Wednesday 6th September 2023
Our hotel has one redeeming feature: a garden that goes down to the riverside with some tables and chairs. We got take-away pastries and coffee from a local bakery and ate in the garden looking across at the castle, a much better breakfast than whatever was on the buffet indoors.
Today we visited the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, also known as “Saxon Switzerland” in spite of having a landscape nothing like the Alps. It reminded me much more of other big European river valleys like the Rhine or the Danube. The distinctive features here are the towering sandstone cliffs, crags and stacks that emerge from the blanket of pine forest, having been left behind by some quirk of erosion.
On the east bank we visited the Bastei Bridge. It’s one of those places that has generated its own tourist infrastructure, so having parked your car you need to make your way past other car parks, park-n-ride bus stops, snack bars, more snack bars, hotels, gift shops, beer gardens, toilet blocks, more beer gardens and viewing platforms before you can finally join the crowd that has survived all this and made it to the natural wonder you have all come there to see.
And these are pretty wonderful crags, with utterly sheer drops down into the river on one side and pine forest on the other. The “bridge” is a 19th century stone structure built among some of the crags, early tourism. We also nosed around the remnants of a wooden medieval castle that once existed here. There’s not much left. It was clearly very defensible, but I’ve no idea why anyone would bother attacking it!
Then we split up, so Maureen, mum & dad could enjoy the half-hour stroll down from the crags to the village of Rathen on the bank of the Elbe. While I reversed the trek through the tourist junk to hop in the car and meet them there. The route was so circuitous it took me ten minutes longer to get to Rathen than the walkers! All good. After bumping into some frigid Germanic service in a hotel (“Do you have an English menu please?” “No.” Er… okay… so no interest in finding out what we’re after or whether you can help us? Just going to turn away and get on with your own business? Does the word “hospitality” not translate into German?) we enjoyed cheap n cheerful sausages in buns from a snack bar, along with a nifty drink called a “radler” that is essentially a very low-alcohol fruit beer.
Refuelled, we drove up to Hohnstein to nosey around the quiet little village and its castle-now-hotel, where we took an ice cream break before heading on to our second great edifice-over-the-Elbe for today: Koenigstein Castle on the western bank.
Koenigstein is just a gigantic fortification capping the whole crag-sided hilltop, truly enormous, with entire palaces, gardens and barracks built on top. We only really had an hour to mooch around, but I think that was enough. There are various buildings to look into if you’re keen, but the real reason to come here is just to marvel at how flippin’ huge the place is. And how far below you the snaking river Elbe is.
It was quite late by the time we finally made it back to Meissen. Dinner at a beer hall on the main square, Maureen had a lovely flammekuchen and I ate too much again (couldn’t resist some of the flammekuchen).
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