A cruise on the Rhine is, literally, a power trip - past the German and French industrial might evident along the river banks; the commercial and trading power of the scores of huge barges, many of them Dutch, that throb ceaselessly through the immense current, and powerful landscapes like the 440-foot rock cliffs of the Loreley on the most scenic stretch of the Rhine between Mainz and Koblenz.
Dutch, German and Swiss companies all operate comfortable cruise ships that ply the waters on various itineraries between Amsterdam and Basel, but we took the Deutschland, a 22-year-old, 361-foot-long cruise ship of the German Koln-Dusseldorfer Line, which has been running the Rhine since 1826. The trip we chose was a two-night journey between Strasbourg and Cologne over what promised to be a beautiful May weekend.Strasbourg, the capital of French Alsace, is a splendid city to begin or end a cruise, with its pink sandstone cathedral, an old town that is among the best preserved on the river, and numerous fine restaurants. On the afternoon of our departure, dark clouds rolled up ominously as the warm afternoon wore on, and, by the time we arrived at the gare fluviale, the river passenger station on the eastern outskirts of the city, rain had been pouring down for more than an hour.
At the quay at embarkation time, 7 p.m., we found several ships bearing KD's distinctive red and blue insignia, but none of them was the Deutschland. After boarding one of the ships, the Britannia, to inquire into the whereabouts of our ship, we learned that a lock on the canal used by all river traffic through Alsace had jammed, and that the Deutschland was waiting for us on the German side of the river in Karlsruhe, where we had changed trains on the way to Strasbourg from Bonn that morning. A bus ride of an hour and a half seemed an odd beginning to a river cruise, but the passengers cheerfully took it in stride.
The cruise liners all tie up ashore every night, but Karlsruhe is not one of the regularly scheduled stops, so our ship was waiting for us there at a grimy industrial pier. It hardly mattered; embarkation night was mainly for getting settled and enjoying a huge buffet dinner.
Stewards brought our bags to our cabin, on the ship's upper, or Loreley, deck. The comfortable cabin was spotlessly clean, spare but spacious, with two separate beds. During the day, one bed became a couch, while the other folded neatly out of sight into a wooden stand against the forward bulkhead. There were two bookshelves, a radio with three channels, a table and a chair next to the huge picture window looking out on the river.
The cabin was seven feet wide, hardly claustrophobic, and about twice as long, with a curtain separating the berths from an additional space off the main passageway that contained a closet and sink and a separate toilet and shower. There was no television in the cabin, and the radio really worked only when we were tied up ashore.
The ship's crew was as cosmopolitan as the passengers, who came from Germany, France, Holland, America, Britain, Sweden and even South Africa. Our maitre d'hotel, Mustafa Abu-Zead from Egypt, spoke fluent German as well as English and French, and gave us our table assignment next to an elderly pair of Germans (who had come from Karlsruhe and were greatly amused at finding themselves back there the same night), and an American couple from Charlotte, N.C., who had booked the cruise through their travel agency.
The cost of what KD calls a three-day cruise, with two evening meals, two breakfasts, two luncheons and coffee and cakes, booked locally, was 890 marks ($567 at the rate of 1.57 marks to the dollar) a person, based on double occupancy on the Loreley deck. On the Rhineland deck below, rooms are slightly smaller, with two windows instead of one, and practically right at water level; they cost 735 marks ($468) a person. (If the passage is booked in the United States, rates would be $555 and $460 respectively; in this case they would not vary with the exchange rate.) There are 184 berths in all, and as our cruise was not sold out, neither the spacious restaurant nor the lounge, where a two-man band played music and there was dancing after dinner, ever seemed crowded.
The company recommends that passengers distribute between 4 and 5 percent of the ticket price to deserving staff as tips. The only currency accepted on board the ship is the German mark, and the purser's office offered an exchange rate that, unlike those in most German hotels, did not leave us feeling gouged. It was 1.50 marks to the dollar when we were aboard, when the official bank rate was 1.57.
All drinks, including mineral water, are extra.
At 6:30 the next morning the ship had begun to move, and at breakfast time we watched the gray-brown water of the Rhine rush by, as the current and the ship's 1,920-horsepower diesels pushed us along downstream at 16 miles an hour. The river, half a mile across at many points, is so vast that it reminded Stendhal of the sea when he first saw it. Even after a relatively dry winter, it still flowed so powerfully that the Deutschland could move upstream at only a little over 9 miles an hour. You can measure the speed exactly by the white signs on either bank that mark off kilometers and tenths of kilometers.
