Biking Vieques' Virgin Beaches and Kayaking the Bio Bay

I've learned never to argue with a man holding a machete. So when one of our guides, Mark Franco, Jr., whipped out his blade and said "Hey, you want to see something neat?" I simply hung my helmet on the handlebars of my rented Specialized Rockhopper and followed Mark into the jungle.

Five minutes of hacking later, we arrived at the crumbling remains of Playa Grande, the last of the great Victorian sugar cane plantations. Tiny Vieques—Puerto Rico's "little daughter" just seven miles off its eastern shore—was once nicknamed Sugar Island, but the local industry collapsed in the 1930s. This plant struggled along until 1941, when the U.S. Navy took over most of Vieques to use for target practice.

"They relocated the whole village of workers," said Mark as we passed Playa Grande's broken rooms filled with leaf loam, picking our way down its arched brick corridors cracked open to the sky and fringed with garlands of vines. "It didn't take long for the jungle to reclaim it."

I had spent the morning circling the island's western end with Mark and his boss, Karl Husson, owner of La Dulce Vida Mountain Bike. Our tires fishtailed though sandy beachside trails and forded shallow streams as we whizzed past cove after abandoned cove of virgin beaches lined with coconut palms, mangrove, and sea grape—no resorts, no development, and only the occasional anchored boat for company.

We peeked into long cement ammo bunkers, camouflaged by grass roofs and empty save for the tiny bats clinging to the ceilings, and crossed the saddle of the island along a narrow path through thickets of mango and papaya.

After bushwhacking to the remains of Playa Grande, we turned onto the dirt road to Vieques' northwestern tip. Beyond the 1,058-acre nature preserve of Laguna Kiani, a dark lagoon girded by a tangle of mangrove, lay Green Beach. This long swathe of sand must not see many visitors; as I waded into the warm surf, crabs scuttled nonchalantly across my toes, and a curious ray swam up to investigate my ankles.

While Karl broke out the organic snacks, I wandered up the beach to Punta Arenas and stood in the shallows at land's end. The water swirling around my legs ran alternately warm and cool as the turquoise Caribbean mingled with the deep blue Atlantic.

The fact that we could experience this storybook slice of the Caribbean at all was something of a miracle. The Navy continued using 70% of Vieques' 26,000 acres as a punching bag until 2003, when protests and pressure finally forced them to turn it all over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The island's eastern half is still littered with decades' worth of unexploded ordnance—and is closed to the general public as a National Wildlife Refuge. But while the western end has been entirely cleared of unexploded bombs, it remains gloriously abandoned.

Much has been written of the island's inhabited central strip, and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the low-key village of Esperanza. I hit the self-proclaimed "smallest aquarium in the world" (a few algae-streaked tanks, a tub scuttling with Vieques' clawless lobsters, and room of Taino Indian artifacts), and I scarfed down tostones, jerk chicken strips, and chili con carne on the breezy wood-plank verandah of Banana's on the beachside road.

But it was those jungle-clad two-thirds of the island, off-limits for more than half a century and shrouded in mystery, that drew me to Vieques. To seek out its secret trails, I needed local guides like Karl, Mark, and Tim Raymond, a bear of a man who owned Aqua Frenzy Kayaks.

I hooked up with Tim for a nighttime kayak tour of Mosquito Bay—a name that gives entirely the wrong impression. The cove is crawling not with mosquitoes but dinoflagellates. You can't see these microorganisms—not even with 720,000 of the single-celled beasties swimming around each gallon of water—but since they flash with light when agitated, anything that passes through the Caribbean's best bioluminescent bay leaves a bright blue glow in its wake.

From his kayak, Tim delivered an informative nature lecture in laid-back dude patois as our paddles churned up ghostly effervescent glows and schools of fish shot through the water like turquoise tracer fire.

When we reached the best spot, I rolled off my kayak and swam in an aura of light, my flailing arms and legs leaving trippy echoes in blue. It was sublimely surreal. I filled my cheeks, tilted back my head, and sent a fountain of glowing blue shooting into the sky.

When you go...
Arriving: Vieques is a 25-40 min flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico ($160–$180) using Vieques Air Link (888-901-9247; www.viequesairlink.com), Cape Air (800-352-0714; www.flycapeair.com), or American Airlines (800-433-7300; www.aa.com).

