Langos via leipzig: Steering the Danube

We dropped down out of Czechia from a height of a thousand metres to around five hundred metres in one short morning’s drive and our nights went from cold, and, at times, frigid in Czechia, to warm again, in Germany. We didn’t realise we’d climbed that high: the ascents and descents seemed inconspicuously gentle, or we may well have been focusing so much on avoiding the ubiquitous potholes that we didn’t get time to notice the inclines.

Since then we’ve been traveling the river valleys: the Danube, the Main and the Rhine. Despite the wrap, the lyrics, and the music, when the Danube rolls into town it is quite often the ugly duckling of the three of them. In Vienna it is canaled, its edges industrial, it is concrete-coloured and sullen in its movements. There it is probably at its ugliest. In Bratislava it is murky and not heaps happier. At Passau, it merges with the Inn, and frequently breaks its bank and floods.

But, out of the cities, into the country, at little spots like Vilshofen, the Danube, can seem almost pretty. From our Stellplatz we looked across it to neat little farms perched every few hundred metres along the opposite bank and the river water between was pleasant, even peaceful. If not blue.

At that spot, too, we learned a little about the barges, and the barge men and barge women, who constantly ply the waters of the Danube.

A husband and wife team from the Netherlands moored just metres from our van. They live aboard their barge, the Gitana, which is their only home, all of its 102 metres of working body, with its 3 metre draft. Their neat little home at the back of the boat, below steerage, is lined with pretty café curtains and pots of red geraniums. Above deck they store their bikes, and their car, which they are able to crane off and on at various spots along the river.

They had, just that morning, taken on a new load of 1,000 tons of maize at Passau. It had taken them all day just to load and move on to this mooring at Vilshofen, where they were waiting for a pilot to lead them through the next lock section of the Danube as the captain’s license did not cover that particular stretch. They were to load another 800 tons of maize in Regensburg enroute to the Netherlands, but as the Danube is running low this season that is all they were likely to carry this trip, even though their maximum capacity is around 2,450 tons.

A busy pair. They were up and gone at five the next morning. Their lives and their livelihood completely dependent on the Danube and the cultivation along its banks.