, because an hour later there was a knock at my door and the woman had
returned with a sad-looking cyclist in tow. Everything about him sagged. His face had sagged, his clothes sagged, and his shorts drooped. He was wearing a yellow reflective jacket and holding a blue helmet that dripped on the floorboards.
"This man says you must go to Deggendorf and ride from there," the woman said with that confusion of "must" and "should". The heron-shouldered man produced as an exhibit nodded wearily and wished he could be somewhere else. Like in bed. He had had a hard day and now, I'm sure, he'd been subjected to a 20-minute interrogation before being hauled to my room as evidence.
So, I did ride to Deggendorf, and it's no fault of either the man or the woman that it rained all the way. It rained katten und hunden, or whatever the German was. And I got to Deggendorf under a less than summery sky and dripped into a restaurant for anything, anything, please, so long as there's lots of it and it's hot.
And there I decided to call it a day. The weather was changing and due to get worse. I had more mountains ahead and I'd planned to take a train when I reached them, to get home before cold nights really took a grip. Today's rain made the temptation overwhelming. Deggendorf had a station. A quiet one, because the man operating the signals abandoned his post to translate the automatic machine which was the only way to buy a ticket. If, on a couple of trains, I could get to Munich, I could ask about trains home. It would have been perfect to have ridden to my door and say I'd cycled to Istanbul and back. But, realistically, we were already in October and November in the central mountains of France was more than my summer sleeping bag and, indeed, my morale could cope with.
Munich was in the last day of Oktoberfest, the giant beer festival. The station was full of people in traditional dress - lederhosen or blue pleasant dresses with pumped-up short sleeves and diving necklines - and even more who could no longer walk straight.
It took 30 minutes to reach the head of the queue for inquiries and then a further 40 minutes, and the attention of two reservations women, to find me a succession of trains home. Travelling on a bicycle is simple but travelling with one can be darned tricky. It took seven trains and an overnight halt to get back.
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