Part 12: "Next stop:Upper Birdsong"

Sunday 10 August 2003

Only three installments to go after this one! I wonder if I'll get the "diary" finished in the same year the trip happened. Tomorrow, Prague; the next day, the trip home via Dresden Neustadt and Frankfurt; and finally an overview of the whole trip.

After a grueling Saturday in Dresden, we longed for some more of the beautiful German countryside that had so entranced us in the first week. It was Sunday, 10 August, and what beckoned was the "Sächsische Schweiz," or the Switzerland of Saxony. We trotted off to the Pirna Bahnhof once again, but this time we headed south, to Bad Schandau on the regional train that went as far as Schöna.

I had been noticing the purity and clarity of the German accent here in Saxony -- even the people on the streets outside our hotel room who woke us up in the morning spoke exactly as Frau Elisabeth and Fräulein Mary Eleanor Bender had instructed us to speak back at Goshen College! That was not always the case everywhere in the deutschsprächige Raum (the German-speaking countries) where I had travelled before. Memories of a Bavarian cab driver in Regensburg, whose rapid-fire narration would have been difficult to understand even at a slower tempo, or of cosmopolitan Swiss friends in Zurich and Bern whose polyglot dinner conversation switched without warning from French to Italian to English to Spanish to a totally incomprehensible Schwyzerdeitsch, or of Viennese shop clerks whose defenses rose when they heard coming out of my mouth an accent they associated with, ugh, Prussia or Berlin, had made me wonder over the years whether the accent I was taught was actually spoken by real people anywhere. In Pirna, it is.

And what a delight it was to hear the recorded announcer on the train identify the first stop out of Pirna: "Nächste Halt: Obervogelgesang."

Not only was the name of the station delicious in itself -- "Upper Birdsong" -- but every single vowel and consonant in those three words was distinct and clear as a bell. The sloppy elision of "nächste" that my American tongue and lips had turned into a lazy "nextuh" over the years made me ashamed when I heard "na-ech-ste" glide out of the speakers. But the name of the station! The two "o" sounds were uncorrupted by any kind of diphthonging into, say, the "a-ah-ow-oo" that so offended the ears of Henry Higgins when it issued from the Cockney mouth of Eliza Doolittle -- or even into the first syllable of my hometown, Goshen, which sounded so rustically charming when spoken by the local telephone operators back in the years when there still were such people and I'd call from New York and get all homesick to hear "Gowshun." Then the schwas, in -ber- and -gel- and ge- were equally pure and forward in the mouth, just like Frau Bender used to say them, with no betrayal of the consonants that were to come, and likewise the bright and forward "a" in "Halt" got itself beautifully out of the way in time for an unemcumbered "ell" sound to flip trippingly off the tongue. It got so I couldn't wait to hear the next station announcement, and they were indeed all equally accomplished, but none quite matched the pleasure of that first one.

The train ran alongside the Elbe, on the left bank, and before the birds of Obervogelsang had stopped twittering the cliffs of the Sandsteingebirge, the Sandstone peaks, began to appear on the opposite shore. We began to get excited about the day ahead of us. We got off the train at Bad Schandau and went into the tourist information center to get directions to the Bastei. The woman there wanted us to go to Festung Königstein as well, but I told her we had seen many castles and were ready for nature. So she told us where to catch the bus that would take us up to the Bastei. It sounded complicated. We left the station, and there was a taxi, and it was hot, and I was already beginning to feel less well than I liked after the previous day's ordeal, and we looked at each other, and without further ado hailed the taxi and asked the driver to take us to the Bastei.

Soon we were on a plateau and the countryside began to look quite ordinary. Then we arrived at a hotel that sits atop the cliffs, where we got off. The driver recommended that instead of returning via Stadt Wehlen, which had been my plan, we should walk down to Kurort Rathen, where we could get a ferry to the train station. That turned out to be superb advice.

But here we were, supposedly in nature, and instead we were in a sizeable hotel with bars and terraces and cafes. We sort of drifted our way with the crowds -- it was an August Sunday in Germany in tourist country, after all -- and within a minute we began to gasp in wonder (I believe we had paused to pay some kind of entrance fee, but whatever it cost was quickly eclipsed by what it admitted us to). All around us the sandstone plateau had been carved into fantastical shapes, separated by deep ravines. Here and there were glimpses of the Elbe, far far far below, and the occasional attack of vertigo only enhanced the effect.

Here is where words fail me completely, and I must look forward to the day when I will have figured out how to get our pictures up on the web for all to see. This landscape is like some of those other extraterrestrial, science-fiction kinds of places, such as Guilin in China, or Bryce Canyon, or the Garden of the Gods in Colorado before it got turned into a commercialized tourist trap. Actually I just found some fine pictures: here is someone's complete and superb photo album of "Felsen, Felsen, nix als Felsen :)) - aber nicht immer die gleichen oder manche aus einer anderen Perspektive": (Rocks, rocks, nothing but rocks -- but all different, or many from another perspective)


In medieval Europe, of course, every rock formation that was at all accessible to human endeavor got a castle put on top of it, but I had not been aware that this "Bastei" formed by nature had also been, literally, a bastion, part of a serious military fortification. In the second array of pictures above you might be able to find the model of the "Felsenburg Neurathen" that had been inserted into this nature-built citadel sometime in the 13th century. What sketchy history I can glean indicates that, after serving as an almost impregnable stronghold on the frontier between Bohemia and Saxony it came into the hands of a band of robber knights, who were finally expelled by the armies of the Prince Elector of Saxony in 1469, after a 20-year siege. The _Basteibruecke_ is not in itself a beautiful structure, but its placement atop deep ravines had me clinging to its railing in anxious awe as I walked along its crowded passage from rock to rock. I hoped the throng of tourists would not pull it away from its moorings!

