Welcome to the land of fairy tale and Baroque excess

VIKING’S GRAND EUROPEAN TOUR, WEEK ONE Kinderdijk, Cologne, Koblenz, Miltenberg, Wurzburg (Rothenburg ob der Tauber), Bamburg, Nuremberg 

I haven’t vacationed on an organised tour within Europe for more than 30 years, and its confines can feel as awkward as a stiff pair of new leather shoes. The sightseeing en masse, the constricted free time, the dashing through historical sites with only top-line summaries, the fresh locations with each day are all a far cry from the way we usually settle into a place and delve deep into local opportunities. It does, however, have its advantages.

A bit like a chef’s tasting menu, an organised itinerary pushes you to places you wouldn’t have bothered with on your own. Koblenz, for example, is a pleasant but unexceptional town best known for the monument at, and view down upon, the place where the Rhine and the Mosel come together. I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit its sprawling early-19th century Ehrenbreitstein Castle, but if you’re there already the guided tour conducted by an actor assuming the character (although not the accent) of a British officer who knew the place at its construction was quite entertaining. 

A deep restfulness comes with not having to think. If, as we were, you are mentally exhausted by the demands of leading projects at work, having someone else organising your every move so you don’t even need to be aware of what day it is or what you’re doing next is bliss. And if, like me, you have the tendency to sightsee to physical exhaustion, the need to weigh anchor and keep moving enforces the down time. 

I won’t bother with an entry on each destination as, to be honest, few are worth that level of detail. The first week of Viking’s tour collapses instead into four broad categories: fairy-tale villages, scenic cruising, baroque places and windmills.

FAIRY-TALE VILLAGES

Thanks to Walt Disney, people around the world know what to expect from picturesque German villages. Half-timbered, steep-roofed houses broader above than below. Stuccoed buildings in pastel colours with fanciful gables. Churches with onion domes or narrow, pointed spires. Wells adorned with baroque sculpture. Wooden shutters, gabled windows projecting from roofs and window boxes full of geraniums.  The town hall will inevitably have a Rathskeller for drinking and dining below (cue Gaston using antlers in all of his decorating) and a glockenspiel chiming the hours in the tower above. If you’re lucky, some automatons might pop out and do something interesting on the hour.

There are copious opportunities to take in such scenery in this first week. Miltenberg is a pretty little town beside the Rhine with a charming central square, a high street distinguished by an unusually long, uninterrupted run of historic buildings and a particularly pretty historic coaching inn that combines half-timbering with decorative painting, polychromed saints figures and an ornate wrought iron sign. 

Something that’s nominally a castle, but looks more like an aristocratic step-gabled manor house sits on a hill above town. Bamburg leans a little more to the Baroque, with its stuccoed building fronts and ornamental rooflines, but there’s charm aplenty inside its city centre. The town hall, built on an island in the river that cuts through town, is particularly attractive; part half-timbered, part covered in lavish fresco. Head to Schlenkerla brewery for a place so atmospheric Snow White and the Seven Dwarves could be in charge. (Their distinctive smoke-flavoured beer is one of the highlights of Bamberg).

Nuremberg is the second-largest city in Bavaria, so no village here, but the bit inside the old city walls has buckets of old-world charm. The square outside the Albrecht Durer House, tucked against those walls, is a particularly charming place to settle for a while, particularly as there are two establishments serving up Augustiner beers. The artist’s house is well worth a visit; something I may cover in more depth later. (And for more on Nuremberg, see my report from an earlier visit here.)

But for photographic charm, all these pale to insignificance beneath the fanciful towers, gables, spires and cupolas of Rothenberg ob der Tauber. It’s so perfect it’s been drafted into service as a film location multiple times, most recently notable in the live action version of Beauty and the Beast. Everything inside the city walls, which you can walk around, is stage set cute and the locals play on this. Every shop vies for tourist attention, every restaurant is traditional. Other places mentioned above have more history and culture … we dipped into the local museum on the 30 Years War and weren’t terribly impressed with the hotch-potch of displays and basic details … but nowhere else is so resolutely photogenic in every direction. Tourists have figured this out, of course, and this is the only place in Germany I’ve been to, other than Neuschwanstein, that feels like it exists only for tourists rather than having a reality of its own. I suspect that, like Mont Saint-Michel, the secret is to spend the night here so you can enjoy the edges of the day without the bus tours and drive to lesser known villages when they arrrive.

