Day 37 - [R]hine River Cruise (Breisach; Black Forest), Germany

A walk in the Black Forest

Morning view from my cabin porthole

Today was a quiet day for touring, with only one official thing to do – visit the Black Forest (and, of course, sample the ‘real’ Black Forest Cake). The morning was given over to sleeping late and then preparing a blog entry, which I’ve fallen behind on. Because the day that I had to post was another quiet day, I had the post up by late-morning and decided to do the walk around Breisach that was recommended the evening before. The town centre is literally five minutes walk from the jetty and you could see the medieval church on the hill from the boat. Briesach is a small town right on the Rhine, surrounded by small towns in the river flood plains around it. All of these towns are probably mostly dormitory towns for the nearest city, Colmar. Certainly, Briesach was very quiet in the middle of the day when I visited.

Medieval church over-looking the Rhine, from the ship	Medieval church, as you enter the town of Briesach	Street scene of Briesach
One side of the main square/plaza in Briesach	The other side of the main square/plaza	The shopping district in Briesach?

The only real attraction in Briesach is to visit the huge church on the hill, around which the town was established in the 12^th century. As usual, it’s a bit of a climb up the hill following the old road. There’s also a staircase, which I later descended, but the walk up the road is definitely the scenic route.

The old city gate	The steep road up the hill to the church	Glyphs present a scene on the side of an old house I don’t know if they’re preserved originals or more recent additions
The view over the town from about half-way up to the Church	An old watch tower that also served as a prison	The street on top of the hill running away from the Church

Panorama of the view from the Church over the Rhine

The Church is very imposing and in very good repair for something that has been there so long. It’s still the town church and clearly its parishioners care for it. It didn’t appear to be open, though I suppose it was, but I’ve seen enough big churches already on this trip, I settled for respectful awe from the outside. I later saw a sign that had an English explanation that the Church was built on the Southern end of an earlier Roman fort/building. The footings of the remainder of the Roman construction were still visible in the surface of the plaza between the Church and the Rathaus.

The Church on it’s North side	The Church at it’s Eastern end	A fascinating display in the crypt?
The Briesach Rathaus (town hall) opposite the Church	An amazing sculpture in the square between the Rathaus and the Church	The view over Briesach from the Church plaza

After looking around the Church and admiring the view of the fantastically charming Briesach, I sauntered off on a ‘random walk’ through the little patch of town on the top of the hill. It was idyllic.

Tree-lined main street looking at the tower	The tower which has served various purposes and is now a memorial	A public garden overlooking Briesach Past its prime this late in the season
A cryptogram	I snapped this puzzle on the wall, thinking that I’d be able to translate the story on the plaque later. Unfortunately, the text is not big enough for Google Lens to see it as text. More unfortunately, there’s nothing immediately helpful on Google. While looking, I did stumble upon the fact that Briesach has been a place for nearly 4000 years and was specifically named for fortifications by a Roman Emperor in 396 BC.

I wandered back to the ship in easy time for a light lunch before heading out on my tour of the day – The Black Forest. This tour turned out to be a bit disappointing, overall. It involved a long bus ride to the Black Forest – deliberately long to take the scenic route, which was pretty wonderful actually. I wasn’t sitting by a window so couldn’t capture any images of the really spectacular views that we encountered. Then, when we got to our destination, Hofgut Sternen, there were four buildings, all aimed at tourists, and three very tame tour activities.

The contrived village square at Hofgut Sternen	Another view of the village square	A huge, old hotel, still operating as a hotel
The train bridge running overhead	The train bridge from another angle You might see two build dates: 1926 and 1946	A Christmas market being erected under the bridge arches

My chosen activity was a walk in the Black Forest. This was a little disappointing too, as it was going to be no more than 30 mins in total (because of the final activity and the need to drive all the way back again). However, the guide for the walk led us a short way up a steep, slippery trail beside the Ravena river/creek and then said we could go further if we chose but be careful and be back by 4:30 pm (it was 3:45 pm, when she said that). I pressed on a bit watching the clock to allow for a timely return. It turned out that there just wasn’t much further to go before being back on the road we’d driven in on. Still the walk along the Ravena was very satisfying from an experience point-of-view.

Scenes of the Ravena river/creek - it was surprisingly loud (to me) down on the river
Scenes of the gorge, trying to show how deep it is and how tall the forest is

I got back from my walk up Ravena in loads of time to look around the big tourist souvenir shop. I found a couple of grandfather clocks I would have loved at home. Unpriced, so they fell into the ‘if you have to ask, you can’t afford it’ category. (One of the other activities was a demonstration of making cuckoo clocks and there were loads of them in the shop too.) I still had lots of time, so I did the other walk (stroll) that had been on offer – down to the local chapel. St Oswald’s is totally quaint and an archetypal old German church, in my mind. There were a couple of things that were a bit unusual about it, which I couldn’t reconcile without a guide. The sundial on the wall is the height of optimism, in my view. The sun must rarely get down to the bottom of this gorge all through the year, I think. The other disturbing thing was to discover an ossuary under the church. I asked one of the guides about it when I got back and there isn’t any story to explain it.

St Oswald’s in the distance	The main entrance to St Oswald’s	Historical explanatory material
The (well-underused) sun dial	The locked entry under the altar	An ossuary of real human remains

Making a Black Forest Cake

The final tour event in the Black Forest was a presentation showing how to make a Black Forest Cake and why it was special to this area. The presenter, a young woman pastry chef, was a real delight in her presentation and she was also clearly very skilled, making the cake assembly seem like nothing. We all had a piece of the traditional Black Forest Cake. It was lovely, but involved much more cream than I remember.

The drive home from the Black Forest went under horschsprung – Stag’s Leap – and I had an explanation of the stag’s head on the t-shirt I’d bought in Briesach as a souvenir of my Black Forest adventure. (Just as well I did too, as the offerings in Hofgut Sternen were not appealing and too expensive. Someone commented that Hofgut Sternen translates to ‘tourist trap’ in English.) The drive home was supposed to take 50 minutes, but ended up taking just over 90 minutes because of traffic jams near Frieburg, the bigger city between Hofgut Sternen and Briesach. Our delay delayed the Captain’s cocktail party on board that night, which preceded the German-themed buffet dinner, at which some of the staff wore traditional German outfits.

Daily facts: Location: [R]hine River (Briesach, the Black Forest) Temp: 12 Weather: Sunny, patches of cloud