Budapest
Guided by uniformed employees of Viking Tours through the transfers at Heathrow in London and at Budapest we arrived at the Viking Gullveig in time for late afternoon lunch buffet, nap and dinner.
Entering the dining room we noticed four jolly looking folks sitting together, one sporting a bald head and an impressive lumberjack beard, and sat down at their table. Ice was broken with the discovery that they were Canadians–residents of the Maritime province of New Brunswick but familiar with our second hometown in British Columbia. They all were or had been involved in secondary education, one about to celebrate retirement, his wife still teaching, another a high school principal, and her husband, a former teacher who became a nuclear power plant operator and spent time at Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo. We shared many onboard meals with these people and a couple more who joined the table.
The boat itself was sleek, elegant and comfortable, graced with well appointed lounges, restaurants and outdoor deck space in high style Scandinavian taste,
decorated with visually arresting, and aesthetically pleasing prints and paintings,
The most notable was the wall size painting at the top of the main stairway portraying the ship’s namesake, Gullveig, a goddess associated with the love of gold, with magic and sorcery, and with the ability to return to life after being burned to death three times. This figure in Norse mythology seemed appropriate to the Viking company and to the city of Passau we visited, home of a German literary version of those stories, The Nibelungenlied.
I was especially fond of the 24 hour functioning coffee machine that allowed me to brew and drink 2 cups of cappucino every morning before anybody else was up.
The floor-to-ceiling windows of our stateroom opened directly onto the river, allowing for dreamy appreciation of its flow.
From the moored ship, one could feel the Danube’s urgent current.
The second longest river in Europe, it extends from Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea in Romania, connecting nine countries and four capital cities in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. It served as the northern border of the Roman empire at its greatest extent and the transmission line for trade, culture and warfare for milennia.
An evening walk on the long deck offered views of mountains, bridges, busy boat traffic
and brightening city lights.
The light of dawn brought the mysterious landscape back in view, in particular what looked like an ancient hermitage carved into the rock,
But it turned out that the Gellert Hill Cave was built in the 1920’s by a group of Pauline monks, used by the Nazis during WWII as a field hospital, and sealed up with concrete by the Soviets in 1945 as part of their anti-Catholic Crackdown. After the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 it was reopened as a monastery and tourist attraction.
After breakfast heavily featuring Norwegian lox, all passengers were loaded onto four buses for a “panoramic” tour of Pest, the flat half of the city on the eastern bank. It included narrow old city streets and wide boulevards modelled upon those of 19th century Paris. They were lined with high-end brand-name chain stores one sees in airport malls. We had a quick glance at the Great Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, built during the 19th century and burned by the Nazis along with the indigenous anti-semitic Black Arrow Cross Party which collaborated with the Germans in murdering 400,000 Jews. Our guide pointed out the large “Museum of Terror” memorializing the horrors of both Nazi and Communist occupation, including the extensive torture chambers employed by both regimes.
The bus crossed the Danube from Pest to Buda passing the striking thermal bath houses I’d hoped to visit, but it didnt stop. It ascended the mountain to the Castle Cathedral complex from which the view revealed the central relation of river to city
and the huge but delicate neo-gothic parliament buildings on the opposite bank, reminiscent of Britain’s Parliament, built at the same time.
Most of the monuments and government buildings on Castle Hill were destroyed by Allied Bombings and ground battles between Soviet and Nazi invaders, but are now, like St. Stephen’s Cathedral, fully reconstructed or still under repair.
Our guide pointed out the ugly facade of a Hilton Hotel immediately the right of the Cathedral. In order to promote international capitalist development, the post-Communist government accepted this desecration despite widespread local protest.
As during last year’s trip, I collected pictures of Jan in front of City Halls.
A slow walk to the landward side of the Castle Hill took us to a treed promenade atop a high wall interrupted by the opening of a stairway leading downward to the “Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum.”
Back on the bus, which headed out of the City for a rendezvous with the boat upstream, the guide related some of the history that she and her family had experienced, memorialized in the large grey cement apartment blocks along the road.
These were the tiny shoddy living spaces constructed by the communist government between WW II and its collapse in 1989. She described the regime’s persecution and murder of families with education, financial means and heritage, forcing professionals into manual labor and farming. But she acknowledged the benefits that went to poor workers and peasants–full employment, and free health care and education.
And though she had managed to survive, learn languages and travel, the collapse of communism left large portions of the population unprepared for the competitive raw capitalist economy. Party officials, however came out ahead, using their power and influence to pillage state resources and succeed.
The experience of Budapest seemed to end before it started as we returned to the comforts of our floating hotel north of the City. The shallow-bottomed Gullveig glided upstream through a flat landscape revealing nothing but green vegetation on both shores.