Many of you will remember how excited I was to arrive in Vienna in November 2024 after walking from Prague. This post continues the journey - I realised that I could walk to Bratislava quite easily. I thought that I could do it in two days, but a warm day on Sunday put paid to that idea. What it does mean is that I now have less than 20km of walking to reach Bratislava, so I can do the last part in just over four hours, and then visit a few places there. But that's a story for another day.
This story will start and end predictably, but the bit in the middle is anything but predictable. As many of you will know, I research my journey back to base (usually - a counterexample will follow) but I don't research what I expect to see on the way. It means that I miss things, but I'm like a little boy with a new toy car when I discover things. Some would say that I'm like a little boy with a new toy car most of the time, but never mind. The lack of research usually means that I don't have expectations about what I see, but this time I was totally astounded about what I saw, and I came back with more questions than answers. In the words of the song, the more that I find out, the less I know. So prepare for a geography lesson, with several silly anecdotes interspersed.
I said that the story would begin predictably. Here's the start of the walk, taken in the evening when I arrived:
This is the Danube Canal or Donaukanal. It leaves the main Danube in the north west of Vienna and rejoins in the north east, having passed close to the centre of the city. It's a canal to allow boats to access Central Vienna, or so I thought. More later.
When I showed this picture to friends, I had the response "I can almost hear the zither". So let's all hear the zither.
I'd walked along the Donaukanal on the way into Vienna in November 2024, but I was quite tired by then, so I missed things. I probably missed things this time, but there will be another day.
A Spotty Dog on the cycle path! What's more, it walked like a normal dog. It didn't walk with all four legs in the air at once, like 'the very biggest spotty dog you ever did see'. (For our younger listeners, Ian is talking about a children's programme he watched sixty years ago. Here's what he means.)
Art work, by the Donaukanal. The whole area is a space for public art. Das Werk say that they have been 'an established part of Vienna's nightlife and subcultural scene since 2006'.
Oh look, a council worker removing graffiti. Nah, this is Vienna. A graffiti artist preparing a blank canvas for later.
The new somewhat dwarfing the old, somewhere near where the Donaukanal meets the main Danube. Claude and ChatGPT have given me two different wrong answers as to what the buildings are, so I'll leave the reader to guess. Or to inform me.
A low level bridge to Donauinsel. The yellow bit in the middle can be raised to let small boats through.
The building on the left is what one of the LLMs thought my previous picture was. Erm, there's three of them. This is DC Towers, Vienna's equivalent of Canary Wharf. The building on the left, the imaginatively named DC Tower 1, is the tallest building in Austria at 220m.
A second low level bridge to Donauinsel. Not sure how this one opens. I could paddle a canoe through the gap on the left - that's assuming that I could paddle a canoe at all, that is. The last time I attempted such a thing, I went round in circles like a Cocker Spaniel.
We've now left the populated part of Vienna, we've left the river, and we're at a sewage works. The first sign is polite, describing it as a 'compost works'. The second picture is less so, describing it as 'bottom loading'. No need for that filth.
Leaving the sewage works, here's a bunker built into a small artificial hill. Maybe it's to protect walkers and cyclists from polluted water close to the sewage works?
The end of Donauinsel. This is where we see the Danube as a single river for the first time.
Having taken the previous picture, I climb back up the bank, and I realise that it's a flood defence. The landscape has changed completely since I left Vienna. But why? And why the sewage works on the river at the east of the city?
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My immediate thought was of this building (By The wub - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116697229 ). Why? It's a sewage works in East London named Abbey Mills. It lies at the east end of one of the Victorian sewers which run across London from west to east, causing the sewage running into buried rivers going from north to south not to empty into the Thames. The case for creating the sewers was strengthened by 'the Great Stink' of 1858 where hot weather transformed an unpleasant and smelly environment into an extremely unpleasant and smelly environment. And, of course, the Thames stank its way past the Houses of Parliament.
But surely the Donaukanal wasn't a sewer? It was a canal built to serve Vienna from the main Danube, surely? Actually, no. The clue is in the name. Kanal often means 'open sewer' in German. The Donaukanal was an old channel of the Danube, not a canal, and a sewer much the same way the Thames was. Vienna implemented a similar system to London with an intercepting sewer, and a sewage works beyond the city.
