#56 The Austrian Danube

I struggle on cycling down the Danube with cracked ribs and a badly bruised thigh.  The cycling is terrific and takes all the pain away, but the weather turns cold and wet.

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Friday 3 May 2019.  Linz · Lilienfeld |160 km|

Thursday  would have been a good day for cycling. It was cool, sunny and clear and without any wind for the entire day. But I chose to laze around my student digs for an extra day just to be doubly-sure I was properly on the mend, and so I wasted it. It’s probably good that I did because it gave me the opportunity to see a doctor and get the prescription for some strong pain killers for my fractured rib. I’d had to wait out the Wednesday to do that anyway, because Wednesday was a national holiday for May Day, and everything – but everything – was shut.

On Friday it was cold and it rained off and on all day, but this didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for being on the move again.  For the first 110 km I was rewarded with easy going riding, excellent scenery and a clearly-marked path to follow.  But, well, it did rain most of the way.

Overall, the Danube Cycleway – the 400 km section from Deggendorf (60 km upriver from Passau) to Bratislava at least, really is that good.  Especially in Austria.  There, it is clearly signposted as ‘R1 Donauradweg’ (‘Donau-rad-weg’, or Danube-cycle-path), and usually co-signposted as Eurovelo 6).  Of course there were industrial areas to pass through too, and sometimes the path diverged well away from the river itself, and there were still some idiosyncratic signage to contend with, but on the whole: very nice.  The cycling infrastructure in Austria is absolutely fantastic.  There were free council-provided ebike charging stations every 20-or-so kilometres along the path, and most Tourist Information Offices and your average bar (bierstube)/ café/ restaurant had them too.

I’d gotten a bit clever too.  Or at least I thought I had.  Before I checked out of Sommer Haus in Linz, I used the WarmShowers website to request stop-over accommodation at Ybbs, a town about 75 km down the river, for Thursday night and at Krems, 75 km further on, for the Friday.  This was in order both to force myself to slow down a little (I’ve been averaging 130  km per day so far), and also to put off having to test out my rib cage in the confines of a small tent for a few more days.  Well, the first guy, the one in Ybbs, just totally ignored me.  Never heard a peep out of him!  Apart from the affront, it turned out that this did not inconvenience me at all.  I had made excellent progress and was at Ybbs by midday and still feeling really fresh.  I messaged the guy to say I wouldn’t be stopping by after all and just pushed on.

Mauthausen, with it’s dark history as a WWII concentration camp, has successfully rehabilitated itself as a major tourist attraction.  There was an important  commemoration at the camp on the day after I passed through, and all the accommodation in Linz was fully booked out as a result, (including the place I was staying at, so I had been about to be kicked out anyway):

Picturesque all the way to Ybbs and on to Melk, where I took shelter for a while from the pouring rain under a Linden tree in the main square.

Looking at the map, I realised I could easily make it to Krems today and so I called Martin, who was to be my next host, and asked him if I could come a day earlier. He said sure, no problem; it actually suited him better.

Trouble is, I hadn’t exactly done a good job of scaling-in his location in relation to the river.  He had come up in the list for us Danube-riders,  so I’d just assumed he was maybe 5 or 10 km off the track at most.  Turned out his town of Lilienfeld is actually 41 km south of the river from the town of Melk, and then it’s another 45 km back to the river again to the downstream town of Traismauer.  Melk and Traismauer are only 53 km apart on the river (and all flat going along the Donauradweg); so basically I was making a 33 km hilly detour to go and stay with Martin for the night.

No big deal.  OK – the trip down was a hard slog on busy B roads in the pouring rain with 500m of climbing to do, but at least the trip back to the Danube was all along a dedicated bike path down the pretty valley of the River Traisen. (The Traisental Radweg).  It did teach me to be a bit more careful in getting the host’s location right in future though!

Martin is a high school PE and history teacher who is about to retire in June.  Then he’s heading off on his own cycling adventure across Russia to Vladivostok and across the USA from Los Angeles to Miami.  Along the way, he’ll be raising money for a charity that funds eye cataract operations in Somalia.  He’s only recently joined WarmShowers, as a backup for finding accommodation for himself on his big trip (he says the Couchsurfing website is much better), and I was just his second WarmShowers guest after a Chilean student last week.  If there’s one word that best describes Martin, it is “super-organised”.  He’s been planning his trip for 5 years and has it down to the nth degree, knowing each and every day’s exact route and the full details of where he’ll be eating and staying and what he will be seeing etc. etc. (and he says he’s even ridden the entire route already on google street view).

