Life on the river, it’s easy
Hops on a cruise as it winds its way from Amsterdam to Budapest - enjoying the mesmerising pace, fantastic scenery and amazing food along the way.
Deborah Sloan
The flamboyant and courageous among us demand oceans. The more introspective prefer rivers: slow moving, intimate landscapes, centuries of history.
On a river cruise, the living is easy. Especially aboard Avalon Waterways’ Passion as it placidly winds through the 69 locks between Amsterdam and Budapest - or Budapest and Amsterdam, if you prefer - on the Rhine and the Danube.
I preferred the former, along with 159 other passengers and 55 crew, beginning on a crisp April day. I unpacked once in my cosy bolt hole and sailed for 15 days through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and, finally, Hungary before I even thought about the suitcase hidden under the bed. It’s hard to beat Amsterdam in April that’s when the vast fields of tulips bloom. The bands of colour stretch past the chartered bus window for those of us who’ve signed up for the Keukenhof Gardens tour.
And that is the beauty of these small river cruise tours. You can do as much or as little as you like. You can take the extra tours offered each day - in Avalon Waterways’ case, paying about 50 euros (NZ$77) or so - or stick to the included guided tours of every city/ town/village/ruin you encounter along the 15-day way.
You actually don’t even have to leave the boat. Sit in the comfort of your cabin, or the lounges both fore and aft, or up on the top deck, or in the dining room for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and watch the world go by. And what a world - ancient castles rear up on rocky hillsides, ancient villages squat solidly at their bases, church steeples punctuate like exclamation points. Ignore the occasional car (and the sumptuous surroundings of the Avalon Princess) and you could be sailing through a Renaissance landscape, even a medieval one.
And since the number of passengers is small, you soon make friends to spend time with. Avalon is known for its good mix of nationalities, unlike some cruise lines that advertise almost solely in America or Britain.
And then there’s the food. Full cooked breakfast or just a quick danish, a carved roast at every luncheon or just a warming bowl of soup, then full-on dinners with a choice in three to four courses. The chef designs menus to match the countryside, so Germany saw bratwurst and sauerkraut, Hungary saw goulash and paprika chicken.
Oh - and the daily dose of cake. There’s a whole cake hour every day, lodged about halfway between lunch and dinner. And should you get peckish in the middle of the night, there’s one small lounge constantly stocked with cookies, doughnuts and danishes. Coffee and tea, too, of course.
Then there’s the wine - or beer, should you prefer. Endless glasses at lunch and at dinner. Indeed, champagne showed up more than once on the breakfast buffet. Plus there’s the ridiculously cheap daily happy hour in the lounge. And sometimes demonstrations of more foodstuffs and alcohol as beforedinner entertainment. And music and lectures and documentaries and varied amusements to suit the passing parade.
Amid all these calories, a world you would never see otherwise floats by. You sail mainly at night so you can disembark and explore with knowledgeable guides tiny cobblestoned towns of medieval buildings and fortresses and Napoleonic cannonballs lodged willynilly. Or antique musical instruments in a museum housed in a 1000-yearold building with remnants of original frescoes gazing down. Or make comparisons between one town’s plague monument with the next. Or one town’s castle with the next. Or one town’s cathedral with the next. Or one town’s shopping with the next.
Some of these are places so obscure, the names are hard to retain: Miltenberg, Bamberg, Durnstein. You see a few big cities - Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne, Nuremburg, Budapest - but mostly it’s just small places, built in stone with marks on the walls to show the height of various floods over the centuries.
It’s life on a river. And for two weeks, you live life at a meandering, mesmerising pace.
The writer travelled on her own dime.