SCENIC CRUISING

The stretch of the Rhine between Koblenz and Miltenberg is a highlight of the trip. For more than two hours of steady cruising the Rhine squeezes between forested hills broken by outcroppings of ruddy granite. Where the land slopes to gentle bottomlands there are charming villages. Vineyards climb up steep terraces. Orderly caravan parks expand the local population in riverside fields while every picture-worth building seems to be a hotel. At one dramatic point, the Lorelei Rock, the river here is particularly narrow, deep, and … before modern navigation aids … dangerous. Winds around the rock murmur and sigh, and the area is laden with legends.

Whether cruising or staying, visitors undoubtably enjoy the pastoral views, but it’s the castles that pull people in. It seems like a new one comes into view each time an old one disappears to your stern. And there’s a reason for that. The owners of these castles maintained commerce on the river. You can think of them as servants of the people or owners of a brutal protection racket, but whichever way you fall you’ll admit the architecture of their fortresses makes this a special part of the world. 

Ironically, most were just mouldering ruins until the 19th century, when the Romantic movement coincided with all those German states jockeying for power in a Germany on its way to unification. They look like something out of storybooks because that’s the way they were designed. At their most picturesque there are castles on the heights and at the riverside, presumably once working together. The most picturesque is Burg Pflazgrafenstein on an island in the river with Burg Gutenfels looming above. 

The lower could be a jewelled charm in a medical monarch’s cabinet of wonders; the upper is the kind of brooding ruin worthy of gothic horror.  The progression of castles on this stretch runs the gamut in between. Unsurprisingly, many now operate as luxury hotels. If you live in Europe, we’ve realised you could book into one of those hotels for a long weekend, take a day cruise and re-create this part of our journey fairly easily.

BAROQUE PALACES

Catholic Germany had a tradition of strong prince bishops who had both secular and religious authority and a taste for grandiose architecture. While they rolled out lavish Baroque architecture in their churches to assert the appeal of their religion over dour, ascetic Protestantism, they used the architectural style at home to demonstrate their political heft. Just like Louis XIV, father of the movement, they equated architecture with power.

The biggest of these examples in the first week is the episcopal palace in Wurzburg, a hefty block of golden stone that would make the French king feel at home. These places have a pattern across Germany: a porte cochere that allows carriages to unload their passengers at the bottom of a grand staircase. 

Shallow treads ascend to a landing, divide and continue up on either side. Statuary ornaments the railings, there’ll normally be some massive architectural statement on the landing and it will all be covered with a tromp l’oeil ceiling full of Greco-Roman deities frolicking their way across the heavens. Wurzburg looks like all the rest, with the exception that its ceiling is by Tiepolo so far better than most. A series of state rooms always follows, dripping with ornamental plaster work. Wurzburg is unusual in its embedding of mirror fragments into the swirls of the plaster, no doubt adding an exceptional glow to candlelit events. The best site here is a mirrored room, larger than these things usually are and unusual in that the mirrors are over-painted with scrolls and scenes. What you see today is a post-war recreation of what was destroyed by WWII bombs; even in modern incarnation it’s magnificent but a bit too much to live with.

Grand as Wurzburg is, I far preferred the smaller palace, its accompanying hunting lodge and the grotto-style chapel at Brühl. 

They’re all the creation of Clemens Augustus of Wittelsbach, a young man who had no interest in the church … he was forced in by his power-seeking family … but a great passion for hunting and showing off. The lodge, Falkenlust, celebrates falconry in its interior decor, complete with a blue-and-white tiled staircase hall with hand-painted tiles showing stages of his birds’ lives. Blue and while tiles (the Wittelsbach family colours) also clothe a delightful dining room in the main palace. 

The mirrored room in the lodge, though only a fragment of the size of the Wurzburg room, is much nicer, and more traditional with its writhing gilded wooden frames with little plinths occupied by china birds.

Back at the main palace, the artists behind the staircase might not be as famous as in Wurzburg, but I found the colours fresher and the architecture … complete with giant figures holding up the columns … altogether lighter and more fun than other examples. The chapel, created as a fashionable shell grotto in the ever-present blue and white, has the same effervescence. August Clemens was doubtless a terrible representative of the Catholic Church but as a builder and part host, he was my kind of guy.

