Schloss Stolzenfel looms over the town of Koblenz. Photograph © CORBIS

Rhine Journey
By Bill Bryson

A leisurely river voyage reveals storybook castles, soaring cathedrals and picturesque riverside towns.

Strasbourg has everything you could want in a European city—a soaring medieval cathedral, narrow pedestrian lanes that wander beguilingly and seem always to smell of warm chocolate and fresh-baked bread, half-timbered houses with window boxes of tumbling geraniums, lively cafés, splendid restaurants, infinite charm.

All it lacked, as far as I could tell after a day and a half there, was the Rhine River. This was mildly disconcerting, because I had a ticket for a three-day Rhine cruise departing from Strasbourg, and, despite two long taxi rides and many hours of dedicated walking, I hadn't come across the Rhine once.

The Rhine is indeed there, but so remote is it from the historic center of the Alsatian capital that it doesn't even make it onto many tourist maps. As was sometimes the case in old Europe, the people who built Strasbourg prudently turned their backs on a mighty, flood-prone river and erected their community along a neighboring tributary, in this case the little Ill River.

And thank goodness they did. The Ill, which wanders tranquilly through the old heart of Strasbourg before decanting into the Rhine some distance to the northeast, seems made for a medieval city—small enough for little humpback bridges, tame enough for swans, quiet enough to hear the plink of a briefly surfacing fish. Particularly around the old quarter known as Petite France, where the river divides into a series of short canals, green and mirror-smooth, it perfectly complements the cobbled lanes and picturesque jostle of steep-roofed houses, their white facades knitted together with squares and X's of black timbers. It is exquisitely pretty—and all the more so for being remote from the Rhine. Even here in Alsace, more than 400 miles from its eventual outflow into the North Sea, the Rhine has a grand, powerful air that is wholly out of keeping with the small-scale charms of a Petite France.

The Rhine doesn't complement landscapes; it makes them. Running for 820 miles through the heart of Europe, from Switzerland to the North Sea, the Rhine is much more than just a river. It is a source of myths and legends, a conduit for trade, a focus for industry, a link and a boundary between nations and cultures, an object of pleasure.

A perennial question for those who wish to know it is whether it is best to see it by boat or by land. I decided to try both. I had bought a ticket for a three-day, two-night cruise on the MS Deutschland, a sleek 184-berth vessel that makes regular journeys between Strasbourg and Cologne, 250 miles to the north. At Cologne I would pick up a rental car in which to make a more leisurely and independent return trip.

Thus I was to be found, one damp Friday evening in August, stepping from a taxi at a dock in an industrial zone along the Quai des Belges in outer Strasbourg, and getting my first glimpse of both boat and river. The Rhine was broad and swift-flowing in the steely evening light. The Deutschland, stretching for 360 feet along the grassy riverbank, looked huge and inviting, every window a pool of warm light. There was an air of expectancy among the hundred or so other arriving passengers, all of whom, like me, had been instructed to show up at 7 p.m.

KD German Rhine Line, the company that owns the Deutschland, has been running European river cruises since 1826, and it does so with crisp aplomb and well-oiled efficiency. Barely had I crossed the threshold than my ticket was taken, greetings issued, a key handed over, and my bags whisked away by a young crew member, who fairly sprinted with them to a distant cabin deep within the ship.

The cabin was modestly proportioned but well organized, with a table and chair; two single beds (one of which converted into a sofa, the other of which folded out of the way against the wall); a dressing area with a sink, cupboard, and mirror; and a snug cubicle containing a toilet and shower. The window was a good-size rectangle rather than a poky porthole. Towels, toiletries, and a map of the river were provided, and a small color TV was tuned to several German channels and one British satellite news channel.

In short, the cabin had all the features you would expect to find in a good hotel room, with two differences: It was much smaller, and it moved. Or at least soon it would be moving, on the first leg of the journey to the cathedral town of Speyer. But first there was the serious business of dinner to be engaged in.