Between Karlsruhe and Speyer, our first stop that morning, the sights consisted mainly of power plants, cement factories and other testimony to German industry. We tied up for a couple of hours at a park that was a short walk from Speyer's huge Romanesque cathedral, where emperors of the Holy Roman Empire lie buried in the crypt.
Passengers who wanted to spare themselves more chemical factories and power plants that morning could take a four-hour guided tour of the nearby university town of Heidelberg, for about $40 a person, rejoining the ship in the afternoon at Mainz.
We stayed aboard and arrived at Mainz shortly after 5 p.m., just in time for another torrential thunderstorm. This lasted nearly until it was time to pull out for the short trip to Rudesheim, a quaint if somewhat honky-tonk tourist village of half-timbered houses and wine restaurants clustered along a cobblestoned pedestrian street called the Drosselgasse.
The pier at Rudesheim was also next to a park, and about a 10-minute walk from the town. Everyone stayed aboard for dinner, a six-course feast centered around a veal roast. Though nobody dressed formally, a group of employees of a Paris engineering concern on an outing set an elegant tone.
The line itself has no dress code; not even jackets and ties are required. A German family - two parents in their 60s and their sons and their wives with their own children - came with a long-haired young man in his 20s who wore dark glasses and baggy green jeans to every meal. We guessed the occasion of the trip was a family birthday. "I'll invite you all to a rock concert for my birthday," the young man told the rest.
After dinner, as dusk fell, many passengers strolled off to Rudesheim for a look around. One of them was Sandy Anderson, a United Airlines employee from Schaumburg, Ill., who was suddenly surprised when a young German man ran up behind her and took off with her purse, containing her passport, birth certificate, airline tickets home, cash and traveler's checks.
She spent the rest of the evening with the police, who took her around to the wine restaurants and discos to see if she could spot the culprit, but they had no luck. She thought her trip was ruined.
The next morning was to be the scenic climax of the cruise, the passage through vine-clad hills and finally the Loreley rock, situated at a narrow curve where the river channel deepens to 75 feet. According to legend, it was here that an enchantress called Lore sat and lured unwary sailors to shipwrecks with her song.
But she brought good luck to Ms. Anderson. During breakfast, as we passed through the scenic Binger Loch, originally a low waterfall until engineers blasted a shipping channel through in the 19th century, we noticed a green-and-white German police car keeping pace with the boat on the eastern side, flashing its lights and hailing us to a stop a few miles downstream.
Two smiling policemen came aboard with most of the contents of the lost purse, including credit cards and traveler's checks, but minus about $500 in cash. The thief was still at large, but the victim was greatly relieved, and could spend the rest of the day enjoying the scenery.
The sun finally broke through the morning clouds, dispersing the mist rising off the water. A 9-year-old boy was the only one among us to brave the small heated swimming pool on the top deck, though it was warm enough to sit coatless on the folding canvas deck chairs. We soon passed the famous vineyards of the Rheingau, including such names well known to enophiles as Schloss Vollrads and the Hollenberg in Assmannshausen. Sailing past the Loreley, the ship's public-address system played a choral version of Heinrich Heine's poem about it, full of melancholy.
This stretch of the river is really the raison d'etre for a Rhine cruise. The forest- and vine-covered hills plunge down toward the water on either bank, with half-timbered villages clinging to the shore. The big barges - from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Poland, the Czech Republic - never stop, as they shove their way against the tireless current, signaling to our ship, barreling along with it and finally passing it. Some of them are packed three layers high with automobiles, some bearing cargoes of thousands of tons of oil or chemicals, some bearing coal from the Ruhr. Most have the owner's car, as often as not a Mercedes, riding along as cargo too, and laundry drying from clotheslines on the deck.
Two railroads on either side of the river bear trains of passengers and freight as well. But the view from the middle of the river is more dramatic than the glimpses of the same scenery that a passenger sees on the train ride along the river bank from Cologne to Frankfurt.
We pass the picturesque 14th-century Katz, or Cat, Castle above St. Goarshausen, built by the counts of Katzenelnbogen in response to the construction of the Maus, or Mouse, Castle downstream by their rival the archbishop of Trier. The Marksburg beyond, also constructed by the counts, is a fortress high on a hill from which they could command the approaches along the valley. It is the only castle on the Rhine not to have been destroyed at one time or another. Even the ruins farther downstream, looming eerily above us on their lofty perches, cast a romantic spell.
