The AmaWaterways Danube River Cruise begins in Budapest, Hungary, above, and finishes in Vilshofen, Germany.Ama Waterways
The Volga is longer, the Rhone is more important economically, the Rhine is fairy-tale prettier. But the Danube is the cruise to choose if you want to understand how Europe became what it is.
This is the waterway that links Europe to Asia, that marked the northern border of the Roman Empire and the western frontier of the vast Ottoman sultanate. Pliny and Ptolomey wrote about the Danube, and so did Ovid.
In September, I travelled the storied river myself, on the AmaWaterways Danube River Cruise from Budapest, Hungary, to Vilshofen, Germany. To give you some idea of the rigours of cruising the most culturally gripping river in Europe, the program for Sept. 14, 2023, which was Day 6 of seven, was as follows:
Spectacular on-ship meals are based on local fare and regional dishes.Ama Waterways
The bistro breakfast was laid out in the lounge, on the foredeck of the AmaSonata, our three-decked luxury river cruiser, at 6 a.m.; the main dining room opened an hour later. Morning yoga with Csilla kicked off at 7 a.m., followed by core and balance training, also with Csilla, at 7:30. The ship, sailing overnight from Vienna, pulled into Linz, Austria, Hitler’s favourite burg, and where he planned to retire, at 7:30 a.m. Four tour buses left the ship between 9 a.m. and 9:30. Lunch onboard began at 12:30; afternoon tea was served, with musical stylings by pianist Petar, at 4 p.m. Csilla led a fresh resistance band training class on the sundeck (weather permitting) at 4:30, as the last of the tour buses returned, followed by classes in circuit training and posttour stretching. Cocktails, 6:30; multicourse à la carte dinner featuring an option of mind-altering wienerschnitzel, 7 p.m. Sounds of Austria, the evening’s onboard entertainment, warbled to life at 9 p.m. The ship sailed for Passau, Germany, at 10, followed by the nightly 10:30 late night snack, also in the lounge. And that was a semi-busy day.
That, in a paragraph, is the beauty and frustration of river cruising: There is always something to do, and there is always too much to do.
The work of grafitti artists along the banks of the Danube's tributaries through the city of Vienna.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
This is the Danube, after all, the Nile of the north, the storied “gutter of Europe” (as Claudio Magris dubbed it in Danube, an ideal book to take along) that flows purposefully but without boasting from the Black Forest in Southern Germany to the Black Sea in Ukraine, south of Odessa. The villages and cities you deke into and out of along its course – AmaWaterways runs the tour in both directions – were founded by Celts, who were trounced by the Romans, who were run off by the Huns, who were massacred by the Turks, who were overcome by the Hapsburgs, who were swallowed by the Nazis, who lost to the Russians, who caved (most recently) to the European Union. There is very little in Europe’s past the Danube hasn’t somehow soaked up and washed away. You can stop literally anywhere along its banks and sink down into history as deep as you can bear to go. The Venus of Willendorf, the famous big-bum-breasts-and-braids fertility carving from the late Paleolithic era, was dropped on the ground just up the river from Linz about 30,000 years ago. She currently resides in Vienna’s Natural History Museum. You can see her on the tour – if you can find the time.
That’s another challenge of cruising a river, especially the Danube: You get a tantalizing taste of a place, and then you’re whisked away to the next attraction. Ideally, you would take the cruise, and then double back on your own, to find out why your curiosity snagged where it did. It snags everywhere.
You meet all kinds on a river cruise, and some of the time you can get off the boat to get away from the ones you don’t like.
The AmaSonata manifest comprised a passel of lively Costa Ricans; a solid block of experienced Portuguese and Spanish cruisers; handfuls of Canadians, French, Germans, Brits and Scots; and nine efficient women, all professional travel writers, who photographed and noted everything they ate and saw and did. The rest of the passengers were Americans.
Within the Americans was a close knot of roughly 20 evangelical Protestants, acolytes of Pastor Erwin Lutzer, who was cruising with his wife Rebecca and their Sound of Music-obsessed adult daughters. Lutzer is the Saskatchewan-born pastor emeritus of the Moody Church in Chicago, a Christian megachurch founded in 1860 that today attracts 3,000 worshippers each week, plus (Lutzer claims) another 700,000 online. He’d written more than 50 books, including One Minute After You Die: A Preview of Your Final Destination. He was tall, silver-haired, extroverted to the point of pushiness, eager for publicity, deeply conservative, pro-Trump, anti-abortion and 82. He gave private lectures about the history of Nazism to his flock on sailing days in the special occasion dining room in the ship’s stern.