Though the Deutschland abounds with comforts and distractions—heated swimming pool, sauna, lounge, library, bar, gift shop, nightly dancing to live music—it quickly became evident that the bulk of the passengers (and I use the word advisedly) had come for the food. You could hardly blame them. The Deutschland offered three full meals a day, plus an afternoon tea with cake, and the food was unfailingly copious and tasty. Plates invariably appeared from the kitchen piled high with meat and vegetables, and there was always also a buffet of cold cuts, salads, and assorted breads and cheeses. Desserts were a fiesta of whipped cream.

The hard-worked waiters flitted not just between tables but between languages. KD cruises are nothing if not cosmopolitan. Passengers on this voyage were from Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Australia, Japan, Italy, Britain, and the United States, so every gathering reverberated with a score of accents and a bewilderment of tongues, but the waiters adapted effortlessly. Dining was by assigned seat. I found myself sandwiched between a pair of foursomes who spoke German on the one side, French on the other, and to strangers not at all. Partly because of the polyglot backgrounds of the passengers, partly because of the shortness of time aboard—somewhat less than 48 hours—and partly, I suppose, because of the greater reserve of Europeans, a cruise on the Deutschland tends not to be a terribly social experience for someone traveling alone.

This was fine by me. To my mind there are few experiences more quietly exhilarating, more literally refreshing, than to be cocooned in some comfort on a train or ship while watching an ever-changing landscape glide by, and I was happy to sit for hour after hour on the sundeck and watch it undisturbed.

For the first 30 miles beyond Strasbourg, we had France on the left and the western foothills of the German Black Forest on the right, but near Karlsruhe the Franco-German border jagged westward, and we were entirely in Germany. Except for walkers and cyclists along the riverside paths, and the odd patient angler, there was little sign of life. Occasionally the lonely woods on either side opened briefly to reveal a farmstead or drowsing hamlet.

When you're chugging along at a stately 15 miles an hour, the world takes on an agreeably unfamiliar pace. You find yourself examining things you may not have looked at for years—the undersides of bridges, the driftings of clouds—and the landscape unfolds with a deliberative slowness that gives it an almost dreamlike quality, as when the river straightened from a long bend to reveal a distant vision of towers and domes rising from a carpet of trees. This was the Kaiserdom at Speyer, the Romanesque cathedral where followers of Martin Luther were first dubbed Protestants, and our first shore excursion. Even close-up, the cathedral appears to stand in a wilderness of forest. Leaving the ship, you follow a path through a wooded park for a few hundred yards, then step from the trees, and there before you is the cathedral with the medieval town of Speyer at its feet. There could be no more magical way to encounter it.

The cathedral at Speyer is stupendous—you can practically hear the ground groaning beneath it—but inside it is surprisingly light and airy, with plain sandstone walls rising to a lofty ceiling. The scale of it tells you that this was once one of the most important churches in Europe; four Holy Roman Emperors and four German kings lie buried in its crypt.

We had 90 minutes in Speyer, not enough to properly explore the cathedral, much less the town. That is the signal frustration of a river cruise. You witness a beguiling procession of memorable towns, sights, and landscapes, but only rarely can you step into them.

A few miles beyond Speyer we passed Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, two industrial cities. For miles there was nothing to be seen but chemical factories, cement works, refineries, power stations, container docks. The riverfront on both sides was a dusty bustle of trucks, cranes, and hydraulic shovels, and the river was crowded with long, slow-moving barges. It wasn't pretty, but it was absorbing, and when it all ended, and the landscape returned to a bucolic scene of farms, villages, and scattered woodlands, the contrast seemed all the more miraculous.

We tied up for the night at Rüdesheim, one of the liveliest and most popular towns of the small wine-producing region known as the Rheingau. Like most towns along the Middle Rhine, Rüdesheim stretches along the riverfront in a long line of small hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops, but its most famous street—for many, its very raison d'être—is a narrow back alley called Drosselgasse. Just 200 yards long and a few yards wide, Drosselgasse contains what must be the densest and dinniest concentration of wine bars in Europe, most with blaring oompah bands and throngs of revelers singing German drinking songs. Never, I promise you, will you see a greater concentration of hangovers in the making.

