Day 05

Waking up early in the morning in my camping spot near the river was just fascinating. I totally enjoyed my morning walk, quick breakfast and later set off for the journey. I woke up earlier because I wanted to attend a mess on Sunday. Luckily I found a church on my way in a small Austrian village and smelly and dirty as I was, went inside to the utmost surprise of  the locals. I even managed to charge my cellphone battery. Later on, I continued to Passau, made few quick phone calls with friends and family in because I wanted to make the most of my free Austrian minutes and in the later afternoon I came to Passau, the first German city in Bavaria near the Austrian borders. To my big surprise, I was to find out that my cellphone internet roaming was not working as I had expected and I was to cope with this problem until I reached France.

I do not know whether you have visited Passau, but it is a very nice city with its own urban charm. Passau is not so huge and spectacular as some major metropolies, but it is definitely very cute and its promenades around Danube on a small Island where the city centre is located,  turn it into a very romantic place.

I have seen many interesting things there, however, one experience outshines all the others and that was my visit of a praline factory. It was really like entering a chocolate paradise. I was totally overwhelmed by the plethora of various chocolate and praline sorts and even though it was rather expensive, i succumbed to the temptation and purchased some pralines. I do not consider myself a conneseur, but I can appreciate tasty foods and drinks - it somehow comes from my nature to enjoy deeply  everything that I can perceive with full jolly. Those hand-made pralines, winners of countless competitions, carefully selected by the chocolate master were gorgeous - I was just in the seventh heaven! 

For the rest of the day, I motivated myself with one praline per break - a well deserved reward, indeed. I think I will practice this with other sweets as well. 

The whole day was awfully hot and I think that at some point I got a small sun-stroke. I had to lie down for a while before I was able to continue. Due to a bad road description I got lost several times and significantly lagged behind. This became even worse as the darkness fell and I totally lost my sense of orientation. In the end, I gave up and built my tent somewhere behind Degensdorf, in German a dagger village, which was definitely not as small as I had expected from its name. I did not choose an ideal place for building my tent because there were still few people walking around, probably on a drink night out, seeing my tent and saying “Bist du tepad?” I was pretty scared that night and could fall asleep. Fortunately, in the end, there were no problems at all.

I was mildly dissapointed by the quaility of the road as I went from Austria to Germany. In Austria, you had the vast amount of roads well paved, but the first 50 km of Bavarian Donauradweg were mostly narrow country roads through which you could not ride fast. Maybe it is delibaretly so to give Germans a sense of adventre as they spend their vacation fishing and camping along the dusty road. I saw many people who obviusly wanted to get in shape on their active vacation. This kind of road offered definitely plenty of oppornutities for a wide variety of sport activities. The road itself leads along the Danube as a form of a dam and there are many small bars, restaurants and accommodation on the way. Presumably, this road offers for the locals a good source of incomve from the tourism.