I was travelling with my own daughter, Hayley. The cruise was a rare chance to spend a stretch of time together, to compare the way the world looks to a daughter and her dad, to a 30-year-old and someone more than (eep) twice her age. Having left Toronto Friday evening and checked in onboard by noon on Saturday in Budapest – my first impression, given the average age of the passengers, was of a floating retirement home – we were raring to go. Hayley immediately suggested we grab two of the motorized scooters you can rent and park all over Budapest, to visit the city’s famous thermal baths. Please picture a 69-year-old man bouncing hard over cobblestone streets at 25 kilometres an hour on a stand-up motorized device he has never used before as he tries desperately to keep up with his beloved daughter who is zooming ahead – I swear this is true – at twice his speed. Gah. We hit the indoor Gellert Baths (Moorish art nouveau) and the all-outdoor Szechenyi Baths (DJed pool parties on weekends). Let me say this: Wading semi-naked through hot thermal currents with hundreds of equally shameless strangers is an excellent way to shuck off any precruise self-consciousness you might be lugging around (age-related or otherwise). It also helps the scooter bruises.
I was skeptical of river cruising for a reason. The comforts of the AmaSonata – its spectacular made-on-ship meals (based on local fare and regional dishes), well-appointed (if very small) cabins, crisply organized outings, impeccable but friendly service – were designed to insulate us from the hardships of travel. But the insulation made it difficult to experience anything authentic, which is the secret desire of every traveller, even cruisers.
The solution was obviously to get off the boat whenever possible. The trick was choosing the right preplanned adventure.
The view from the ruins of Durnstein Castle in Austria's Wachau Valley, where Gruner Veltliner and Zveigelt wines are produced along the raked banks of the Danube.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
For instance, in Austria’s Wachau Valley, so green and pastoral it could be a Teletubbies background, I took a short but lung-searing hike up to the ruins of Durnstein Castle, where Richard the Lionheart was allegedly imprisoned for more than a year by Duke Leopold V of Austria. The ruins were a bit of a bust, so I skidded downhill again to a wine and apricot tasting hosted by Leopold Bohmer. Bohmer tills vertiginous vineyards to produce mostly Gruner Veltliner under the Weingut-Bohmer label. He does not seem to enjoy it. “Here in the Wachau Valley,” Bohmer shouted in a stentorian voice while staring at the floor throughout the wine tasting, “we can’t make anything else, because our soil is awful for everything else!” Hayley, meanwhile, had opted for a long, thrilling bike ride down the valley to Melk. I felt a pang of envy.
Unlike ocean cruising, which frequently entails longer stretches on the water as a captive audience, river cruising – theoretically – is a string of shoreside revelations separated by stretches of floating leisure. River cruising became a global phenomenon, the travel writer women informed me, when Viking Tours suddenly began to advertise river cruises on the first season of Downton Abbey, late in 2010.
The Danube itself is a muddy brown ribbon meandering quaintly past turreted towns of ochre walls and orange roofs. It’s Bavarian postcard country. The ship cruises through the landscape serenely, like a favourite uncle dropping by for lunch. The entire $30-million, Serbian-built contraption – 135 metres long, 11.5 metres wide, 81 staterooms, 162 passengers – is controlled with a four-inch joystick. Isn’t it always?!
But the river itself has a serious feel to it. The Danube has seen it all. In Budapest alone during the Second World War, Arrow Cross Party fascists shot as many as 20,000 Jews on the banks of the Danube, letting their bodies tumble straight into the river. The victims were forced to remove their shoes first because their shoes could be resold. Most of those executions took place between December of 1944 and January of 1945. That’s more than 300 murders a day, roughly one every four or five minutes. The Nazis knew they were losing the war, but were intent on exterminating the Jewish people. The famous Shoes on the Danube Bank monument – dozens of pairs of empty bronze shoes from the period, bonded to the quay – is the kind of monument that makes you stop talking.
Nazis can be a delicate subject on some stretches of the Danube. In Vienna, we chose the three-hour bike tour. It was a good ride, along the graffiti-adorned banks of the Danube canal, past the graves of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Strauss, Brahms and Hedy Lamarr, under vast pink and white parliaments and palaces from which the Hapsburgs managed their empire and their inconceivable wealth. We finished in Heldenplatz, a.k.a. Heroes’ Square, in front of the Hofburg, the former principal crib of the Hapsburg crew. There were tanks parked on the square to commemorate the 340th anniversary of the Hapsburg victory over the Ottomans.
