Wanderung 32

As we were having lunch back on board, the Tor unmoored and left Passau,and then glided quietly down the Danube to the confluence point at the tip of the peninsula. Although we had just been walking on shore there, it was fun to get the "middle-of-the-river" viewpoint of the confluence from the top deck of the Tor.

Heading downriver from Passau, the Tor started navigating going through some beautiful wooded river gorges. The Danube wound like a snake through some rather steep, but not very high mountains, maybe 1000-1500 feet high. We saw old buildings perched atop or on the shoulders of some of the mountains, many of which looked like abandoned castles or large stone houses of some kind.

In between the mountain ranges the relatively flat land on either side of the Danube was intensively farmed wherever possible. Typically each of these riverside valleys would also have a small town or village of some sort, and invariably the centertpoint of that would be a local church. As we were in the southern half of Germany, the churches would have almost certainly been Roman Catholic, because at the end of the Reformation and Counter Reformation warfare, Germany was split into two halves, with the Lutheran Church dominating the northern half and the Roman Catholic church dominating the lower half.

Rivers always flow downhill, so almost imperceptibly our ship was descending in altitude as we proceeded downstream. To keep the water levels in all sections of the river at a navigable depth for most or all of the year, this descent was regulated by a system of dams with locks located at natural narrow points in the river basin. During the course of the afternoon, we passed through three locks that lowered us by about 20-30 feet each time. At all of these dams, I think, the flow of the Danube River water was mainly used to generate hydroelectric power, with just a small amount of water used in the locks beside the dam to lower the ships going downstream, such as the Tor, and to raise the ships steaming upstream.

As we continued downriver that afteernoon, the mountains gradually subsided and the landscape became more of an alluvial plain. We finally arrived in Linz that evening shortly after dark while we were all having dinner in the dinning room together. When we travel as a family, we tend to do different things during the day but all get together and discuss our daily activites over our evening meal. Since the Tor had only one seating for the evening meal at 7 pm, our family dinner and discussion typically occupied our time from 7-9 pm .

After dinner we ventured onshore briefly just to look around, and then took one nighttime picture of our moored ship before turning in for the night. Curiously, though, the sensors on our two cameras gave the nighttime scene a rather different color cast, so I'll just put both of them in here and let you judge the one you like best!