The castles along the Rhine

I have mentioned on my previous post that my fave train trip in Germany is along the Rhine river from Mainz to Koblenz... I passed the area several times and always wonder if I could visit some of the castles there. There are lots of castles on the valley and I didn't have any idea how to reach it.

Well, someone apparently helped me to realize it. Thanks to Chris, my VT friend! We talked about it from quite a long time ago and initially we planned to join a boat trip to do the castles hopping. We just talked about the plan again on Thursday and Chris offered me to do it on Saturday by car (and he's so well prepared for the trip...:-)).. We met each other in Bonn Hbf at 9am (quite an achievement on Saturday morning). We drove directly to Bingen, got a glimpse of our first castle of the day: Burg Klopp there. Then we took a ferry to cross the river to Rudesheim, starting our castle journey that day. Our plan (well actually it's Chris' plan :-P) was to visit the ruin of Burg Ehrenfels , we stopped in a very scenic village called Assmanshausen, which is also a starting point for the people who want to go to Niederwald denkmal. It turns out that it's still quite a long way to reach the ruin and considering it was our first destination and it was only ruin, we decided to skip it and continue our journey. We also took some pics of Maeuseturm (mouse tower) on the middle of the river.

Our next stops were some spots to see and take a picture of some castles on the other side of the Rhine: Burg Rheinstein, Burg Reichenstein, Burg Sooneck, Burg Fuerstenberg, and Burg Stahleck, close to the town of Bacharach. The ruin of Nollig castle on our side was the next object of our camera. Yes, we stopped by like every 5 minutes drive, because the castles are everywhere. Great that I have a good driver who did not mind even to return to the missed-spot-for-a-good-pic on such a narrow street along the Rhine :-P

Pfalzgrafenstein castle, a former custom tower on the middle of the river was our next object. Then we stopped for Gutenfels castle after finding a parking space right in front of the way to the castle. We climbed a bit to reach it and found the castle was closed (it was used as hotel before, but apparently it was just recently sold). The scenery from outside the castle was beautiful and we (well Chris actually...I only followed him :-P) just walked around to find a good spot to take a good pic of the castle. We met a friendly woman who was visiting the vineyard around the castle and got some info from her about the castle (some insider info..). We then climbed down and had a glimpse of Kaub, a village on the foot of Gutenfels castle.

Our next stop was for Schoenburg castle across the river, close to the town of Oberwesel. Then we passed through the famous Loreley and Loreley statue. We took some pics of Burg Katz along the way (we could not visit it since it is privately owned by a Japanese), we dropped by at Dreiburgenblick to get a good spot to take some pics (what's else :-P) of Burg Katz, Burg Rheinfels, Burg Maus.

We visited Burg Maus and planned to have some drinks there, but it was only opened for Eagle and Falcon show at that time (and we're a bit late actually). We joined the one-hour show and it was interesting to see the eagle, falcon and owl... After the show and took some pics of the castle (it's a pity we could not go around the castle), we climbed down to the parking lot (they said it took 20 mins to reach the castle from the parking space, but I think we managed to do it less than that...which was quite an achievement for me hehehe..).

The next destination was the two castles Burg Liebenstein and Burg Sterrenberg which are famous as the hostile brothers' castle. The two castles is divided by the so-called hostility wall, legend says that the two brothers killed each other in the nearby church. Burg Liebenstein is a hotel and a cafe..just wondering must be nice to stay there...:-P We had a drink, then returned back to Burg Sterrenberg where we parked the car and had a lunch/dinner there. The food was delicious and it was really warm when we were there (it started to be very warm in Gutenfels when we had the bird show, someone got quite bad sun burn out of it, sorry Chris, seemed that I brought too much sunshine that day). The view from the terasse and tower of Burg Sterrenberg was very beautiful.

It was around 6pm when we had our lunch/dinner and we still had several castles to go...:-P We passed through Boppard on the other side of the river. It really looks like a beautiful town..
We stopped to take some pics of Marktsburg (and got a perfect blue sky as a background). We visited Burg Lahneck which was closed already but we did not give up on taking some pics. Strangely the castle had a red-white flag on top of it which made me imagining if someone from Indonesia owned it (or a new Indonesian embassy) hehehe... Our last castle was Stolzenfels across the Rhine river..

To sum up...we did 20 castles in one day, it was around 350 kms round trip from Bonn and when Chris dropped me at Bonn Hbf again, it was almost 9pm already, so we spent almost 12 hours for our castles hopping ...:-)

More pics on http://dhina.shutterfly.com?a=1