I had a stroll up Drosselgasse, but resisted its blandishments, contenting myself with a glass of Riesling in a quieter Weinstube on a neighboring street, then turned in early. In the morning, I was glad I had. The 50-mile cruise through the Rhine gorge, where the river passes between dark, enclosing hills liberally sprinkled with castles, is the high point of the trip, and it was evident that many of my fellow passengers had over-imbibed and were not feeling their best. The ship's public address system proclaimed the passing sights in three languages, and I could see people wince each time the speakers crackled to life.

The hills of the Rhine gorge are not especially large, but they have a certain muscular darkness that enhances their grandeur. With its brooding castles and storybook villages, it seems altogether appropriate that this area should be so closely associated with tales of dragons, magic rings, and heroic figures such as Siegfried, Roland, Brunhilde, and—perhaps the most famous of all—Lorelei.

The 433-foot-high Lorelei cliff near St. Goarshausen is the one feature that all the passengers crowd to the railings to see. According to legend, Lorelei was a temptress whose siren song lured sailors to their deaths on the dangerous rocks beneath the cliffs. The rocks have long since been cleared away, and the Lorelei cliff is neither more nor less dramatic than those around it, so the passage can come as something of an anticlimax. To my mind, the real visual highlights of this stretch of the river are the two curiously named and romantically sited castles, Burg Katz (Cat Castle) and Burg Maus (Mouse Castle), which face each other across a steep valley. Katz was named for the Katzenelnbogen family that built it in the 14th century, and Maus, as one story goes, was given its name because it was so much smaller.

Some 50 castles stand along the Middle Rhine, the greatest such concentration in the world, according to the ship's commentary. Almost nowhere between Mainz and Cologne are you not within sight of a castle—often two or three. Most were built by medieval princelings to extract tolls from passing boats. Only one, Marksburg, near Braubach, managed to escape destruction through the centuries. Some have been left as ruins, others restored. Some are private residences, but several function as hotels or tourist diversions. Burg Maus, for instance, is a falconry center. Burg Rheinfels, on the opposite bank from Burg Katz, is a hotel. One of the most imposing of Rhine edifices, Burg Stahleck at Bacharach, is a youth hostel.

For the rest of the morning, we passed beneath a succession of romantically gloomy edifices, often perched on impossible-looking crags, and pretty villages squeezed between stately river and terraced hillside. At the old city of Koblenz, where the Mosel River flows into the Rhine at a place called Deutsches Eck (German Corner), the gorge officially ends, though the hills remain steep and dark, and the villages just as lovely as before. And then, almost before I knew it, we were in Cologne, and being given instructions in three languages on how to disembark.

The skyline of Cologne is dominated by its vast gothic cathedral. With its twin spires soaring 515 feet, among the highest church spires anywhere, Cologne Cathedral is possibly the only man-made object that is equal to the natural grandeur of the Rhine. I had seen it before and would have loved to have seen it again, but I was loaded down with luggage, and in any case I had to get to the airport to pick up my rental car.

The Köln-Bonn airport, just outside the city, is surrounded by a confusion of exceedingly zippy autobahns. Since I am the kind of driver who spends the first two days in a rental car going very slowly and repeatedly washing the windows by accident, I prudently decided to go wherever the car took me until I could navigate well enough to safely escape the network of autobahns for something quieter.

In consequence I found myself not back in Cologne, as I had hoped I might, but in the little town of Königswinter, in the shadow of the Siebengebirge Mountains. This turned out to be reasonably good news. I was on Highway 42, the main road along the east bank of the Rhine. It was a two-lane highway, busy with Sunday drivers, but far less intimidating than an autobahn. I followed the road through a succession of little towns—Rhöndorf, Bad Honnef, Unkel, Bad Hönningen—where geraniums bloomed in window boxes and overflowed from hanging baskets on the streetlamps. Almost everywhere crowds of people were out enjoying the afternoon sunshine, cycling or strolling along riverside promenades, or playing in the many waterside parks.