WINDMILLS

This falls into one of those pleasant surprises. Never in 20+ years of regular visits to Amsterdam has it ever occurred to me to travel to the windmills at Kinderdijk. I’ve been to individual Dutch windmills. I’ve seen them in the landscape. We have similar in Norfolk. What’s the big deal?

Well … UNESCO knows what they’re doing when they hand out those World Heritage Site designations. Kinderdijk isn’t just a bunch of windmills. It’s the largest concentration of these historic buildings … 19 from the 18th century or before … in the world, and demonstrates a unique ecosystem. The mills pumped water from one holding area to another, ever upward and to the sea. The “polder” is the cleared area left behind; a peat-rich, below-sea-level area of rich, green fields perfect for dairy farming. Windmills in such profusion are remarkably picturesque, and worth the visit to see whether you’re on a ship or in Amsterdam.

 * Viking runs this itinerary back and forth all season. If you start in Budapest, then what’s described here will be week one

River cruising is a smaller, more sedate version of oceanic holidays

One year and three cancellations past the plan, we’re finally on a Viking river cruise. Though not on the river we expected. Rather than blazing heat, crocodiles, hippos and ancient temples we’re on familiar European waters, with hawthorns blazing the hillsides with white, castles crowning promontories and half-timbered villages bankside. Welcome to the Grand European Tour, 15 days meandering from Amsterdam to Budapest at a stately pace.

Covid is, of course, the reason we’re here. The ability of Egyptian customs officers to deliver spot PCR tests and send failures to two weeks in a government quarantine hotel didn’t fill us with enough confidence to try that route. And Covid is still casting a long shadow, even over European travelling. We had to submit negative test results to get to our starting point, self-quarantining for a fortnight before the trip to ensure them. Staff illness wreaked havoc with Heathrow and its airlines, cancelling scores of flights including our original early hop to Schipol.  (While the rescheduled flight got us to the ship on time, it killed the possibility of getting to Keukenhoff Gardens for the tulips.) 

Though we were told we grabbed one of the last free cabins, the Viking Modi set sail with only about half of its full complement of 190 guests. Whether the no-shows were ill or just nervous, I can’t say. The on-board crew is short due to illness, though you’d never know it from excellent levels of service. 

Covid also introduces a new kind of holiday stress: the daily PCR test. The daily routine includes spitting into test tubes and delivering them to the front by 8am. Anyone with a positive test gets whisked off the ship to quarantine in a Frankfurt hotel, so there’s always a frisson of anxiety that a tap on your shoulder could eject you from holiday paradise … especially when you discover the people you’ve been drinking regularly with were amongst the six who’ve already had to leave.

The Covid situation means that an already small ship is even more intimate. Approaching a week on board, we’ve spent time with at least two-thirds of our fellow guests. After dinner, there are rarely more than 20 people drinking in the lounge. The barmen know and call everyone by name. One guest, adept at the harmonica, ended up duetting for two sets with the ship’s pianist. There’s an Agatha Christie-like vibe to the whole thing, with the familiarity of the lounge dwellers channelling Death on the Nile while the daily PCR test results conjure And Then There Were None.

Even with a full crew and guest list, river cruising would be a much cosier proposition than an ocean ship. There’s no pool, no spa, no grand lobby and only one restaurant. Public areas spread across three floors. On the lowest you‘ll find the restaurant, with just one seating per meal and the freedom to sit where you like. The middle … though it’s the highest enclosed deck … features a small library, a couple of computers, two 24/7 coffee and snack stations and the combined bar and lounge that opens into an outdoor area at the ship’s prow. 

Upstairs, running almost the entirety of the Modi’s 443-foot length, is a sun deck strewn with loungers, tables and chairs. The more active can walk around a track 12 times to make a mile, though most shore excursions will get you to your 10,000 steps a day. There’s also a shuffleboard court and a putting green. Unfortunately, the frequency of low bridges in the middle of the journey means the sun deck is closed for several days, but otherwise it’s a glorious place to enjoy down time.

