Beautiful Passau

Well here is my second post for today. As I mentioned, I wanted to complete another travel page & after a few delays I finally got stuck into it. This is one of two pages I'm doing of this lovely German town. On this day we had a choice of either going on a 4hr bus trip to Salzburg or a walking tour of Passau, where our ship had docked. We are so glad that we chose to stay on the ship because Passau turned out to be the most beautiful & interesting town. By this stage I had had enough of hopping on & off buses anyway. As a result, we not only had the opportunity to explore a little of Passau (a town sitting in the middle of 3 rivers) but there were only about 20 people left on the ship (everyone else had opted for Salzburg), which meant that we were very spoiled by the crew. They gave us a 5 course lunch in the exclusive Portobello's restaurant as we sailed over the border into magnificent Austria. We lounged around on the top deck while sipping Latte's & taking in the breath-taking Austrian scenery. A few of our new friends wanted to make up for the fact that I didn't get to see where The Sound of Music was made & graciously entertained us with songs from the movie......it was a real hoot for us & for the crew who looked on in wonder at these crazy Aussies!  I hope Robyn & Kerin don't mind me sharing these pics with you.  Anyway, later in the day we arrived in Linz to collect the other passengers from their day trip.


But back to Passau (I know, I tend to get side-tracked). St. Stephen's Cathedral is the most beautiful church we had the pleasure to visit on our trip. It hardly has any stained-glass windows, so when we walked in it was lit up by all the natural light. Most of the building is white marble, intricately carved & with amazing frescoes on the ceiling (suffice to say that our necks were a tad sore afterwards which was alleviated somewhat with a couple of good German whites over lunch). It also claims to have the largest cathedral pipe organ in the world & I must say it was very impressive. The black & white stone floor is shiny & worn from centuries of church-goers & the carvings on the pillars, walls & ceilings must have taken many man hours to complete. It was a nice change from all the Gothic Cathedrals we had previously visited & we could have spent a lot more time exploring here, but our ship was about to sail....

Just some of the detail inside St. Stephens.

The river Inn, one of the 3 rivers running through this town.

 Being serenaded by the girls with "doe ray me".

Hope you like my little story, thanks for dropping by :)