A car, I discovered, gives you an entirely different perspective on the river. Aboard ship, the Rhine is the central feature of your existence. It is always there, stretching out before and behind you. In a car, the river becomes much more incidental to the landscape. Sometimes the road follows it faithfully for a few miles, but then the river slips into the background as fields and towns intervene. Nor can you give the river anything like your full attention when you are preoccupied with road signs and traffic.

The real surprise, however, was what a different sense of scale and distance a car imparts. On the boat, it had taken over an hour to get from Boppard to Koblenz. Now I covered the ground between the two in about 20 minutes. I pulled over to consult my map and realized with a small sense of shock that in two hours I had driven nearly a third of the way to Strasbourg. Clearly I would have to slow my pace.

I spent the night in Boppard, an intensively pretty town with a leafy riverside promenade and a cobbled market square dominated by a large white church, 760-year-old St. Severus. I wandered along almost every one of the town's little streets and followed the riverside walk to the highway at the edge of town, then dined at an open-air restaurant with a large terrace. The weather was warm, the food was hearty, and the river in the fading light was lovely beyond words—broad, calm, the color of molten chrome—against its backdrop of rounded hills.

In the morning, I realized just how popular Boppard is. By 8:15, tour buses were disgorging passengers all along the sunny promenade, and soon day cruisers from Koblenz and Bingen, their sundecks a solid block of round heads and colorful shirts, began sliding past on their way to or from the Lorelei.

I drove south toward Bad Salzig and St. Goar, and was startled to find how little usable space there is along this central stretch of the Rhine. The narrow shelf of land between the river and hills accommodates not only communities, but also railroad lines, highways, power lines, and other links to the outside world. The village of Hirzenach, which had looked ineffably serene from the ship, proved on closer inspection to be battered by the ceaseless whoosh of highway traffic and the scream of passing trains. It must be anything but serene to live there.

By the time I reached Burg Rheinfels, a ruined castle high above the Rhine gorge near the Lorelei, traffic on the river road was solid. Burg Rheinfels dates from the 13th century and was once one of the largest fortresses along the Rhine, but in the 1790s it was captured by the French, who then tried methodically to destroy it. The views, however, are still sensational. Just below Rheinfels is the town of St. Goar. I'd intended to stop for coffee, but the place was packed and there was nowhere to park. Here I discovered the one indubitable advantage of a car: if things are too crowded in one place, you can always go somewhere else. That's exactly what I did now, heading into the hills and toward the Mosel Valley. The contrast was instantaneous. There was hardly a car on the road, just long sunny views across billowy trapezoids of woodland and wheat field, with occasional scattered villages that seemed never to have seen a tourist.

The Mosel seemed altogether a quieter, gentler waterway than the Rhine. Running for 150 miles through France, Germany, and Luxembourg, the Mosel is one of the great wine-producing river valleys of northern Europe, particularly along the last 60 miles or so between Trier and Koblenz, where it wanders between the Eifel and Hunsrück hills en route to the Rhine. It is a wonderfully fetching landscape, with hills that are sometimes rolling, sometimes nearly perpendicular, and always lushly green and quilted with vineyards. In the old villages, almost every shop and building has a sign announcing some connection with wine—winzerkeller, Weinstube, weinausschank, weingut, weinort, weinhof—almost always written in the severe gothic script that Germans reserve for life's more serious concerns.

Cochem, with narrow streets and a big castle, is one of the most popular of the Mosel wine towns, but there are others just as attractive and far quieter. Beilstein, perched on a long, lazy bend on the southern, quieter side of the river, was a flawless little place, full of secret corners and tempting wine bars where the loudest noise was the occasional (actually not so occasional) popping of a cork and attendant smacking of lips. I was drawn on through a succession of comely towns and villages—Bruttig, Kröv, Bernkastel-Kues—and found myself at nightfall in Trier, just short of the Luxembourg border. One of the oldest cities in Germany, Trier has a number of Roman monuments, most notably the massive Porta Nigra, or Black Gate, once the northern entranceway to the city and still one of the most impressive Roman monuments outside Italy.

