Rhinecruise

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Mountain waterfall and river cruise in a day

Whosoever heads for Black Forest of Germany, generally visits Triberg to see Germany’s tallest and easily accessible waterfall and buy a cuckoo clock. I am proud to declare that we could withstand the temptation and did not buy a cuckoo clock.

We were not always immune to Temptation. Once upon a time, long ago, we HAD succumbed and bought two cuckoo clocks, but what they say is true : The best way to conquer Temptation is to succumb to it. So, this time we won.

Triberg has a lot of facilities for outdoor activities. Right opposite the train station, there is a rock-climbing facility. However, I will rather leave rock climbing to more energetic persons and to monitor lizards.

Triberg is the cuckoo clock capital of the world. The road from train station to the base of the waterfall is lined on both sides with shops selling cuckoo clocks of all sorts and sizes.
It is also rather steep, and so, you end up making many stops in the shops and buying something or the other. No doubt the shops are happy about the steep climb.

The waterfall is about 500 meters tall, but you never see all of it together. It falls in 7 stages and at every stage, only the next level is visible. However, the lowermost 3 -4 stages are most scenic. The area has lovely, serene nature paths on both side of the falls.

Sometimes, German-to-English translation is so hilarious, that I can’t resist including the following two sentences from Triberg’s website.

“In tri mountain always something is the matter."
“it becomes boring in tri mountain never.”

The Black Forest Museum in Triberg is a must-see. It has the largest collection of grind-organs in Europe as well as an impressive collection of antique Black Forest Clocks. We had a lot of fun putting a coin in an automated organ and the watching it play a complete tune. The bridal and traditional dresses of women of the Black Forest region were also interesting.

Etymology is something that interests me very much. Most of the times, I try to find the roots of the words in Sanskrit. Sometimes, it also leads me to make wild claims that ‘Saskatchewan’ is derived from ‘Sakshat che wan’ (‘God’s forest’ in Sanskrit)
And ‘Teotihuacan’ can’t be anything else than ‘Deo ti Vyakhyan’ ( ‘God’s story’ in Sanskrit ) However, to find the meaning of ‘grind-organ’, I had to search the web and at last found a satisfactory answer.

“A musical instrument that makes music by rotation of a cylinder studded with pegs.”

I also found an unsatisfactory answer, which was too gruesome for me to repeat. I will just give you a hint. Here ‘organ’ referred to a part of the body.

We had a nice lunch at Triberg and then boarded the train to Mainz and then another, smaller train to Rudesheim, from where we were taking a cruise on the river Rhine upto Koblenz.

The river-ship is a slow mode of transport. The train-journey from Mainz to Koblenz would have taken much less time but would not have been so enjoyable.

The river Rhine bristles with castles on both sides along this stretch. For anyone interested in those, I will give the link below:

http://mediaspec.com/castles/rhein/

Apart from the medieval castles, the riverbanks also boasted of modern vineyards interspersed between the castles.

The most interesting was the Lorelei rock. According to Wikipedia, it used to murmur once upon a time, the German folklore just personified the rock and converted it into a siren that lured sailors to their destruction. She was supposed to sit on the rock combing her long hair and bewitching the sailors.

In Greek mythology too, Scylla (Shila means rock in Sanskrit) was a dangerous rock at one side of the Strait of Messia, opposite the whirlpool Charybdis.( char+abdhi in Sanskrit means ‘abyss’ in ‘sea’ ) Again poor Scylla and Charybdis became personified as sirens and between them they lured 6 men of Odysseus to death. Speaks a lot about navigation skills of Odysseus’s crew, doesn’t it?

Men should always blame some female for their faults, isn’t it?

At one place, Rhine just turned 180 degrees and started flowing in the direction it came from. I am surprised that Germans have assigned male gender to the river Rhine. If, like in India, all rivers were feminine, this fickle-mindedness also they would have attributed to the feminine nature of the river.

The ship had glass windows on all sides, because the scenery on all sides was equally
beautiful. The upper deck was occupied by the sun-worshippers. It was a sort of ‘free format’ kind of ship without any class distinctions. People could get on at any port along the river and get off at any port. We ordered our supper and enjoyed a glass of wine as we glided past the castles and the vineyards.

The ship had welcoming message written near the entrance in all major languages of the world and I was happy to note the welcome message in Devnagari. While I was reading it aloud, one white man said “I also can read it”. He was learning Sanskrit in a German university. There is a lot of awareness about Sanskrit in Germany.

So far, all our travel was going like clockwork (cuckoo clockwork?). However, at Koblenz, we were delayed by marathon runners. (I do not remember now, what cause they were running for) Our bus to the station reached quite late and over and above that, the trains also were running very late. We reached Dusseldorf from Koblenz about 4 hours late. Was it because we did not buy a cuckoo-clock?

We were home at last.

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Photos

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View of the Triberg waterfall from top

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Rock climbing

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Castle on the hill

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Lorelei rock

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A bend in the Rhine

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Town on the riverbank with castle on the hill

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Town on the riverbank

Comments

[Cornel Rosario]

Sanskrit, etc
I enjoyed your translations from and into the Sanskrit ! Also the detailed recordings of your travels. Herman Melvillesque, almost!