And, as anticipated, there is down time aplenty. Half-way though this journey we’ve only had one truly packed day, with activities morning, afternoon and evening in Cologne. But the ship spends most of its time moving … a necessity when you’re covering more than 900 miles at a stately pace of no more than 22 kilometres per hour. It’s no surprise that Viking has done this for 25 years; their pacing along the route is masterfully planned. Industrial and lock-heavy areas usually glide by while you’re sleeping, though locks are such a feature of these waterways there are plenty in daylight hours, too. (There are 68 locks en route.) Many excursions start from unremarkable spots on the riverbank, bussing passengers to their sightseeing destinations while the ship keeps on with the business of sailing. 

It’s worth noting that despite what’s pictured in the brochures, and my photo up top from Cologne, the ships don’t usually moor right in the heart of the tourist district. You’re often in more industrial ports a short distance from town, making it difficult to walk anywhere. This is a challenge for the independent traveller who’d like to explore on their own … something that’s clearly not the norm. The expectation is that most guests will leave and return to the ship with the guided excursions, whether those are the included walking tours of destinations or the extra cost add-ons. Later in the cruise, when we get to destinations we know well and want to do on our own, we’ll be sharing the tour buses in and out but breaking off from the group for the time in between.

The river cruisers (of which Viking operates more than 70 in Europe) are surprisingly quiet. We can hear the engine from our balcony, though not from our room, but it’s a gentle purr rather than an intrusive growl. In the mornings, the burble of weirs and the dawn chorus of the local birds easily rises above it. The motion is also completely unlike sea cruises, with their constant rocking. Most times, it’s hard to even tell you’re moving without looking out the windows to see if countryside is passing by. I miss the sensation of being at sea, and that strange sensation of having to find your land legs when you disembark, but it does add to the placid relaxation of the whole scene.

The small scale of a river cruise also means a more sane approach to food than the big ships. Aside from the breakfast buffet, everything is a la carte with European portion sizes. While you can order as much as you want, sticking to two or even three courses a mean here is a saner, less weight-compromising affair than on ocean ships. 

The food is generally to excellent standard, and less inclined to global sameness than your typical cruise. Each night has a three-course local offering to reflect the countryside we’re sailing through. It’s not particularly seasonal … it seems odd to be on holiday in Germany in April without being bombarded with spargel, their beloved white asparagus … but I assume these menus are planned to be repeated year-round without variation for efficiency’s sake. There have occasionally been some Asian offerings that get closer in origin to the chefs and servers (mostly Filipino and Indonesian); a soul-warming tom kha gai and a chicken tikka masala that wouldn’t embarrass a top English curry house.

The crew is a well-oiled, customer service machine; this is unquestionably a five-star hotel that just happens to move. The design is more simple than Viking’s ocean ships, given the much smaller canvas they have to work with, but still a gorgeous mix of pale woods, thoughtfully mixed textiles and Nordic decorative elements. It is elegant and tasteful throughout. There’s the usual cruise industry variety of nationalities, with plenty of Eastern Europeans rounding out the already-mentioned Asians. A German hotel manager and Hungarian cruise director tie us solidly to our route. 

The guests, however, show no such variety. Despite Viking’s enormous investments in UK advertising and sponsorship, we are the only Brits on a vessel entirely populated by Americans. Perhaps three of those, by our current conversations, were born outside of the States, but on the whole it’s a very homogenous group. Which brings a few advantages, and a great many more disadvantages, I’ll write about in a future entry.

But next comes a round-up of our first week. 

Caractère deserves a Michelin star. Try it before it gets one.

There was a moment, about half-way through the procession of perfectly plated, succulent dishes that made up our tasting menu, when something extraordinary yet strangely familiar sat before me. 

It was half an artichoke heart, turned to such perfection it might have been engineered on a lathe, stuffed with a layer of umami goodness that might have been mushroom duxelles, covered with a perfect dome of some sort of light mousse and adorned with tiny crouton and micro herbs. It was only the accompaniment to the magnificent bit of skate wing that was billed as the main event, but it was so striking it took my mind back to one of the best dishes of my life … the decadent artichokes Lucullus at London’s iconic Le Gavroche.

