It was a cool, gray morning in Bad Schandau. I woke up early and worked on editing photographs. John joined me later and we had a bit of breakfast. At about nine we boarded a bus for our first excursion of the voyage, a trip to Sächsische Schweiz, Saxon Switzerland. Despite the somewhat bizarre name, this is one of the most famous places in southeast Germany.
Saxon Switzerland is nowhere close to Switzerland. It is on the border of the Czech Republic. The Germans use the word “Schweiz” to refer to any area of great natural beauty. This area of Germany became popular in the early nineteenth century, the time when Romantic painters and poets were looking for wild natural scenes to evoke equally wild passions within themselves. Anything that looked vaguely desolate was the best for this. And this area fits that description perfectly. No wonder it became a popular spot for painters like Caspar David Friedrich.
Viking gave us a free guided tour, and it was not as lame as many of those tours often are. We took a bus from Bad Scandau to the entrance of the national park, about half an hour away.
The park is apparently dog-friendly, though I only saw one there.
You only walk a few feet into the park before you see the eroded sandstone cliff formations that are the signature feature.
As I said, we had a great guide for this. His name was Alexander. He lives in Dresden but with originally from Mainz in the west. So he admitted that he still could not understand a word of the local Saxon dialect. Fortunately, everybody in German can speak both standard German and their regional tongue.
He explained that Saxons love to go sleep overnight in the woods. Instead of using established campgrounds, they look for small indentations in the rocks like this one. Today, since this is a national park, they are obviously not doing it here. But there are many inscriptions to show that visitors have spent time here in the past.
The most famous feature of the park is the Bastei Bridge. This connects several of the pinnacles.
And indeed there are many evocative vistas even for those who, like Jane Austen, find the early Romantic emphasis on “sensibility” somewhat silly.
There are also vistas of more pastoral countryside
and the Elbe, flowing below.
The nineteenth century writers concocted a story of a monk and a nun who fell in love with each other. Of course, vowed to celibacy, their love was romantically doomed to fail. But each went to monasteries on opposite sides of the river and each evening would climb onto rocks so that they could see each other from a distance. Somebody decided to put a metal statue of the monk on one of the higher rocks.
On a less romantic note, we saw a high fortress that had been used at various points as a prison. This was also one of the places where art treasures from Dresden were hidden during the war.
Alex took us to one point where we saw both the rock formation
and Caspar David Friedrich’s rendition of it.
After a couple hours in the park, we went back to the bus and drove back to the ship. John and I decided that we wanted to actually go to the hot springs in Bad Schandau as the town is famous for this. We grabbed our swim trunks and walked about 500 meters to the Toskana Spa. The facilities is quite new, even though the springs themselves have been an attraction for a century. Inside, the lady at the desk, who basically spoke no English, sold us tickets and showed us how to use the lockers. It was an ingenious, but a little complicated, system of something that looked like a small poker chip being inserts into a bracelet for us to wear. Suitably attired, we went about to explore. The main area had about a half dozen pools of various sizes. Some were designed mostly for kids. John found a large pool in a darkened room with a light display on the ceiling. This was a little warmer than the other pools, and it was the only one with salty water. The neat thing about this pool was that you heard music when your ears were under the water, but not when you were out of the pool. There was the “Saunaland” area. A sign on the door here told us that nudity in this area was “compulsory,” though, somewhat confusingly, we were also told to use a towel. There were at least a dozen saunas and steam rooms here. Each had a different theme. There was also a big pile of ice, but neither of us felt like using it.
After about 90 minutes, we returned to the boat. We had missed our lunch time, but the staff had saved us some soup and fried chicken. As we ate, the boat pulled out of Bad Schandau and down the Elbe. In a few minutes, we passed through Saxon Switzerland again, and this time we could see the attractions from the water.
It was interesting to see it from the water, but I was glad I had actually been up there on the Bastei Bridge. The dramatic scenery only lasted for about 20 minutes and after that it turned into flat countryside. We took a nap.
In the later afternoon, we pulled into Dresden. After dinner, we went into the city to explore a bit. We will have more of a tour tomorrow. We saw the central square next to Our Lady’s Church.
We saw a little bit of the old German Democratic Republic on the side of the main library.
As it started to get dark — and a bit cold, too — we went back to the boat.
