Of course, we got to the bus station early (it’s what we do) and wasted some time playing at another really cool German playground. We got on the bus with roughly 100 schoolchildren, evidently that’s how they get to school. We ride the bus and get there at about 7:40, just a little bit ahead of when they (emphasis Jessie’s) THEY TOLD US TO BE THERE and we are the only people around. No tourists, no buses, the stores are all closed, and the ticketing office doesn’t even open up until 8:00. Jess was quite upset. We wasted some time standing in a line consisting of the two of us. (Any geometry student can tell you that it only takes two people to make a line.) Eventually it opened up, but the tour didn’t even start for another hour.
This castle is much cooler on the inside than the other one.
We slowly walked up to the first beautiful, historic castle, Hohenschwangau, slowly. We had time to spare. It’s just a bit up on a hill from the office and the little tourist town beneath. It was a little overcast so we didn’t get a view of the other castle, but I’m told that one exists. We saw the gardens and fountains and then went in for our tour. Hohenschwangau (Ho-en-SCHVAN-gau) was definitely the better of the two tours. The castle was finished and we got to see all the rooms at a calm, unhurried pace, with an English guide and everything. We got to see a lot of neat details and gifts to the royal family, which were always terribly impressive. No pictures, though, sorry. My personal favorite were the queens bedroom and the kings bedroom. The king had put little pinpricks of light in the ceiling so he could have stars over his bed, just like ours back home. There was even a larger light for the moon that you could adjust from full to new. The queens bedroom was directly downstairs, and they were connected, get this, by a *secret passageway*. Evidently they knew that little princes got formed somehow, they just chose to believe the actual process *never happened*. I’m also tickled by the idea of the queen lying in her bed, nearly asleep, and then she hears a creak from the secret door and inwardly rolls her eyes thinking: “It seems the king is in high spirits tonight”.
He he. He he he. Ah. Ahem. Anyway.
The other hidden door in the kings bedroom was for the other thing that kings, I guess, weren’t actually supposed to do. His bathroom. Do note, though, that not counting the servants passageways and annex, the castle, this royal dwelling for the highest people in the land, probably wasn’t that much larger than our house is here. Ah, progress. Also, the beds were TINY! Were kings really short? And not allowed to cuddle with their wives? I shudder to think!
Lots of people getting their picture taken here. Can you blame them?
Next up: Neuschwanstein. *The* romantic castle. Unfortunately, covered mostly in clouds today. No matter: we girded our loins and hiked up the hill to see the castle, and once we got closer it slowly appeared in the mist. Very romantic, very inspiring. Also: huge. Again, no pictures, but the inside of the castle wasn’t that impressive. It’s this enormous, sprawling thing, and only a few rooms were ever finished. There were a couple of fantastic ones, though. The kings bedroom, for one. The whole room was done in wood and carved with *preposterous* elegance. We even got to go through the *secret door*, cleverly hidden behind wooden carvings. This secret door only went to the dressing room. No late-night trysts for King Ludwig. Ludwig was the king who designed, more or less, the castle and oversaw its construction. Jess and I suspect he may have been gay, hence his never marrying, his brooding solitude in a world that *clearly* wouldn’t have accepted him, and his love of fabulous, fabulous castles. We saw a video of the history of the castle because it was warm in there and cold outside, and then boycotted the gift shop on the way out because Jess resented being made to wait early in the day.
Food for fuel, next. A restaurant down the way sold us a four cheese pizza and some pork medallions on top of egg noodles (delish) as fuel for our hiking! We took a trail up to Mary’s Bridge, which, unfortunately had clouds instead of the customary view of the castle. We could still see the river underneath, though. Then we went past the bridge, past the “danger” sign, and on and upwards to...something. We weren’t really sure. We’d read about the path but weren’t really sure where it went. We’re still not.
How's this for dramatic?
See, this path wound up the mountain on which Neuschwanstein (Noy-SCHVAN-stein) is perched, and so it was steep and covered in clouds. We ascended on switchbacks for about 45 minutes and never had any sense of where we were going. Every few minutes the switchbacks would take us to this terrifying cliff face that presumably overlooked the castles and the valley but today was just...white. Nothing. We had no idea where we were. We just knew the rocks went *straight down* from where we were standing. The peak of...wherever we were going always seemed just out of reach, but that was, primarily, because that was all we could see through the clouds. After quite a lot of that we decided we weren’t going to get to the top and we turned around and came back. We were the only people on the trail the entire time. Turns out we made the right choice. We were on a three hour trail to the top of a gondola, which, no doubt, wouldn’t have been open with the fog.
Behind Jess and that tree, the world just drops away.
On the way down, instead of taking the normal route, we wandered down Pollat Gorge. Remember the river we could see from above at Mary’s Bridge a couple of paragraphs up there? Yeah, that’s the river. We took a different route down and HO-LY-CRAP. That walk was the best part of the day, beating out both castles by far. (Granted: Jess and I are both suckers for waterfalls). It started out with a massive waterfall and a view from below of Mary’s bridge that we could just *barely* see. We studied the waterfall and then took the path down to see yet more waterfalls, more and more. It ended with a walk on a steel grating that had been drilled into the side of the rock directly over another set of waterfalls and a flume for collecting water. It was astounding. We stayed there for a long time just watching. Definite highlight points.
Jess likes waterfalls. Here's she's standing on a grate, which is *directly over one*.
After that it was a short stroll and a bus ride back to Fussen. We stopped at a supermarket to buy some water and trail mix. We ended up eating lunch on trains out of our backpack a lot and having backup stock was always helpful. Also...more chocolate. We decided to try an Indian restaurant for dinner back at the city and it was really good. Refueled, we managed to get back to the hostel and just write and relax our legs for the rest of the day.
-N
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