“That is the end of the tour,” our licensed guide, who doubled as a high-school teacher, said. “Are there any questions?”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t this Heldenplatz?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Isn’t that the balcony where Hitler announced the Nazi annexation of Austria to a vast crowd of Viennese?”
“Yes.”
“Do you not mention that on the tour?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It upsets people.”
It upsets people. But what do you do if you’re not a tourist, if you live and work by the Danube, where you can’t pretend the past didn’t happen? Two days later, after stopping by Mondsee Abbey to see where Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews were married in The Sound of Music, Julia Hattinger, our Salzburg guide, described her own radical candour.
Salzburg, Austria, which can be visited by bus on Amawaterways' Danube River cruise, where Mozart was born and key scenes of the Sound of Music were filmed.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
Hattinger was the perfect tour guide. It takes two years to become one in Austria, and you have to pass the test in two languages. Hattinger spoke five and was learning Czech. She had a MA in Spanish literature. She knew the location of every public toilet between Linz and Salzburg, naturally, but also where to find the best wienerschnitzel (“the size of a toilet seat, as it should be”) and where everyone lived and worked in the city, from Joseph Mohr (who wrote Silent Night) to Christian Doppler (physicist). She knew why lederhosen is still popular in Austria (the leather eventually becomes as soft as linen) and that Christopher Plummer and the director of The Sound of Music were driven crazy by Julie Andrews’s bossiness.
Six times a year, Hattinger leaves Salzburg and leads tours of Mauthausen, the blunt fortress, still standing and tourable, that served as a concentration camp outside Linz. It was a work camp rather than an extermination site, but 120,000 people died there all the same. “You can see it from the river, if you know where to look,” Hattinger said. “It has a very evil atmosphere. I can feel it.”
Hattinger’s 47. Her parents were born during the war. But her grandmother, like many Austrians of her generation who lived amid the Nazis, “cried every day until the end of her life, saying ‘I should have done something, I should have gone out and helped.’ But she had five children. And if you went out, they would put you in the camp.”
Hattinger paused. “I have not murdered anyone,” she said. “But bearing the weight of your nation’s history is necessary. That’s why I do the tours of Mauthausen.” Six times a year is all she can handle. “The Sound of Music is definitely easier.” She does it to acknowledge history. The Danube forces you to do that.
Italian master plasterers needed thirty years to finish the ceiling of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Passau, Germany.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
Eventually, Lutzer found me again. He was eager to complain about Joe Biden and liberals and defunding the police, and how they all ignored the fundamental truth of human nature. “The Bible teaches us,” Lutzer said, “that the human heart always tends toward evil.”
The last night of the cruise, as we floated toward Vilshofen, I made my way after dinner to the roof deck, to sit in a lounge chair and feel the German night slip by. I thought about the sad but also the beautiful things I had experienced on the Danube: Strauss’s corny waltzes, white German sausages, the million infinitesimal details of the baroque ceiling of St. Stephen’s cathedral in Passau that had taken Italian plasterers 30 years to create. I thought about apricot jam and the delicious grain bowls the AmaSonata chefs served every morning as an alternative breakfast. I remembered thinking, surrounded by Vienna’s layers, how light and recent and maybe even fixable North American history feels, despite our mistakes, next to the back-breaking burden of Europe’s past. I thought about how quiet the Danube is, despite its size. Of course, I thought about Hayley too, and our rare days together on the river. History lasts forever. A lifetime is a blink.
Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown and his daughter Hayley Brown, in front of the AmaSonata, at the end of their river cruise.Ian Brown/The Globe and Mail
I decided Lutzer was wrong. The human heart doesn’t always tend to evil, factually speaking. You can take a cruise down the Danube and come to that conclusion, of course, but you have to ignore half of what you see and hear and feel, because human hearts tend to beauty and goodness at least as often. You just have to know where to look on the river. And you have to want to look there, too.
- AmaWaterways’ seven-night Melodies of the Danube cruise sails Dec. 27, and then several times a month beginning in March, 2024. Staterooms from $2,480 a person. amawaterways.com
The writer was a guest of AmaWaterways. It did not review or approve the story before publication.