The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘It felt like being adrift in the Med or Adriatic’
On the clear blue waters of Lake Constance, Mike MacEacheran discovers the secret pleasures of inland island-hopping in Germany
In autumn, bobbing in the middle of Lake Constance, where the sun arcs from the foothills of western Austria and vineyards of southern Germany into Switzerland, you could swear you were adrift in the Mediterranean or Adriatic. The meditative blues are the same, the rigging on the single-masted ships are the same, but the difference is the views, framed by a distant horizon of mountains, that few Brits ever see.
Did you know that Lake Constance, or the Bodensee, as German speakers call it, has a baker’s dozen of islands? I certainly didn’t, and slipping into this scene, by virtue of a Swiss train from Zürich to Romanshorn and onward across the border into Germany by ferry, I realised what a tantalising prospect it all was.
Scheduled boats ping-pong along the fractured lakeside more efficiently than they do in Greece or Croatia; there is a succession of half-timbered towns to discover; as much Côte d’Azur style as you can shake a stick at; and an island for each mood. Plus, down here, the speciality is creating fernweh, the German essence of pining for unseen places. Admittedly, Lake Constance is less about fanfare, more about subtlety, and I’d decided to take advantage of the area’s lack of all comers. Somewhat inexplicably, this watery wonderland is peripheral on German travel itineraries and neglected by both regular visitors to central Europe like me – and by locals, too. If you have been in the Black Forest or elsewhere in
Bavaria, you’ll know the country’s most romantic towns can feel overwhelmed. Not so here.
On my first night in Konstanz, on the lake’s western side, I stayed at the exquisite Steigenberger hotel, a onetime monastery on Dominicans Island. I wondered why the waterfront terrace was empty, despite the lake’s riviera glow. “Pah!” said manager Thomas Swieca, dismissively. “Most Germans couldn’t pinpoint us on a map. Tonight, the lake is yours.” The pleasure of being part of its secret was immense.
Lake Constance is fed by the Rhine and encircled by mostly sloping foothills, burnt green in the summer and snow white in the winter. The part I had started my trip on, in the lake’s western reaches, is known for Mainau island, an ornamental botanical garden invaded by perennials and alpine flowers. Like an Alcatraz with azaleas, it’s wild enough that you can get lost amid an arboretum of unbroken Chinese redwoods, then find sheep grazing in the shade of the lakefront vineyard.
The Germans love their forests – the national obsession is so great that, like the Japanese with shinrin-yoku, they embrace waldeinsamkeit, or solitude in the forest – and it’s not uncommon to see an extended family surrounded by drooping branches, capturing a photograph. In the Mediterranean, I often find myself peering at ruins and dusty information panels. This was different. Stretching my eyes across Mainau’s meadowsweet landscapes was far more rewarding.
There is little chance of staying in Mainau’s showpiece baroque castle. It’s the home of Count Björn Bernadotte, who co-runs the place with Countess Bettina Bernadotte of Wisborg, but there are restaurants and cafés with plenty of old-school beer garden identity to linger at in T-shirt weather. Spend the day as I did, and there is more than enough time for a mustardsmeared bratwurst and steins of beer in the sun.
As the ferries chugged between the island and borderlands of central Europe, I plotted my next move from the quayside. The challenge for the time-pressed traveller is to work out what to miss. There is Reichenau, a monastic island known for its tilled fields and Unesco-worthy abbey with bicycle paths to explore it all. Then, Triboldingerbohl, an uninhabited marsh island that forms part of the Wollmatinger Ried wetland wildlife reserve. Here, the freshwater is home to bolshy whooper swans and grey herons; the reed-belted shores the haunt of curlews, tits and red-tufted pochards.
The next morning, I opted to catch the MS Karlsruhe along the lake’s northern bank towards the island of Lindau, stopping off in the toy box town of Meersburg. Here, vineyards pitch towards the lake and the wines, cheap by anyone’s standards at around €3.50 a glass, are an invitation to take the rest of the day off. There is a fourmile wine hiking trail through the vineyards, but I made do with a mosey around its Disney castle (the oldest in Germany, I was told) and sampling tongue-twisting white wines such as Spätburgunder Weissherbst at the august Staatsweingut Meersburg above the harbour. When the sun came out, its vineyards took on a whole different look, the deep dark grooves of green meeting the brilliant blue of the lake head-on. Before it was too late, I caught the last ferry east. A few hours of exploration that day justified another glass on deck.
Only by boat do you really appreciate the idiosyncratic port towns and islands and by the time I’d reached Lindau that night, fishermen sat silently on the quayside and the town’s courtyards were ghostly quiet. It was in sharp contrast to the following morning, when the island took on a regatta-like feel and the lighthouse and Bavarian Lion sculpture that bookend the harbour began to draw a
‘Most Germans would struggle to pinpoint us on a map. Tonight, the lake is all yours’
trickle of like-minded tourists. Like I did, they surely felt as if they’d discovered the island town for themselves.
And what a place to discover. If Lake Constance is where you can fill up on nice-as-pie history, culture, food and wine without the crowds, then lakelocked Lindau is its honeypot. There is much to recommend here: take in a puppet opera show; join the locals in Lindenhofpark with a boozy picnic; stroll the promenade with the seagulls. Or do as I did. Sit in a waterside café, as though suspended in time, looking out to the lake and absorbing its spooling blues so you can take them home with you.