It has been a tradition for the last three years that Bee and I celebrate her birthday somewhere other than Brussels! This time, I did not tell her where, just that there was the castle of a princess, the nest of an eagle, a place where there is lots of beer and a place that should never be forgotten.
We flew to Munich and immediately drove south with the intention to visit Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein, two castles who belonged to Ludwig II (the mad) of Bavaria. Hohenschwangau is not very famous and therefore not familiar to people. However, that is where the visit starts and I had nothing to do while waiting in a long line of cars – so I took a picture of the castle behind the trees.
We were only 300-400 m away from the parking lot, but the road was completely blocked and we moved a few meters every several minutes. Bee went ahead to see what was going on; when she came back 15 minutes later, I had moved two car lengths and she explained that the parking lot being full, one car could get in every time another one got out! She also mentioned that the line to buy tickets has several 100 people in it.
So we decided that visiting Neuschwanstein was not that important. We stopped and took a few pictures, because that one is recognised all over the world!
It was the inspiration for Disney’s original Castle at Disney World and was the Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the movie. It was also featured in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, another Disney movie, but not animated this time.
The castle was actually never finished and Ludwig II never lived there. Only 1 or 2 rooms were decorated, including one with a fake grotto as an homage to Richard Wagner, who was a close friend (very close friend?) of Ludwig.
The location for the castle is great – At the edge of the mountains and on the side of a large plain.
So, we decided to move on ahead and go to Garmisch Partenkirche, where we would be spending the first night. This is one of the first winter resorts in Germany and it hosted the Winter Olympic Games in 1936, the same year the summer games were in Berlin. In summer, like right now when we were there, it is a sleepy little town, with typical Bavarian architecture such as this Bier Garten with very nice frescoes.
The local church has the onion dome that is also typical of this region.
We were early for dinner so we kept walking around town and heard music in the distance. We were intrigued and saw that there was a trio of young musicians setting up. Two violins and a clarinet. They were very good and played classical music adapted for their instruments. The movie below is taken with my still camera and reduced so that it can fit into my blog, but the music quality is not bad.
Here is a trio playing Vivaldi’s 4 Seasons! It will take a while to load, but I can assure you that it is worth it. It is very risky to take music that most people will have heard and than transform it for only three instruments. I think they make it work really well.
We had left the destination for the next day up to the weather. It was somewhat cloudy and we decided that if it was again cloudy the next day, we would go to Hitler’s retreat near Berchtesgaden. However, given the experience of the previous day, we were afraid of large crowds and the place is now a restaurant – the view is still great but the access very limited.
However, the weather the next morning was great so we decided to go to the Zugspitze instead. The Zugspitze is the highest mountain in Germany, right at the Austrian border and is easy to get to. This is also where one of the main ski resort of Garmisch actually is.
We took a cog-wheel train to the base of the cable car that would take us to the top. The cog-wheel is required to climb some of the steep gradients on the line.
We could barely see the end of the line, way at the top of the mountain right in front of us here.
When we got there, the final ‘climb’ to the Zugspitze was very easy, but very crowded. We decided that we did not need to do it ourselves – we were close enough at the restaurant.
The views were great. On the one side, the mountains stretching across the Alps to Austria and Italy. Clouds were building on this side, making things even more dramatic.
On the other side, the plain with lakes (the Eibsee) and a small river, the Loisach, that eventually flows into the Isar and ultimately towards the Danube
We had lunch at the top, in the restaurant that you see at the top left of the previous photo, and the view changed every few minutes as the clouds revealed more or less of the surrounds.
I was surprised to see these black birds way up here – they looked cold, but well covered by their feathers
When the clouds were just a little lower, we could see other mountains as far as the eye could see, probably as far as Italy across Austria. Several 3800+ meter peaks should be visible from here, but we could not identify them.
At times, the clouds appeared to be flowing over the mountain into the valley, but they would disperse right away on the other side and so the views of the plain remained clear.
We took another cable car down from the top restaurant to the ski resort itself. In the photo below, you can see the top of the mountain and the restaurant on the left side of the ridge.
The building in the middle of the photo used to be a hotel but is now a place where experts come to study the mountain and the high altitude habitat and climate. Not a bad place to work, but the commute may be a bit difficult.
There is a very different view on this side, looking towards Garmisch; no vegetation whatsoever at this altitude, especially since the ground is covered by snow for 4-5 months of the year. We can tell that we are in the sun, but the city is probably under the clouds, just like yesterday.
There is a patch of snow (Ice?) left where kids are using sleds. The ski-lift is not operational and the temperature, even with the sun, is not very high.
We decided to have a go at the snow. I sent Bee ahead to test the ice and look for crevices. Footing was solid!
But you still had to be careful as it was very slippery. If you do not believe me, look at the gentleman in the background of this picture!
I am not sure if he actually fell – it is not until I looked at the photos that I noticed that he had lost his balance.
Amongst the desolation and the snow, there was a small chapel, as is often the case, dedicated to the mountain guides and Alpinists who live in these parts.
On the way back, we actually took the train from the ski resort all the way to Garmisch. the first 10 km of the rail line from the top are actually inside the mountain. This is where the cog-wheel on the train is absolutely necessary as the gradient is much steeper than a normal train could take.
From Garmisch, we headed back towards Munich where we would be spending several days.