Having discovered the liberating possibilities of a car, in the morning I decided to explore another Rhine tributary, the Lahn, which enters the Rhine just south of Koblenz. After a few miles the Lahn leads to Bad Ems, a historic spa town and a favorite retreat of Kaiser Wilhelm I at the turn of the century. Off the main tourist track, Bad Ems has the feel of a forgotten relic of imperial Germany with its 19th-century-style grand casino, stately hotels, and gracious riverside park.

An hour's drive south, and far grander, is Wiesbaden. In the second half of the 19th century, Wiesbaden was one of the richest and most glittering resorts in all of Europe, the haunt of the rich and royal, who came to take the waters from its 26 hot springs and gamble away their fortunes at its casino (immortalized in Dostoyevsky's The Gambler). The springs and casino are still there, and still thriving, but these days Wiesbaden has grown into a substantial commercial and administrative center of 273,000 people, and many guidebooks don't even mention it. This is unfortunate because it is a handsome town, with a grand market square and cobbled lanes with congenial cafés and restaurants.

Most guidebooks instead concentrate on Mainz, Wiesbaden's twin city across the Rhine. Although smaller than Wiesbaden, Mainz attracts more attention because it is the home of one of Germany's great cathedrals, St. Martin's and St. Stephen's, and of the celebrated Gutenberg Museum. The cathedral, dating from the 11th century, dominates the city skyline with its six towers. Inside, the air of chilly gloom is somewhat enlivened by an array of stone carvings, many representing medieval archbishops and other prelates from the time when Mainz was a principal center of the Holy Roman Empire.

Despite the haughty grandeur of the statues, the central figure in Mainz's history was not an archbishop but the son of a patrician family: Johannes Gutenberg. Born in Mainz in the 1390s and trained as a metalworker, Gutenberg developed a form of movable type in the 1430s that allowed books to be manufactured relatively cheaply and in large numbers. A model of his original workshop, along with much else to do with the history of printing and publishing—including two original Gutenberg Bibles—is housed in the Gutenberg Museum, just northeast of the cathedral.

About 25 miles south of Mainz is the third of the great imperial cathedrals of the German Rhineland, the Kaiserdom at Worms. It was close to here in 1521 that Martin Luther refused to recant his utterances against the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, reputedly declaring: "Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise." Even without this historic link, Worms Cathedral would demand a visit. Vast and weighty, it is impressive from outside, but even more compelling within, with its huge, lavishly decorated baroque altar, the work of Balthasar Neumann, and its ornate choir stalls and side chapels.

Away from its cathedral, Worms is not a particularly attractive place, so I didn't linger. There was one last cathedral I just had to see again—that of Strasbourg, where I had begun my trip.

The mighty Cathedral of Notre Dame in Strasbourg is one of the truly incomparable sights of Europe. Soaring above a maze of surrounding streets, it is a mountain of pink sandstone, great stretches of its exterior intricately worked by medieval stonemasons into Gothic patterns of a lacelike delicacy. It is a wondrous sight, but even more wondrous is the experience of stepping inside, into an echoing void lit only by scattered islands of flickering votive candles, and discovering the richness of the interior little by little as your eyes adjust. At first all you see, floating eerily above you, is a row of stained-glass windows, rich and glowing. Gradually, large fluted columns become distinguishable from the surrounding murk, and finally you realize that they soar to impossibly lofty vaulted ceilings. It is a truly unforgettable experience.

For a small fee, you can climb worn, winding steps to a platform on the cathedral tower. It is a taxing slog, but worth it for the view. You can see for miles. I was interested to note that I still couldn't see the Rhine anywhere. It hardly mattered. After all, I'd seen it.

Bill Bryson, a regular contributor to Traveler, was a lecturer for National Geographic's "On Tour" expedition along the Main-Danube Canal in June 1994. Photographer Patrick Ward, who lives in England, illustrated Scotland's Hebrides for Traveler's July/August 1992 issue.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.