It seems an age since the last blog post, but the time has just flown. At that time, we were in Germany on our way to Paris to collect Pauline’s sister Patricia who has joined us for 4 weeks….we achieved that pick up OK, and it’s been all go since! In brief, we’ve clocked up nine countries for Patricia in just under two weeks: France of course, plus Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Italy, and now tonight we are overnighting in a car park very close to the top of the hill that dominates the very small republic of San Marino. We’ve been having a great time together in the camper van with the putting up and taking down each day of the second bed now down to a fine art.

And our travels haven’t just involved scenery either – there’s been a bit of culture as well! Take last weekend for example….Friday night saw us at the Oberammergau Passion Play Theatre enjoying an excellent performance of Shakespeare’s “Antonius und Cleopatra” (despite the very obvious language barrier of the entire thing being in German); on Saturday night we had a night in watching (again) “The King’s Speech” on the iPad; and on Sunday night we were in a magnificent old Baroque hall in Salzburg enjoying a 18th Century style meal while being entertained by a quintet of musicians and two opera singers, brilliantly performing a variety of Mozart pieces. On the way to that last one, we stopped in at the Mozarthaus where the composer lived for a few years in the 1780s, and also had a look at his birthplace across the river in the old Salzburg town.

And then, to round things off nicely, on Monday morning we got all touristy and with our new found friends Dave and Tash from Hawkes Bay (our neighbours in the camping ground) we took a four hour coach ride around Salzburg and out to nearby Mondsee, to see most of the locations where they filmed “The Sound of Music” – it was a fun tour despite the incredibly irritating voice of the guide and we learned a lot of information, useless and otherwise, about the movie and also about the real Von Trapp family story too.

But that’s not what this blog was intended to be about – we want to tell you about three small German towns, or villages, which we’ve visited in the last three weeks or so. Firstly Colditz in what used to be East Germany, about halfway between Dresden and Liepzig; then Ediger on the Mosel, and lastly one already mentioned above….Oberammergau in Bavaria. We have stayed in a number of other German locations, notably Neckargemund which is just up the Neckar River from Heidelberg, but the three mentioned are very typical of “village Germany” – being unchanged in many respects from the way they were hundreds of years ago yet still so appealing to visit today.

When the last blog was started, we were freedom camping in Colditz, not too far from the famous castle which most notably was a POW Camp in WW2, but has a much longer history than that, having been built hundreds of years ago as a home for a member of the nobility, burnt down, rebuilt, used as a hospital, a mental asylum, a normal prison and so on. All of this before becoming what it is today which is a very interesting museum, partly about the castle itself, and partly an Escape Museum retelling the stories from 1939-1945. Colditz town is also very interesting – a seeming jumble of winding cobblestone streets surrounding not only the castle and the church on the hill, but also a small market square down below. We had a good wander around on a quiet Sunday morning before climbing the steps up to the church where the normal service (again entirely in German of course) was supplemented by a visit from a youth orchestra from a Leipzig Academy who played some magnificent pieces of music on authentic medieval instruments. They were really good and their concert was outstanding – just a pity that, despite posters up all over town announcing the event, the orchestra outnumbered the congregation 3 to 1. After church we visited the Castle, then had lunch in the only place open in town because Germany like a lot of European countries is essentially shut on Sundays. Our visit was short, but so worthwhile, and we can now add the small town of Colditz to our list of good places to visit, which is a positive way of thinking about the place rather than seeing it solely and somewhat negatively as the site of a well known POW Camp.

A day or so later, after a couple of abortive attempts to find a place to stay in the winegrowing Mosel region to the west of the Rhine, we were at the stage of driving along looking for the “next rest area or parking place – anywhere will do!” when around the corner we came to find the truly delightful village of Ediger. It is on the banks of the Mosel (the river flowed past just 5m or so from our back bumper after we found an almost free park – just €4.50 – for the night); and it consists of some extremely old houses on a handful of the narrowest cobblestone lanes you can imagine surrounded by an almost intact fortification wall built in the 1560s, all sandwiched between a few shops and restaurants on the main street which runs alongside the river and some of Germany’s steepest vineyards on the hill above the village. It was such a photogenic place – vines, 16th century towers and walls, a church of the same vintage, Tudor style houses, cobblestones, barges on the river – the camera was in action quite a bit that’s for sure! If there’s ever a competition for “Brilliant Little Villages of the World” then we will be nominating Ediger and we confidently expect it to win!

But then of course there’s the third place on our list – the almost as delightful small town (about 5000 inhabitants) of Oberammergau in the Bavarian alpine region. We called in there for coffee and a quick look at the place Mum and Dad (Moffat) had visited in 1980 to see the Passion Play, and were so taken by it that we ended up staying for two nights! This time there were a variety of reasons, not just the postcard scenes of the streets of the town and of the towering mountains all around, nor the undoubted talent of the performers we enjoyed seeing at the theatre, nor the theatre itself which is a fantastic building where the audience is inside but the stage is open to the air so part of the stage set, therefore, is the Bavarian night sky as the sun sets. And it wasn’t only the history of the Passion Play which, for those who haven’t heard about it, is when almost everyone in town takes part every 10 years, in the staging of the Easter story. Not that the history isn’t very important – in 1633, when the Black Plague was rampant across Europe the villagers of Oberammergau prayed for a miracle to be spared, and when for the most part they were, they made a commitment to stage the play every 10 years. The first one was produced in 1634, and then they’ve done it in every year ending in “0” since (apart from just two: 1770 and 1940), plus in 1934 and 1984 to mark 300 years and 350 years since they started putting the Play on. It’s a huge undertaking attracting an enormous audience from all around the world – most of the villagers are involved including our taxi driver (Us:” “What part did you have?” – Him [very proudly]: “Crowd!”) and they put the play on 5 times a week for nearly 5 months!

No, the highlight of the visit to Oberammergau (especially perhaps for Patricia who really pushed the envelope and overcame a few fears) was our scaling of Mount Kofel which overlooks the village, and stands some 500m above it, at 1342m. It’s a reasonably easy track winding back and forth through the trees on the hillside for most of the way but the last 30 minutes or so is up some pretty steep rock faces, with a steel rope set into them to assist. And to add to the fun it started pouring with rain when we were almost at the top which made the last few metres quite interesting, as was the descent! But at the top where there is a large statue consisting of a cross with Jesus on it – big enough that it can easily be seen from the town below – the view is magnificent and all the effort made to get there becomes so worthwhile.

So our tour of three German villages ends with a tale of an intrepid Alpine climb, and three proud mountaineers who made it to the top! Thanks for staying interested this long (I’ll assume you have done so) – if you’d like to see a few photos of these places click on the link here

Oh, and one other visit in Bavaria…to see Neuchwanstein Castle which is the delight of jigsaw and calendar makers everywhere for its picturesque fairy-tale castle beauty (and of course was also the castle in the movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”). After all the effort to get there we were a little disappointed to find its charm was 80% covered in scaffolding and mesh as they near the end of a restoration programme that started in 2001. And as if that wasn’t enough, we also found out that it isn’t even an authentic medieval castle – some mad Bavarian aristocrat had it built in the 1860s because he wanted to own “a medieval castle”. Obviously the real one that was already on the site, albeit needing a bit of repair but torn down to make room for his fake one, wasn’t good enough!