A Week of Wandering: Füssen

In the morning of our third day in Munich, M. and I took the train to Füssen, a Bavarian hilltop town on the banks of the Lech River. We walked up to the Hohes Schloss, a cheerful white castle which was built in the Middle Ages and then heavily rebuilt beginning in 1486. It did not awe me much and the trompe-l'oeil paintings of cornerstones and bay windows – their glass panes ringed as they so often are in Bavaria – did not trompe l'oeil* very much either. What charmed my imagination was a nearby portion of grey ruined wall and inbuilt grotto, which were embedded into the slope, but whose date of provenance was, however, 1876. *(fool the eye)

The town itself is very friendly – no stares of hostile apathy – and the tourist hordes had either not quite arrived yet, or they tend to bypass the town. I loved the surroundings: firs, fresh air, leafy trees, grassy fields out of a Swiss cough candy advertisement (purple-flowering spearmint and clover, yellow arnica, tender dandelion leaves, lady's mantle, plantains, etc.) and little mountains. We went to a quiet corner, passed the bench that was labelled "private property" and sat down on another to eat lunch. A fountain splashed away in front of us, a lawn reposed in the shade, and from a vine-sheltered backyard we heard the subdued clinking and conversation of people having a peaceful lunch, too. It strikes me that the sole element missing from this glowing description is a circle of rabbits dancing a minuet; but the scene truly was idyllic, all the more as it was not too glaringly so.

Then we walked off to the village of Hohenschwangau, for three or four kilometres, though we could have taken the bus, too. Our trip was not too steep, it was sunny, and cheerful pedestrians and cyclists passed us on our way up. The Lech River is a milky aquamarine tint, which lends a toxically artificial appearance; but as there is no black dead zone above the waterline, and we spotted bubbles that a fish made on its surface, the colour is presumably due to glacial pristineness and not to mining waste.

Hohenschwangau's village is now a cluster of immodestly large Teutonic buildings, inns or shops; it overlooks the Alpensee, and is overlooked by the yellow castle of Hohenschwangau, which was built by the father of the Ludwig who was responsible for Schloss Neuschwanstein. We stood in line for an estimated forty minutes to buy tickets, which cost 9 Euros for Neuschwanstein, and would have cost 17 Euros if we had wanted to enter both castles. There are English, French, Spanish tours, and if you do not join one, you may not enter. Fortunately for them, the pleasingly diverse tourist crowd did largely seem to be American, British, German, or Spanish. But a little girl, or the paterfamilias, in the family behind us, remarked unenthusiastically that this was like [waiting in line at] Universal Studios. When we had paid, we went out and discovered that our tickets were for a tour at ca. 5:30, which in turn was ca. 30 minutes after the last train directly for München left from Füssen station. (Which reminds me that one beautiful thing about living in Berlin is that the train schedules don't have asterisks and daggers and fine print all over because the trains run so differently on holidays, Sundays, Saturdays, Fridays . . . every second Monday after a full moon . . . and so on and so forth, ad absurdum.)

So we sold our tickets to a nice Spanish couple, and then, after I had purchased ice cream and eaten it, we ascended the path to Hohenschwangau. It has a delightful courtyard with a swan fountain, oleanders, a potted lemon tree and apricot trees, lavender, a lion fountain, plane trees, etc., in an homage to the beauties of Italy. Winding along into another courtyard, we found an unpromising concrete basin that was filled with fresh, pure, and cold water. We inquired after its salubrity at the gift shop, then indulged in the luxury of washing our hands and, in M.'s case, filling up her water bottle. Schloss Neuschwanstein loomed quietly from its hill. I think it much maligned now; at least on a mildly cloudy day, it was not the hectic technicolour experience I had expected. Its proportions, too, are modest given the towering mountain, where sparse firs straggle up the rounded peak and dried-up waterfalls run down the heights, in the background.

Slowly we walked back down to the Alpensee, in which one is permitted to swim. One of the tiny beaches was crowded with people, and a black-footed swan and fish were tranquilly flocking near the humans. We pulled off our socks and shoes, hung our socks to air, and then waded out into the limpid water. It was a beautiful experience, at least for me – so cool, and the feet felt wonderful after it. Putting on the socks and shoes again was no torment, either; my socks were not wet with perspiration as I had expected, but cuddly and warm and dry.

Then we went to the bus station, waited for the bus, rode back to Füssen train station, and then took the train back to Munich. Along the way we had the opportunity to admire more of the squat, comfortable Bavarian houses, armed with red roof tiles, solar panels, satellite dishes, and every other modern convenience. I did enjoy, too, seeing farmers wielding pitchforks to rake up the cut grasses on their fields, instead of threshing through the field with hay-baling machines. There were terraces, fields with horses or cows, cornfields, gardens bright with calendula and sunflowers, balconies overflowing with pink and red geraniums or petunias, stacks of firewood, woods with firs and maples and birches and meagre pines that resembled paintbrushes, mountain ash trees full of red berries, a striped blue and white maypole, etc., so the route painted a hearty picture of rural German life, straight out of a children's book. Then there were apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere and factories and an apparent gravel pit.