As we have done before, we thought about doing a walking tour of the city, but did not really organise anything. By luck we ended up at the Neue Rathouse (New City Hall), built only 150 years ago and saw the sign for a tour in English about to start. We gladly joined the small group that was there.
The guide is a British expat living in Munich and teaching school. He does this on his spare time.
We started in front of city hall, just in time for the daily mechanical puppet show that starts soon after 11AM locally known as Glockenspiel (or game of bells – there are 42 bells and 32 animated figurines).
There was a crowd watching and I took a very short, and shaky video. I realize that I should stick to photos, especially with the camera I have. Occasionally, it is very nice to be able to capture things in motion, even if poorly.
We walked towards this church officially called the Theatinerkirch or Theatiner Church. However local expats tend to call it the Tina Turner Church as it sounds very much the same and is easier to say. It was built by Italian Architects (Agostino Barelli first and later Enrico Zuccalli) for the Elector Ferdinand Maria and his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy, as a gesture of thanks for the birth of the long-awaited heir to the Bavarian crown, Prince Max Emanuel, in 1662 but also to impress the population and other Kings and Emperors with the style and sophistication of the Bavarian Court. Because of this history, it has become today a place where couples come who are hoping to have children.
The loge that you see on the left of this photo was built as a copy of the loge on the Piazza Signoria in Florence – there are, unfortunately, no significant statues in this one.
We headed from there to the Englischer Garten, or the English Garden, Munich’s largest urban park. This is the only place in Munich where one is officially allowed to sunbathe in the nude and we noticed several people who were doing so. There are some in this picture – can you find them?
When you finally tear yourself away for the totally pointless exercise of finding the naked men sunbathing (I never said it was a woman!) you can continue to read this reportage.
The Englischer Garten is crossed by a small stream, the Schwabinger Bach and where it enters the Park, it forms a permanent wave that is used by local surfers as a place to practice. It is amazing to be able to see surfers this far from the sea. Some of them were quite good. There is usually a good crowd watching too, including tourists whose busses drop then off not too far.
In my original indications to Bee as to where we were going, I had mentioned a place that should never be forgotten!
The place in question is Dachau, the original Nazi Concentration Camp actually started as a camp for the rehabilitation of political opponents. It was started almost immediately after the Nazi party came to power in 1933 and was founded by Heinrich Himmler, at the time, chief of police in Munich.
This is the first place where these famous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” were used, and at the beginning, this was true!
In 1938 the camp was expanded, using conscript labour, in order to house up to 6000 prisoners. Eventually, it would hold up to 12000 during the latter part of WWII. Two sets of barracks have been rebuilt – only the foundations of the others are left.
The courtyard in front of the barracks was used for the roll call every morning and evening. This was part of the ‘torture’ that prisoners had to endure as it could take hours and they were not allowed to talk or move during the roll call. If you showed any sign of weakness or sickness during roll call, your chances of survival were reduced to almost nothing.
Inside the barracks, these are the beds used by prisoners. No telling how many prisoners had to sleep in each bed section of this one.
There were modern washing facilities in all barracks
A very evocative statue in front of the administration building. As the first concentration camp, this was the place where new “techniques” and “procedures” were developed, tested and first implemented.
As a result, Dachau had very extensive administration buildings. These are now used to house a museum illustrating the history of Dachau but also that of the Concentration Camp system in the Third Reich and in occupied countries.
We followed an excellent guided tour – our guide was the lady with the red skirt and she did a very good job. Most of her tours are given to school children as there is still an obligation that German school children have to learn about the Third Reich and the Nazi regime, and have to visit the concentration camps to see what happened there. On the Saturday of our visit, however, there were no school groups.
This photo speaks for itself!
Below is the prison in the Dachau Concentration camp – yes, there was a prison within a prison!. This is where special prisoners were kept, either trouble makers that were separated from the general population or clerics from occupied countries, one of the specialties of the Dachau camp.
The most special prisoner in Dachau was Georg Elser who had been convicted of attempting to kill Hitler in 1939. He was alleged to have carved a hole in a column at Hitler’s favourite Bier Garten in Munich over many repeated visits. Just before he knew Hitler would be coming to Munich, he hid a bomb in the hole he had created. Everything went according to plan, the bomb did go off, but Hitler was not killed in the explosion and Georg Elser was captured just before he could escape to Switzerland. He spent the rest of the war in one cell of this prison until he died from, supposedly, an allied air raid just weeks before the liberation of the camp in 1945.
Dachau was never an “extermination” camp, but a labour camp. The crematorium was built late in the war only to facilitate the disposal of bodies who were the result of the harsh living and working conditions imposed on the prisoners. Gas chambers were built together with the crematorium, but there is no evidence that they were ever used.
The crematorium was used heavily in the last few years of the war. American troops which liberated the camp used this evidence with the local population to prove that they must have known what was going on due to the constant smell emanating from them. Americans forced all locals to walk through the camp soon after liberation, to show them what was going on there. As I said earlier, this is continuing today for the new generation so that one shall never forget what happened here and in many other places.
Proving that the indication on the door is indeed true, we were able to escape through ourhard work. All kidding apart, the saying was very true during the initial history of Dachau – only 800 people died lives in Dachau during the first 4 years of operation, when it was essentially a camp for political prisoners. Unfortunately, things changed once the war started.
It was a very good trip and we really enjoyed all we did. I am always amazed at how much I can learn from local guides as opposed to just reading the indications or the written guidebooks that we always have. I certainly encourage all to take the local guides and tours whenever possible.
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