Along the path as it spiralled downward from the high bridge toward the river, it seemed miles below, but actually only about 600 feet, was "the great slingshot" or giant catapult, from the days when the fortification was serving its intended purpose. I would most certainly not have wanted to be on top of those cliffs when a boulder was hurled toward them from this contraption. But also along the path was a view of an angel statue, perched on top of a slender needle piercing the void many feet away, and most charmingly and most German of all, a "Hundebar"-- with two water dishes down there at doggie level. Amazingly, on this hot afternoon we met throngs of people -- with the occasional dog – climbing up to the heights we were just descending from. Some divine guidance must have been at work to help us find the taxi ride up to the top, from where it was, gratefully, downhill the rest of the way!

We got to a point where the magnetic attraction of the rock formations was balanced by the view of the river far below, and especially of the village and its train station that was our goal. The activities of all those Lilliputians way down there, with minuscule N-gauge trains purposefully arriving and departing, were so cute and charming -- of course one couldn't see any actual living creatures operating all those minute vehicles. They even had tiny cars flitting back and forth on the roads -- looking like those wee life forms that sometimes skitter across a kitchen counter, making one wonder how they can contain all the complexity required to move their invisible legs so fast.

And there were a few bitsy water bugs moving along or across what water there was in the river. The ones moving along the river steered gingerly down the exact middle of the shrunken stream -- nothing sadder than a water bug stranded on dry land with its legs waving in the air, so that was to be avoided at all costs.

The panoramic vista that spread out before us was awe-inspiring. Now, Switzerland is Switzerland, and it is definitively splendid to look at. This Saxon "Switzerland" may be a little closer to that benchmark of impressiveness than, say, the "Switzerland of Ohio" or Switzerland County in Indiana (although they each have their own charms), but it does not look at all like Switzerland. It looks like itself, and while "Sächsische Schweiz" serves as an attention-getter that is no doubt useful to the local tourist industry, it's too bad the landscape does not have its own name. It deserves a name as unique as itself. The landscape features a broad plateau punctuated by towering table-like features -- mesas, in fact, but not so called. Lilienstein and Königsberg are the most conspicuous ones from this vantage point, but maps of the area are speckled with the star-like symbols for "outstanding view" that I have always found impossible to resist, even when I know it means a strenuous climb to get there.


We continued our way down into Niederrathen, the part of Kurort Rathen on our right bank of the Elbe, and found the ferry slip, where a crowd quickly formed, waiting for the return trip of the small vessel we could almost reach out and touch while it was docked over there on the left bank at Oberrathen. While we waited, we noticed some very busy and noisy little birds looping back and forth and even darting under the roof of the ferry slip. Periodically it sounded as if there was a momentary quarrel -- until, looking into the rafters not at all far above us we saw the nest, with three eager little beaks standing open, ready to receive the next delicacy to be thrust into them. I took a picture of the babies -- hard as I tried, the forays of the parents were far too, uh, well, swift for the action of my camera. Without that picture I would have guessed that the birds were swifts, because I couldn't see deeply forked tails, but the baby birds definitely have the coloring of swallows.

The ferry returned, discharged its passengers (in the middle of the afternoon there were still many people arriving to climb up to the Bastei), and we boarded for the about 30 seconds it took to get to Oberrathen. We were hungry and thirsty and hot, and luckily the inhabitants of Oberrathen, there by the train station, had anticipated that. We had a choice of several outdoor cafes (the local entrepreneurs had not anticipated how welcome air-conditioning might someday be), and selected the one right next to the tracks where we could sit under a canopy marked Coca-Cola. I'm remembering, perhaps inaccurately (perhaps I was hallucinating) that we may actually have been served water with ice here, but -- nah, I must be hallucinating even now. Whatever food I had was welcome and essential, and we had a wonderful view from the terrace of the rocks across the river and the castle of Altrathen, companion to the Neurathen castle up there on the Bastei.

The train took us back to Pirna, and it was good to be "home." I believe we went back to our pleasant northern Italian restaurant, or perhaps we tried the restaurant we could not get into the night before because of all the crowds in town. But now I pay for my procrastination, because I won't be able to recover the exact memories of that evening without being hypnotized, and I somehow doubt it's worth the trouble.

I'm exhausted, not feeling the best I've ever felt in my life, I'm worried about making the right connections for the train to Prague in the morning, I sleep fitfully -- and wash out some more dirty laundry to hang up in the windows of the bathroom, adorning the echo-chamber street where I *hope* there will not be another party tonight!


[composed Fri, 12 Dec 2003 03:56:20 -0500]