GERMANY: A MOTORHOME JOURNEY

The following article has been published in the MMM (Motorhome Motorcaravan Monthly), the UK's premier motorhome magazine. It describes a motorhome journey through Germany, following the line of major rivers.

Great rivers often provide a focus for great journeys. They give a sense of direction with constantly changing viewpoints, the fascination of river life and riverside towns, opportunities for fishing, boating and swimming, level ground for camping and riverside paths for walking and cycling. They often form the frontier between countries, ancient fortified cities have grown up where the river could be forded or bridged and in places far from the sea, sandy river banks are an excellent substitute for the beach. Europe is rich in opportunities for river-guided exploration: the Rhine, Danube, Loire, Rhône, Elbe, Moselle, Tisza and Oder come to mind at once and there are many more, with their tributaries and linking canals. It will be marvellous when Europe's longest river, the Volga, becomes safe and accessible for the motor-caravanner explorer!

We once followed the River Tornionjoki upstream for a few days as we headed north from its mouth at the top of the Gulf of Bothnia. On one bank lay Finland and on the other Sweden, as the winding river took us across and far to the north of the Arctic Circle. We finally had to leave it where it began, at the point where Sweden, Finland and Norway meet and only a few miles from the dreaded E6 which tries to follow the Norwegian coast past Tromso, Alta and Hammerfest to NordKapp.

However, the 820-mile-long Rhine remains one of our favourite rivers and parts of it have formed parts of many of our best journeys in Europe. Its banks can easily be reached from the UK - the North Sea Ferry from Hull lands you, after an excellent breakfast, near Rotterdam, at the mouth of the Rhine (by then the Dutch have renamed it the Waal and it has joined another great river, the Maas). From the Channel Ports of Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Ostend or Zeebrugge, toll-free motorways take you conveniently via Gent, Brussels, Liège and Aachen to join the Rhine at Cologne or Bonn, in less than a day, if you are in a hurry. Between Cologne and Holland, the Rhine is joined by the surprisingly pleasant River Ruhr which gives its name to the valley which contains the great industrial area of Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg.

Rosie is the 5-tonne, 6-wheel, 27 ft American Motorhome in which we live and travel at the moment, following early retirement from university teaching. She had covered nearly 300 miles from Dunkirk by the time she got us to Koblenz, a few miles upstream on the Rhine from Bonn. The town has its own fascinations. It dates back to Roman times, it is a centre for the local wine industry and it has magnificent shops, but what makes it unique is its location at the meeting point of the Rhine and Moselle (Koblenz takes its name from the Roman word for 'confluence') and this gives the traveller so many possibilities for further exploration.

We spent our nights in Koblenz in the car park by the Deutsches Eck, the 'German Corner' formed by the meeting of the two great rivers. On the Eck is an impressive monument to German Unity with the chilling inscription: 'Never will the Reich be destroyed if we are united and true'. The 14 metre-high statue of Kaiser Wilhelm II (grandson of Queen Victoria) looked down at us from the top of his massive plinth, whilst we looked out of one side window in the end-bedroom at the Moselle, still swollen with flood water, and out of the other side at the equally turbulent Rhine. The rear window showed us the maelstrom of their meeting. Heavily-laden Rhine barges, their decks awash, barely made headway against the rush of the current on their long journey from the North Sea to Switzerland or the Danube; empty on their return journey, they appeared to skim the surface in their haste to return to salt waters.

Motor caravanners have a choice of Eck. Our car park was free at weekends and overnight during the rest of the week; otherwise tickets could be bought from a meter for weekday parking. On the opposite bank of the Moselle (in the other Eck) is an official Campingplatz on a grassy site, two sides of which are actually formed by the two rivers. Both Ecks have been flooded in recent months and, from the dry splendour of our motorhome, we remembered sheltering on the campsite for 2 days in a rain-soaked tent during our 1987 cycle tour of the Rhine and Moselle valleys. We counted the advantages of being old-age travellers!

The car park contained the usual collection of German Bürstner, Dethleff and Hymer Womos (pronounced 'vomo' and short for Wohnmobil or, literally, 'living-car'. The Norwegian Bobil means the same thing and gets our vote for the best name for a motorhome). A colourful exception to this mass-production rule was the home-made Womo from Dortmund which was our next-door neighbour for one night. Its builder had carefully mounted a 4-berth caravan on the back of a Mercedes lorry and fitted it up with buffalo horns, a satellite dish, basement storage and a dual-purpose step for the back door.