Soon we are past Koblenz, gliding past the seven mountains on the other side of the river from Bonn and Bad Godesberg. Two hotels on either side of the river - the Dreesen, an elegant white establishment on the river in Godesberg, and the Petersberg, high up on a hill above the tourist town of Konigswinter on the other side - are the sites where Hitler and Neville Chamberlain undertook the negotiations that led up to the infamous Munich Pact of 1938. The ship's periodic announcements of tourist sights - in German, English and French - do not include the hotels.
Past Bonn, we again enter an industrial zone. After lunch, it's already time to prepare for disembarkation at Cologne. The magnificent twin spires of Cologne Cathedral come into view as we pass under two of the seven bridges linking the two halves of the Rhineland capital. With a blast of the ship's whistle we heave around to face upstream, and tie up at the Koln-Dusseldorfer pier, a short walk from the cathedral and the main railroad station.
As I looked back on the voyage, I found the accommodations to be faultless and the service friendly and helpful without being intrusive. As for the food, it wasn't exactly on the order of the Queen Mary or France, but even our French fellow travelers were pleased with the cuisine. "The atmosphere was a bit stiff," one Frenchwoman complained mildly, but we told her that by German standards the ambiance had been positively Club Med. One could sit in the lounge and read undisturbed, or put together a puzzle with thousands of pieces, as one woman did with her grandson over the weekend, or sit in the sun and eat cakes piled high with whipped cream. The one thing it was not possible to do was to go on a diet, but who ever went on a cruise to do that?
Amsterdam to Basel by boat
A number of operators do the Rhine including those listed below. For information contact your travel agent.
KD River Cruises of Europe, 15 Frankenwerft, Cologne D-50667, Germany, 0221-20880, offers three- to five-day cruises on seven ships on the Rhine and Moselle Rivers from April to mid-October. Information and reservations are available in the United States from Rhine Cruise Agency, Suite 317, 170 Hamilton Avenue, White Plains, N.Y. 10601, (914) 948-3600. The longer routes on the Rhine, between $665 and $1,290, include trips between Basel and Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Strasbourg and Cologne to Basel. The shorter routes, such as the Strasbourg-to-Cologne cruise, are $320 to $555. Prices are per person, double occupancy, with shore excursions extra. Rates for April 1994 will be reduced 30 percent; for May, 20 percent.
Scylla Tours, 16 Blumenrain, Basel CH-4001, Switzerland, 2614565, fax 2614519, offers seven- and eight-day trips on three ships on the Rhine, Main and Moselle Rivers. The cruises begin and/or end in Wurzburg or Trier and include daily shore visits, with stops at Frankfurt and Mainz on the Main, Rudesheim and Koblenz on the Rhine, and Cochem and Bernkastel on the Moselle. Prices are per person, double occupancy, and include transfer between Basel and ports and all meals. Ships sail every weekend between Aug. 6 and Sept. 25 in one direction or the other. Seven-day trips are $890 to $1,228, eight-day trips $1,120 to $1,379.
Flotel-Tours, 20 Grand Rue, Montreux CH-1820, Switzerland, 9638810, fax 9638352, offers eight-day trips from Amsterdam to Strasbourg or vice versa on the Rhine Princess. The Strasbourg-Amsterdam cruise departs Aug. 5 and Sept. 4. The Amsterdam-Strasbourg cruise departs Aug. 29 and Sept. 10. Both trips include daily excursions in Strasbourg, Cologne and Amsterdam, among other stops, and the scenic portion of the Rhine between Rudesheim and Koblenz. Prices, from $960 to $1,234, are per person in a double cabin and include meals and transfer to and from Basel from ports.
Watertransport River Cruises, 35A Groenendaal, Rotterdam 3011, 4118660, fax 4130569, offers cruises on the Rhine and on Dutch waterways. Information on reservations and prices is available from Elegant Cruises and Tours, 31 Central Drive, Port Washington, N.Y. 11050, (516) 767-9302, fax (516) 767-9303. This year the company is offering a one-week Rhine and Moselle Rivers cruise in October from Cologne to Arnhem, Holland, on the Jan Elshout, which includes stops in Bonn, Boppard, Rees, Rudesheim, Koblenz and Cochem. Prices for the 143-passenger vessel, which range from $2,450 for the upper deck and $2,250 for the main deck, include round-trip air fare on KLM from New York, three nights in Amsterdam with sightseeing and all transfers between airport, hotel and docks. The entire trip begins Oct. 10 and ends Oct. 21.