“Who’s in the kitchen?” I gasped to the friend who’d invited me to this amazing lunch. “Is it a famous chef?” My friend wasn’t sure but did a bit of surreptitious Googling beneath the marble table and discovered a proverbial apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Caractère is the culinary love-child of Emily Roux, daughter of Michel and grand-daughter of Albert, and Diego Ferrari, former head chef at the Roux-owned Gavroche and now Emily’s husband as well as business partner. 

Their exquisitely-designed, smoothly-staffed Notting Hill restaurant is a beautiful fusion of Italy and France. Classics from both sides of the Alps dance together here, though a hard look at the menu shows that ingredients lean towards the Italian while preparation methods look to the French. The wine list, as pricey as you might imagine, tends to split right down the middle and does have some good value by-the-glass choices for those trying to stay on the right side of profligate. (Lesser-known wines from Southern Italy help there.) The menu organisation is a bit mystifying, offering two choices under each of a list of five adjectives (Curious! Subtle! Delicate! Robust! Greedy!). Plus a sixth, Strong, for the cheese course. 

Nor do those adjectives really fit the dishes beneath them. I'd never call barbecued octopus delicate, and the desserts were far too petite to satisfy a truly greedy sweet tooth. Though they were perfectly-sized for a multi-course extravaganza that also featured a pre-dessert and petit four.

The perplexing menu set up may just be a clever marketing ploy to push you into the tasting menu (five courses for £90), or you can decide between the adjectives and select three courses at lunch time for £40. We were in a celebratory mood and went for the tasting, particularly appealing as it allowed individual choice for each course rather than mandating the whole table have the same. Some sanity prevailed, however, and we went for glasses of wine rather than the £80 accompanying wine flight. Thank heavens. I barely avoided the post-prandial nap home on the train as it was; nodding off might have ended my day in Cardiff.

The amuse bouche set the scene, as beautiful and packed with flavour as the rest of the meal would be.

Then a Red Sicilian prawn tartare with tomato ponzu jelly and Kristal caviar.  Curious, evidently. I ordered it based on the memory of having those distinctive crustaceans in Sicily, where the natives all get very excited when fresh catches come in. The flavour, indeed, would have returned me to that magical island, had it not been for my fascination with what I could only call a blackberry of caviar on top of the jelly dome. Did they tweeze each egg into place? It was almost too beautiful to eat. I managed anyway.

Next came Caractère's trademark cacio e pepe, made with strips of celeriac rather than pasta. (That's subtle, evidently.) It sounds perverse, but is a substitute so perfect it's arguably better than the traditional tagliatelle. Lighter, a bit more bite, with just a hint of sharpness to balance the richness of the cheese. It is an almost laughable transformation of a humble peasant dish, and leaves you wanting more.

More comes not as pasta, but the exquisite skate and artichoke dish described above. aka delicate. Followed by a plate that deserved its robust description: roast loin of veal, layered potato, apple and smoked bacon, veal jus. I honestly can't tell you exactly what that triangle on top of the potato was. Presumably the apple and bacon pressed into a flat, crunchy delight. It tasted as good as it looked.

Greedy should have been applied to the cheese course, as anyone who moved on to that before the tripartite desert should consider a career in competitive eating. My oversized appetite is the bane of my existence ... or at least of my health ... but I couldn't have managed it. Although I would have loved to have seen what they did with it.

Beauty is an essential element of all fine dining; you eat with your eyes first. But that seems even more true at Caractère, where each plate did indeed seem like a little work of art. Did you spot the marbleised coating on those chocolate petit four above? The same attention is given to the dining room, all white marble, rich grey greens, terra cottas and burnished brass. The chairs are comfortable and the servers charming. Ours bore an almost-disturbing resemblance to Lin-Manuel Miranda, I wondered if we were going to end up in an Encanto flash mob as part of the soundtrack's Oscar bid. But the atmosphere remained quiet and peaceful throughout. They could cram more tables in here but I suspect have made a purposeful decision not to. It's a remarkably calming environment. 

For me, Caractère's only drawback is the challenge of getting to and from it; as it's not on our usual London flight path.  Which means, much as I'd love to try it again, I'm not sure when that will get into the diary. Though it should. Given that my husband and I have spent the entirety of our relationship bickering over whether French or Italian cuisine is better, Caractère feels like the ideal battleground to fight it out. Or exhaust ourselves trying.