Cruising Central Europe: The Ship

[The top deck of the Amadaggio]
So, now is as good a time as any to talk a bit about the general atmosphere of the ship. As I mentioned earlier, it was called the Amadaggio, run by Amadeus Waterways. The cruises I've been on with my family before were on the Star Clippers line, which is a line of hybrid engine/sailing ships that are a lot more cozy (read puny) than the huge cities on water that most ocean cruise ships are today. Being used to thinking of the Star Clippers ships as tiny, it seemed like the Amadaggio was miniscule. But I guess this is the difference between ocean cruises and river cruises, because after a week on the boat I realized that it was really the largest it possibly could have been given the size restraints. They would be hard-pressed to get even a few more inches. So what were the size restraints? Besides the depth and width of the river itself, there was the matter of the locks, something I had never heard of before.

Locks are a system of gateways used to control water flow and to allow ships to pass between areas of the river kept at different heights. Basically, there is a big chamber with concrete walls on either side and huge gates at front and back. The water in the lock is set to the height of the side you are entering from, and the back gate is opened, the ship enters, and the gate closes. If you are rising, then huge amounts of water is pumped into the lock and you float higher and higher, until you are at the height of the water on the other side (in some of the locks on the Danube ascend over 1000 ft). If you are being lowered, the water drains out from under you and you slowly drop. Then they open the front gate and you sail out to the other side. Over the course of the first couple of days until we hit the continental divide in Scheitelhaltung (between Nuremberg and Regensburg in Germany), we climbed up pretty quickly, and we spent the rest of the trip slowly going back down.


[View of the lock from the upper deck as we descend]


[Up close and personal view of the lock from my cabin window]


[Sailing out of the lock]

So the whole lock thing was something new to this cruise, but most everything else on the ship was standard cruise operation. Basically this means they hand-hold you for everything and are constantly cleaning up after you and entertaining you, although I did notice that the crew on this trip seemed a little less peppy than on some of the other trips we've been on, not that that is necessarily a bad thing. There was, however, the notable exception of the cruise director, John, who was basically everyone's mom. He could be found at all hours of the day fielding anxious questions, directing people around, and generally supervising the hand-holding process when not doing it himself.

But most importantly, over the course of the trip they are constantly feeding you. We were definitely well nourished; they made a point of saying that you could get as much as you wanted and we took that to heart, with some of our group ordering several main courses for dinner each night. Also, at dinner the alcohol was free-flowing, so that tended to make everyone pretty jolly (and willing to go to bed to get up at the ungodly hours they had scheduled for us).


[An average dinner on the ship]


[Captain's Dinner on the last night. It was good.]

It was the scheduling that killed us. They had us up and off the boat by 9am pretty much every day to go on scheduled tours. There were also additional optional tours, but I could barely bring myself to do all of the included tours, let alone extra ones. The general routine of the tours was that they would split us up into 4 or 5 groups by color, and the guide for each group would have a little round paddle that said Amadaggio with the color of the group. Then we would be herded onto a bus with our group to get to whatever sight or town we were seeing, or just walk there if we were moored alongside it. Then we would be led around to the various things that were deemed to be of touristic interest, stopping to receive a practiced spiel at each one. While this was a pretty efficient way of hitting all the major spots and receiving all of the major information, by the end of the week I was getting tired of being herded around. A lot of what I like most in travel is just wandering around and stumbling upon things that I think are interesting. If somebody tells me that its interesting, it's less likely to make an impression than if I notice it for myself. I suppose the argument is that I wouldn't notice everything that they point out, but that probably doesn't matter because if I am zoned out then I won't remember everything they pointed out anyway. If I wasn't careful, then after a while I could let it settle into a pattern and only remember seeing another town with Roman ruins, a Church, and an old town square. So I started to wander off more and more, and this made the times when I did stick with a tour more interesting, because I wasn't so sick of them anymore.


[A guide, showing us Regensburg, Germany]

While the tours turned out all right in the end, the one thing I did get a bit sick of was some of the other passengers on the boat. It seemed like the whole place had been invaded by large, pushy, obnoxious middle-aged people from New Jersey with no sense of volume control and a very high sense of entitlement. This sounds a bit harsh, but after a week I felt annoyed enough that I don't really care. I first noticed it in Karlovy Vary, when we were taking little shuttles from our buses into town. People were practically elbowing each other in the face to get on the shuttles, as if another one wasn't coming in five minutes. Everywhere people were freaking out, pushing and yelling things "Stewart, Stewart! Have you seen Ruth? Where's Ruth? Oh my god they've left Ruth!" in the shrill tone of voice of George's mom from Seinfeld.

I figured maybe they'd chill out over the course of the vacation, but apparently that was not part of the plan. At the end of the week, I was waiting in line for some pasta at the lunch buffet and having a conversation in Spanish with a nice old man from Istanbul. He waited for maybe thirty seconds to scoop his pasta, and a woman swooped in from the side and grabbed the last bit, forcing him to wait there for another ten minutes for more pasta. He didn't speak much English, so he sputtered for words with which to reproach her. Meanwhile she figured he didn't have a right to feel affronted, screeching loudly with her New Jersey accent "What? you were just twa-king this whole taym!!" As if the lunch buffet line might close at any minute and then she'd be left stranded and starving, all because of his attempt to have a conversation with me. Not to mention he was probably old enough to be her father. All he could do to respond was shake his head and say gravely "No is correct. No is correct."

There were some cool people on the boat, the couple from Istanbul being one example. And since my whole family was there, it was kind of the point to spend time with them, and we were able to stake out our own corner of the dining room for most nights. So the obnoxious people could be escaped, if only temporarily.

All in all, it was a cool boat, my family was there, and we saw a lot of cool things by the end. So I'll quit griping about the New Jersians and go back to talking about all of that.

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