This doesn't explain the sudden transformation from a pleasant urban walk by a huge river to a walk on a bank above a huge flood plain, though. Let's look at a map.
Note how Donauinsel goes the length of Vienna and no further. Is it artificial? Absolutely. All part of a flood protection scheme from the 1970s and 1980s, it's 21km by 70m-210m. Not quite square then. How does putting an island into a river increase flood protection? Let's look at another map.
Note that the river is little wider, if at all, to the east of Donauinsel. The river to the south of the island is much wider than the river to the north, and there's a good reason for that - the one to the north is artificial too. Dig out an area wide enough so your city doesn't flood, use the spoil to build an island in the middle of the river, plant 1.8 million trees and shrubs on the island to take water from the river. What's more, Donauinsel is now the most popular recreational facility in Vienna. Brilliant. For more detail, see https://web.archive.org/web/20170729015609/https://www.wien.gv.at/umwelt/gewaesser/pdf/donau-hochwasserschutz-2017.pdf.
Mistletoe, and lots of it. I saw it all the way from the Donaukanal. I even saw some in the centre of Dresden at Christmas. Conclusion: the Germanic tradition of having mistletoe in houses at Christmas is not as prevalent as it is in Britain.
Having (eventually) left Vienna, I saw a sign to Bratislava, and to Hainburg, my eventual day two destination. It's more than 12km from Hainburg to Bratislava, but never mind.
And, in the other direction, we now do see a sign to Central Vienna, but no distance. For those of you who didn't know, you now know that I grew up wanting to design road signs.
I ended up taking a taxi back to Vienna at the end of day one. My route on Google Maps was taking me over the river then back by train. See where it says Donaufähre on the sign above? That means Danube Ferry. And it runs 0900 to 1800 or some such. It was considerably later by this point, so no hope. Moral of the story: always have enough charge on your phone to get yourself out of trouble.
(photo credit: Christopher Althuber, https://www.meinbezirk.at/floridsdorf/c-freizeit/ein-blitzspektakel-ueber-der-alten-donau_a2796185)
As I said earlier, it was too hot to walk on Sunday. After the sunshine we had thunder and lightning, so, being in Vienna, Donau und Blitzen. I'll get my coat.
Having managed - eventually - to buy a bus ticket using the phone as I couldn't pay on the bus, I arrived back at journey's end for day one. I've never seen a sign like the one on the right on a cycle path before, and I've never seen cyclists disappear over the horizon before. Talking of the horizon, is that a change of scenery in the distance?
It's a nice touch that there's a bench about every kilometre on this stretch. For the nature lover, you can always see or hear something different, from trees to birds to snakes (I wasn't fast enough to photograph the snake), but for the cyclist, league after league of flat, straight path could be mind-numbing.
To show that I'm not just saying that I saw interesting things in nature, here's a native Black Poplar (which I actually recognised - go me) with the ubiquitous mistletoe to the right. There's a posh word, ubiquitous - well, not really for those of us of a certain age from Scunthorpe. 'Ubique' was the name on the side of a bus between Scunthorpe and Ashby run by a brother and sister (?) driver and conductor team. Next stop Sid!
At long last the 12km is up, and there's a bend. All these places on the sign, but not Bratislava, only 20km or so away. I do like the thought of a place named Marchegg, though.
And if I'd gone straight on - the rather wonderful 'geradeaus' in German - instead of turning right, I'd have gone through a village. These were the first houses I'd seen on the path since the sewage works.
I needed to cross a bridge to reach Hainburg, and what a bridge. 1872m long to cross the flood plain, it opened in 1973. Note the two paths - it's one way for cyclists and pedestrians as there isn't a lot of room. Before this bridge opened, there were no bridges over the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava.
What a difference in the scenery crossing the river! That's Hainburg that you see in the distance. The large hill to the left is what I noted as 'a change of scenery in the distance'.
Here's the tiny station in Hainburg which was journey's end for now. The line ends a little to the east, close to the Slovak border. There is a line from Bratislava to Vienna, but it goes inland via Marchegg, and takes 55 minutes for a two-and-a-bit day walk. Such are the legacies of the cold war, 35 years on.
No, not that one Ian. This one. Bis bald.