His home is a large rambling house he renovated himself, located in the centre of Lilienfeld next door to the police station and a hundred metres from the school where he’s taught for 40 years, which is part of the town’s 13th century abbey.  Besides the abbey, Lilienfeld’s other claim to fame, I’ll have you know, is that it was the location of the world’s first official Alpine Ski Race in 1905 (google it!).

Utterly knackered, I didn’t get in until 7pm, and we hared straight off to the only place in town still open on a Friday night, the local Turkish hamburger joint, before it too closed.  Martin kindly shouted me my burger and two big jugs of beer, and then we went back to his place and spent a few of hours chatting over a bottle of red (mainly me educating him on the facts of global warming).

Saturday 4 May 2019.  Lilienfeld · Örth an der Donau |164 km|

Another big day.  The weather started off overcast and cool enough, but soon after I rejoined the Danube it deteriorated to downright cold and wet.  And it stayed that way, getting more miserable as the day went on.  But the novelty of the scenery once again made it all worthwhile.

I stopped for a couple of hours at a riverside restaurant, where Ziggy got fed some electricity while I had a schnitzel and a Radler:

Tulln has a really weird sculpture:

Then it was more of the same (that is: good!) to Klosterneuberg:

And on to Vienna.  But…Whoa there!!

Vienna has some nice parts – well, I’m sure it does – but I didn’t see anything that inspired me to hang around, and so I moved on.  It took me quite a while to crawl on out of the city.  I must have missed a crucial turn somewhere, and found myself on the canal bike path instead of the main Eurovelo 6.  Once off the main path it can be hard to pick it up again.  But I managed it – crossed the bridge, below, on the eastern side of the city and found some of the correct sort of signage again:

The Danube cycle path along here is one big long Umleitung (diversion) from Vienna to the Slovak border.  This diversion heads off across the river flats on the northern (left) bank of the Danube onto floodplains/ wetlands that constitute National Park Donau- Auen.  The fact I saw not another soul for 30 km added to my anxiety that I was really headed in the wrong direction off out into the boondocks.  By this time (6 pm) it was down to 2°C with numbing rain squalls – and I was on a busy B road with a lot of speedy Austrian drivers on it too (to be fair, though, they did all give me a wide berth when passing).  So I stopped in the little town of Örth an der Donau at the first Zimmer Frei sign (loosely means ‘Bedroom Available’) I’d seen since well before Vienna.  This was Pension Sabine Steurer, where, for €37, I was able to spread out all my stuff in a big warm room to dry all my wet clothes and get a good night’s sleep.  Pity I just missed closing time for the local mini-mart and had to settle for a bourbon and coke dinner (Sabine donated the coke).

Sunday 5 May 2019.  Örth-an-der-Donau · Bratislava |46 km|

It was just sooo miserable, the weather, all night long and on in to the morning.  It was a real test of will to pack up, get back into my wet-weather gear and get back onto the bike.  I tried, I really did try to keep going, but my hands and feet were so numb after only 25 km that when I arrived at the town of Hainburg, I had to stop to thaw out in the not-so-warm built-in verandah of a café on the wharf.  After an hour and a couple of coffees, I still couldn’t thaw out properly, and I knew I couldn’t go on much longer.  The weather hadn’t improved at all as I reluctantly climbed back onto Ziggy and plodded off towards Slovakia.

Coming in to Bratislava, Slovakia:  That ahead is the “New Bridge” across the Danube that joins old Bratislava to new Bratislava.

I hunted around for accommodation in the constant drizzle in an almost catatonic state from my numbing extremities, and pretty soon ended up staying at Hotel Avance.  A guy who wrote a book about his travels (Steven Herrick: bratworst and bicycles) stayed there and reckoned it was OK (but then again, he mainly writes children’s stories!). I found it inept and dysfunctional, but OK too.

– ends –

#56.  Europe 2019.  Linz to Bratislava.  370 km

2019 Europe. The trip so far:  Maastricht to Bratislava |1,570 km|

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1,570 km travelled since Sunday 21 April, with 3 days of no travelling while recovering from fractured rib(s) in Linz.  13 days of cycling at 121 km /day – I may be pushing a bit too hard.
6,514 km total distance travelled on the bike