Passau, Germany - April 5, 2022

Every cruise comes to an end and our cruise ended in Passau, Germany, a city in Lower Bavaria. Passau is known as “The City of Three Rivers” because the Danube is joined by the Inn from the south and the Ilz from the north. (Thank you, Wikipedia!) This monument stands in a park where the three rivers come together.

Note the profusion of red umbrellas on the pathway. That was my group, heading a little farther up the path then making a right into the narrow streets of Passau’s Old Town. I had a bit of an advantage over others in the group—I could hold my umbrella high while moving through the crowd and getting into position for pictures without suffering severe eye damage.

We’d had a number of tours in our stops along the Danube and both of us found them to be really good. The guides were knowledgeable, interesting, and spoke good English. That string of luck was broken in Passau because our guide had good intentions but he also had a super-thick German accent. Most of the time I found his comments to be unintelligible. Couple that with the fact that it was raining, cold, and windy and you have all the ingredients for a fairly miserable tour. Not to mention that the narrow streets went steeply up and down and were paved with rough cobblestones.

This tour was mercifully short and ended in a cathedral where the world’s largest pipe organ resides (12,000 pipes!) Unfortunately it wasn’t being played during our visit but it must be magnificent to hear when it’s cranked up. It has four sets of pipes spread around the cathedral. Here’s one set:

Our guide left us outside the cathedral with vague directions on how to get back to the ship. It wasn’t that big an issue to find our way back. We both felt that Passau had lots more to see than we were able to take in on this short and slightly miserable excursion.

Here are the other pictures I shot in Passau.

After lunch and another good German lager beer we worked on getting packed to leave the ship the next morning. Some were going directly to the airport on Viking buses. We and a few other couples were to be transported to the Hilton Prague hotel for a 3-day cruise extension. Cruise staff were super organized for our ship departure—by this time that was no big surprise.

During dinner they left color-coded luggage tags in our stateroom along with a printed schedule on when we were to have our bags out in the hallway for pickup. Our pickup time was 6:30 am so that wasn’t bad. The dining room even opened at 6 so we all could grab a little something to eat before we took off. And of course caffeine for those who wanted a cup or two.

Prior to dinner the previous night we had a “cultural enrichment” lecture presented by a young German professor. She had prepared a very good PowerPoint presentation and she presented her talk with great enthusiasm—bobbing, ducking, and weaving to emphasize key points. I won’t bore you with all the notes I jotted down. I did learn that the Danube starts in the Black Forest in the north of Spain then runs 3500 kilometers (2175 miles) to the Black Sea.

We had purchased a gratuity package prior to the trip but the officers of the ship let us know that if we had received extra special service from a crew member we could pick up envelopes into which we could put tips (Euros only, please.) Dail and I felt our maid, Camellia, had done a super job of cleaning and straightening our room twice a day so she got an envelope.

I developed a good relationship with the Night Manager, Tihomir, from Serbia. He and I were the only ones up when I went to make tea and fire up my laptop to check email, blog, and read the morning news. He was kind enough to walk upstairs and turn on the lights in the lounge so I could use my “office”.

He also did a lot of research in his spare time on duty into the origin of a symbol that Viking uses on its stationery and on a sliding glass door upstairs in the Aquavit Lounge. He was obviously a deep thinker just from the few brief conversations we had. So he got an envelope from me. Here’s a picture of the symbol on the door:

Next (and last) stop: Prague, Czech Republic.