Amsterdam to Basel and back

Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral) looms on the horizon on a Rhine River cruise in 1995. (Photo by Walter Foery)

There was one more cruise on my agenda, although it was a river cruise in 1995 on a much smaller vessel. My friend Walter and I combined a visit to Amsterdam, where his partner was conducting the opera "La Boheme," with a six-day cruise on the Rhine River to Basel, Switzerland, on board a ship named Britannia.

The Rhine River begins at a glacier in the Swiss Alps and flows north for approximately 800 miles, so we traveled against the current. Our cruise, for all practical purposes, covered the navigable length of the Rhine. Built in 1971, the Britannia has about 90 cabins and can carry some 180 passengers. The size of Rhine cruise ships is limited by the river's locks and bridges.

Britannia was, therefore, smaller than any ship I had cruised on before. The entertainment, food and accommodations were downscaled as well, and any comparison between Britannia and, say, QE2, would be unfair. Nonetheless, it was pleasant enough to travel on her, and the connections with her smaller crew and fewer passengers were more personal.

Walter and I were also among the few passengers whose native language was English. The crew's English ranged from nonexistent through passable to fluent, and my German, learned mostly in bars during my three years stationed in Germany, was middling at best. I was, however, surprised when I boarded and said "Guten Tag!" to the gangway attendant. He handed me a cruise itinerary in German. I switched languages and asked for an itinerary in English. He told me that my accent was so good -- I can sustain a decent German accent for at least two words -- that he had assumed I was German.

Walter and I quickly sussed out who among the passengers could speak English, and I did strike up conversations in German with passengers who were exploring their own country. I discovered that if I stopped thinking about it so hard and just talked, a lot of the German I had learned 30 years before came back to me.

We spent the Fourth of July on board Britannia, me wearing for most of the day a T-shirt with a small American flag on the pocket. I was surprised when I woke up on Independence Day to see that the ship had been decked out in red, white and blue bunting and a large banner proclaiming the holiday. I think that was the day that Walter and I asked the dining-room steward if the chef could prepare cheeseburgers and fries for our lunch. He happily, if not altogether successfully, accommodated our special order.

For the first few days of the cruise, the scenery was not quite what I expected. I had taken day trips on the Rhine 30 years before along the magnificent stretch of the river from Bingen to Koblenz. But as we began our cruise in 1995, we saw industrial sites and cities that had turned their backs to the river, much like the scenery on a train trip from Richmond to Washington, D.C.

But then the famed Rhine River castles, built by feudal overlords to protect their lands from marauders, made their appearance. The mid-Rhine is famed also for its lush vineyards and for its legends. One of the best known myths is of the nymph who lived on the Lorelei rock She is said to have lured fishermen to their destruction by singing, until she too was overcome by love and plunged to her death. A bronze statue of the nymph overlooks the river today. And everywhere were ancient castles, more than in any other river valley in the world. This was the stretch of the Rhine that made the whole journey worthwhile.

The most memorable stops were in Cologne, where we visited the famed Gothic cathedral begun in 1248 and not completed until 1880 (it's the largest Gothic church in northern Europe); Speyer, with its Romanesque cathedral dating to 1030 that was extremely influential in the development of church architecture in the 11th and 12th centuries; Koblenz, located at the confluence, known as the Deutsches Eck (German Corner), of the Rhine and Mosel rivers; and Strasbourg, which is on the French side of the river and is the site of a Gothic cathedral whose origins can be traced to the late 4th or early 5th century.

We managed to obtain last-minute reservations for dinner in Strasbourg at Au Crocodile, which, if memory serves, rated at least two Michelin stars at the time. There we had one of the most notable meals of my life.

We spent only one night in Basel at the end of our journey on the Rhine. Then we rented a car for a scenic drive up through, among other places, the Black Forest, with overnight stops at an inn in a picturesque village near Karlsruhe, in Bitburg (where I had spent three years in the Air Force), and Antwerp, where we had a wonderful dinner featuring a galvanized bucket of fresh mussels. Then it was back to Amsterdam for opening night of "La Boheme."