Cologne and Bonn

As I sit on the train departing from Cologne for Frankfurt, I have an opportunity to review the past day or so. We got to Cologne fairly late in the evening, and tired as always, to find yet another hotel room without a kettle, so we went for a stroll, then ate our bacon/egg sandwiches we purchased back in Amsterdam.


For Friday, we had intended to go to Dusseldorf, but instead decided that since we had a free pass for the K-D boat service, we went down to Bonn. It was a 3 hour journey down the Rhine, and overall it’s not massively pretty. It started getting nice as we got to Bonn, so we suspect it gets even nicer further down. The Rhine is massively wide, and runs really quickly. It’s also somewhat of a highway, we were passed or overtaken by many barges, carrying all manner of things, from shipping containers, to 100 truck cabs. (Yes, I counted.)

Bonn itself is also a nice quiet little town, but happens to be the birthplace of Beethoven. So we found it kind of amusing that just near Beethoven’s house, we saw a St Bernard. The map we picked up from the tourism place took us on a walking tour round a number of sites, including the university, the opera house, and Beethoven’s house. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the shops in the town centre, and sampling bratwurst sausage on round buns. Kind of out of place, considering how long the sausages were. We also lucked out, by walking into a Coke promotional thingy, they were just handing out cans free, so we wandered away with one each.

The return trip on the boat was quicker, due to the current assisting, so it only took about 2 hours back. This gave us time to wander around Cologne in the afternoon and evening. It was nice and warm, and down along the water front we found a little water sculpture thing that was kinda neat. We also felt a little bit like we were back in Sydney – you’ll understand when you see the photo of the bridge.

As a side note, German trains are meant to be some of the most reliable, on-time trains in the world (beaten perhaps by the Japanese). It amused us to watch a train leaving 19 minutes late.