Further exploration of the area can be on foot, around the town of Koblenz or along the banks of either river. The Moselle is crossed by two bridges, and a small ferry crosses the Rhine from very near the Eck. Once over the Rhine, you can take a cable car up to the Ehrenbreitstein, an old fortress on the skyline above the Eck and now used as a Youth Hostel with restaurants, a museum and mini-golf. It also provides what it claims to be the best viewpoint on the middle Rhine. Gentle cyclists can follow the Rhine or the Moselle on purpose-built tracks; their more athletic cousins can take to the hills all around and enjoy some exhilarating climbing in open country.

Those who prefer the scenery to go past them can have a Fahrt (trip) on a Boot (boat) on both the Rhine and the Moselle (look for the sign Rheinfahrt or Moselfahrt). The price often includes a meal (sometimes advertised as a Teefahrt or an evening meal could be part of an Abendfahrt) and time is given for sightseeing at riverside stops.

Moving on from Koblenz by road, the choice is enormous. Going south, roads with cycle paths follow both banks of the Moselle as it twists and turns in its deep valley with steep, vine-covered hillsides. The beautiful riverside towns of Cochem, Bernkastel and Piesport (you've seen them on your wine bottle labels) lead to Trier with its well-preserved Roman Amphitheatre and a museum in the house where Karl Marx (remember him?) was born and spent his early years.

We stayed in MacDonalds car park, just across the Moselle from the town, sharing it with a gang of enterprising Anglo-Irish asphalters, using their caravans to live near their work, as it moved around Europe! (One of the young children explained that they didn't need to go to school because their dad could read). The car park was also used by the local junge Herren to practise handbrake turns; one driver was still learning by experience and his BMW had to be unwrapped from a lamp-post by the Feuerwehr (fire-brigade). An eventful night!

Beyond Trier, still going south, lie Luxembourg (fill up with diesel at 40p per litre!), the Ardennes and Northern France. We went on to find peace for a few days at the campsite Les Breuils on the River Meuse in Verdun (a World Centre for Peace). North of the town, on both banks of the river, dense forests now all but cover the acres of trenches, craters, mounds, forts and lost villages where 420,000 young men, French and German, were killed and 800,000 were injured on a battlefront of only a few miles, during the First World War. We thanked whoever was in charge of these things that such mass slaughter is now completely unimaginable in our frontier-free United Europe.

In the past we have gone upstream on the Rhine from Koblenz to see the Lorelei rock on the bend of the Romantischer Rhein between Boppard and Bingen. Its remarkable echo gave rise to the legend of a siren whose song lured sailors to their death (a bit like the effect of a French pâtisserie on a motor caravanner).

Beyond Bingen, on the same road, lies the town of Mainz where the river Main joins the Rhine. We followed the Main upstream to where it meets the Tauber and there can be few greater pleasures than following the Taubertal (Tauber Valley) through Tauberbischofsheim (Tauber Bishop's Home) and Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber (Rothenburg above the Tauber), beautiful medieval towns on the Romantische Strasse (Romantic Road). And all this with quiet riverside camping and cycle paths!

Travellers with their eyes on even more distant horizons can follow the Rhine further upstream from Mainz, past Strasbourg, to Mulhouse where the Canal du Rhône-au-Rhin links to the Rhône at Lyon and then on to the Mediterranean. Or, the River Main can be followed further upstream from Mainz, through Würzburg to Bamberg from where the Main-Donau Kanal links to the Danube (Europe's second-longest river at 1,776 miles) near Regensburg. After that, Passau, Linz, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade await you and, after the river has formed the border between Bulgaria and Romania, you can finish up on the Romanian shores of the Black Sea, with the Ukraine on the other side of the river's swampy delta.

The furthest we have been on this route is Orjahovo on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube; there we turned south for Pleven and the magical medieval town of Veliko Tarnovo. But, like all rivers, the Danube awaits further exploration another day.

Meanwhile, we hope that we have increased your interest in rivers and river-following - why not start this coming weekend on one near you?