Wednesday, 8 August 2012

 

Start: Regensburg (D) 09:10

Arrival: Pieštany (SK) 18:30

Total: 574 km

 

 

 

 

 

Our first destination for today lay close-by: the Walhalla. On our trip back from the Balkans two years ago, we had noticed this extraordinary building from afar and ever since I had wanted to see it from up close.

 

The Walhalla is a large Greek-style temple, built by the Bavarian King Ludwig in 1842, to celebrate the achievements of Germanic culture. Named after the Germanic heaven which supposedly awaits the heroes fallen in battle, the Walhalla is very impressive, both from the outside and when you stand in its vast hall. We had seen pictures on the internet, and now we were ready to explore it for real.

 

We parked our car in a parking lot underneath the hill and walked up a steep, but quite pleasant forest path. Though it was early in the morning, the sun was already shining brightly and we were grateful for the shade provided by the trees. After some minutes, we emerged onto a platform and there it stood in all its glory: the Walhalla. But the forest path actually brings you to the rear of the temple, so you have to walk all around the building to get to the entrance. The columns supporting the roof are enormous and really quite impressive. From the front, a huge stone stairway leads down into the valley, affording the visitor a truly breathtaking view over the Danube.

 

The inside consisted of just one huge room. Somehow I had thought there would be more rooms, like in a museum, but the architect had preferred to keep the overall impression of a temple: gilded marble columns with Greek (or Germanic?) goddesses supporting a star-spangled ceiling very high up.

 

All along the wall, there were busts of famous Germanic people who had made a name for themselves in the areas of culture, politics or the arts.

 

There was Erasmus of Rotterdam, Johann Sebastian Bach, Copernicus, Goethe, Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Some might have been famous in the days of King Ludwig, but I had never heard of Marshall Sabalkanski or Count von Gneisenau before.

 

Further up, there were plaques celebrating more names. With delight, we made out the names of Hengist and Horsa, who with their band of warfarers had conquered Celtic Britain for the Anglo-Saxon people, or so the legend goes.

 

All in all, there were 130 busts and 65 commemorative plaques in the hall. The collection is still regularly updated by the Bavarian government, so there are also busts from 20th century people. There's for instance Sophie Scholl who fought against the Nazi regime during World War II.

 

After about an hour, we decided it was time to continue our trip. By now it was very hot and we were grateful for the air conditioning in our trusted Honda. Soon we reached the highway and headed towards Austria. We made good speed and thought, not for the first time, what a wonderful thing the European Union was. It took us not much more time to drive from Passau to Bratislava, crossing two borders and an entire country, than it would take us some days later to complete the border procedure into Transnistria. Well, I'm exaggerating, but not having to wait in line at a border crossing is a blessing that I appreciate each time I drive into another EU-country.

 

 

 

Shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon, we arrived in Bratislava. The architecture of the buildings reminded us strongly of Vienna, which makes sense, since this region had once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

 

We quickly found the old centre of town, which to our dismay was packed full of tourists. The narrow cobble-stoned streets and old buildings were certainly beautiful, but the whole place had a slightly disappointing fun-fair flair. Too many people, too many tables and chairs in front of each café, too many crammed-in market stalls and, above all, way too much loud, blaring music. We found an elegant famous bakery, the Kaffee Mayer, and sought refuge inside. Here it was blissfully quiet and not too many tourists had found their way in. We enjoyed a coffee and a piece of cake before heading back to our car.

 

We had parked it in the newer part of town, and as we walked past the opera house, we noticed a throng of people all staring into the same direction. Naturally we stared too, and there was a young ballerina in a white tutu, dancing in front of the opera! We couldn't make out if this was a thing for the tourists or whether she advertised some play, but the performance was nice. We strolled through a pedestrian street with interesting modern art objects and then drove on.

 

As I navigated the car through the streets of the Slovakian capital, Sonia suddenly said non-plussed: "There's Stalin." Really? And here I thought the guy was long dead. As I had to make a stop at a red light anyway, I craned my neck to get a good look at the revenant. And there he was indeed: a larger-than-life statue of Mr Ioseb Jugashvili himself, standing in front of a house with the heading "Berlinka". A hotel maybe? Odd, that that they would have him stand there, but in some way it was also cool. A relic of a bygone era. Dead-chuffed about this intriguing discovery, we drove out of Bratislava and headed for our hotel 90 kilometers to the north of the capital.

 

 

 

Hotel Rybarsky Dvor is beautifully situated outside of the town of Pieštany, right next to a small lake. This promised to become another tranquil night. Rybarsky Dvor means Fishing Yard in Russian, and I suppose it is the same in Slovakian, as there was a fishing pond next to the hotel. I decided to have trout for dinner tonight.

 

We had a very pleasant chat with the receptionist, who spoke good German and was interested in our travel destinations. When we mentioned Odessa and Kiev, he shook his head. Why would we drive all the way to the Ukraine, when it was so much easier and cheaper to just take a plane? He also warned us that driving in Kiev was crazy. Either traffic conditions have improved dramatically in the area, which is entirely possible, or our receptionist wasn't the most eager driver, which is very probable too, but driving through the Ukraine turned out quite pleasant. And traffic in Kiev is a lot less intimidating than Chisinau or Tirana, if only because the streets are larger and there are more lanes. In any case, the receptionist told us about his own exploits as a young man, back in the old Soviet times. He had worked for some time in Sochi on the Black Sea. Now there was an exotic destination! Unfortunately, we wouldn't be driving that far this time.

 

After a most delicious dinner (fresh trout, of course!) in the hotel garden, we retired to our room. It was a very large, but unfortunately also very hot room right under the thatched roof. There was no air conditioning, only a fan, which helped a bit, but we didn't want to leave it on the entire night, as fanned air invariably gives me a sore neck. We were so hyped up by all that we had seen during the day that it took us a while to fall asleep. But in the end, we dozed off after all.