The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Pleasure over pace along the Danube
There was plenty to stop Ben Ross and family in their tracks as they cycled along the Austrian shores of this fabled river
The Danube is, of course, a fabulously long river. Rising in Germany’s Black Forest, it sloshes eastwards through a total of 10 countries, before flushing into the Black Sea 1,700 miles later. On the way it ticks off a set of cities that reads like a greatest hits of places you really should get around to visiting one day: Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Belgrade, Budapest. Only the Volga, at 2,300 miles long, beats the Danube as far as European rivers are concerned – and it certainly doesn’t match it in terms of variety, the choice of scenery being Russia, Russia or Russia.
For cyclists, the most popular bit of the Danube starts in Passau, on the German side of the border with Austria, just at the point where it gets a boost from the River Inn, one of its tributaries. Lycra-clad enthusiasts think nothing of thrashing swiftly eastwards from here to Vienna, the Austrian capital, around 200 miles away, pausing only to check their Strava times and adjust their padded pants to prevent chaffing. It’s a stretch of river that forms part of EuroVelo 6, a cross-European cycle route running from Nantes, on France’s Atlantic coast, to Constanta in Romania, 2,300 miles away. Apparently, the full route takes people of “average fitness” around eight weeks to complete.
Why am I telling you all this? Simply to deliver a sense of perspective about my family’s achievement on our cycling holiday along an Austrian portion of this mighty river. In six days of cycling, we managed a pitiful 106 miles, or about six per cent of the Danube’s length. We averaged approximately 18 miles a day – the vast majority of them on the flat, or gently downhill – considerably less than my daily cycling commute in London. And lots of those miles weren’t even in the same direction. A quick consultation with Google Maps tells me that, had we been of “average fitness”, we could have knocked off the 45-mile quickestroute journey from the village of Grein, which was the furthest west we managed, to the Unesco-feted city of Krems, the most easterly outpost on our itinerary, in… er, four hours and 18 minutes.
No, Inntravel’s “Danube Explorer – A Family Cycle” holiday is certainly not about distance travelled, nor is it about whizzing at full tilt through the great cities set along this fabled watercourse. Instead, our route meandered through Austria’s verdant Wachau Valley, which lies around 50 miles to the west of Vienna, a wonderful concoction of green-clad hills, agricultural plains, apricot groves and terraced vineyards, punctuated by an absurd number of fabulously turreted castles.
The trip nevertheless provided exactly the sense of dynamism that young teenagers – my sons are 14 and 11 – require in order to enjoy themselves. As we looped and doglegged along the Danube’s shores, there was always a fresh goal to be achieved: a lake to be swum in, a lunch to be enjoyed, a schloss to be visited, or a hotel to be checked-in to before dinner. It’s just that, thankfully, these goals weren’t measured in miles per hour, but in units of pleasure.
In the process, I learnt that slow holidays might sound easy, but they require meticulous preparation. First the logistics: our bike hire and transfers by train from Vienna were all taken care of by Inntravel, which also arranged for our luggage to be passed between hotels by taxi, freeing us up to pedal with just the bare necessities (sun cream, swimming costumes, bottles of water) in our panniers, which were decked out in the light-blue livery of Donau (Danube) Tourism. (We saw plenty of fellow “Donau” travellers en route, marked out by the colour of their bags, and began to think of them as a sort of friendly slow-mo cycling club.)
Inntravel also supplied a fat folder of briefing notes that was at first glance slightly intimidating, a minutely catalogued set of instructions governing every twist and turn of our proposed route, with descriptions of possible diversions, places to stop and eat, river crossings and the best swimming places. There were even sections (happily never called upon) titled “nine easy ways to Essentials
Slow-holiday specialist Inntravel (01653 617000; inntravel. co.uk) offers the Danube Explorer self-guided cycling holiday for families from £995 per person based on two adults sharing and from £260 per child when sharing parents’ room, including seven nights’ b&b in fourstar hotels, five dinners, luggage transported between three hotels, high quality bicycle hire and cycling accessories, river cruise Dürnstein to Spitz, cycling maps and route notes. Flights to Vienna are extra: there are flights to Vienna from a wide range of UK airports with easyJet, BA, Austrian Airlines and Eurowings. Return rail/taxi transfers from Vienna Airport (out/home 1hr 50min) cost £350 for family of four. Electric bikes are available for adults for a supplement of £58 per person. The holiday operates May 6-October 8 2017 (start any day).