Activities: La Dulce Vida (www.bikevieques.com; day rentals $35, half-day/8-12 mile tours $75).
Aqua Frenzy Kayaks (787-741-0913; two-hour tour $30).

Food & Lodging: Banana's Guest House is a simple Caribbean shack–like joint across from the beach: basic plank-floored rooms with no phone or TV, but with a friendly staff and one of the best casual dining spots along Esperanza's beachside road (787-741-8700; www.bananasguesthouse.com; with fan $65, with A/C $80).

Hix Island House has 13 lofts in four funky buildings that look a bit like Bauhaus-meets-Asia done in poured concrete geometry, with lots of interplay between inside/outside spaces; stylish and hip, with the prices to prove it (787-741-2302; www.hixislandhouse.com; $160-$210 in summer; $220-$295 in winter).

Reid Bramblett is the founder of ReidsGuides.com

Copyright © 2006 by Reid Bramblett

Good Night, Sleep Tight...And That's All

I'm a confirmed one-star hotel man. I get a quirky, self-satisfied thrill every time I snag a railroad narrow room with creaky wood floors, a wobbly chair and table rejected by a finer hotel back in 1963, a bare 20-watt bulb dangling on its wire from the ceiling, and a bathroom down the hall I have to share with the rest of the floor.

I downright revel in my thrift. I mentally lord it over people who can afford better hotels. In fact, I picture the poor saps shelling out three or four times as much for a room with TV and minibar in the three-star joint around the corner, and I think: suckers! Sure, they don’t have to put on pants and grab their keys every time they want to nip out to the bathroom, but I look at it this way: I could stay here for three or four nights at the price they're paying for one. (I say "could stay" because I can't; I've got to dash off to Modena tomorrow, Parma the day after that, then Milan...more than one night in a city is a luxury we working stiff travelers cannot afford.)

I stand there in my gloriously drab one-star room, stripped to my undies, smugly washing my clothes in the sink (even rooms without baths in Europe usually have a sink). As I round-robin my camera, Palm, laptop, and cellphone battery chargers though the single outlet available, I reflect on my wisdom for preferring one-star rooms—"wisdom" sounding so much better than the slightly more accurate term, "poverty". I am one who appreciates that a comfy bed is all one really needs from his lodgings; anything more is downright slothful. Or maybe avaricious. One of the Deadly Sins, at any rate.

So I am content with my view of the airshaft. I can tolerate the traffic noise filtering through the single pane of glass. I don't mind the lack of a phone that would allow me to go online—just a little intercom handset that connects only to the front desk (which is unmanned after midnight anyway). I can handle rough sheets on a sagging-spring cot.

But there are certain things at which I draw the line.

On reflection, it's a good thing I decided to keep reading the next chapter of my novel, when I really should have either (a) sat at the desk and caught up on entering my research into the computer, or (b) snapped off the 20-watt bulb and gone to bed early for once to try to catch up on sleep, which at this point in my whirlwind trip is becoming rather more important than typing up notes.

But, had I done either of those things, I wouldn't have been lying in bed with the lights on. Had I not been lying in bed with the lights on, I wouldn't have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something moving against the white of the pillow.

It was a small brown bug. Well, such things happen. I was frankly surprised I hadn't had to go on an half-hour mosquito-killing rampage within the room this evening, as I have on so many prior occasions in a country where windows are left cracked open all day to air out the rooms. I flicked the bug off my pillow, and went back to my book.

Then, my eye caught another movement. It was another bug. This one was inching along the white bulge where I had thrown the sheets back, right up next to the wall, so I squished it against the plaster. It became a smear of bright red blood, like when you smack an engorged mosquito. Eew. Two bugs got me a bit nervous, so I put my book face down and lifted the covers.

Sure enough, there was another bug. I flicked it towards the edge of the bed, but it somehow managed to land right back on the sheet. I flicked it again. Same thing. I was inadvertently working the thing up towards my pillow, my disgust briefly overshadowed by amazement that the bug kept zipping back onto the bed every time I flicked it off into space, as if the white sheet were some kind of insect magnet. Finally, frustrated, I just pinched the thing. More bright red blood. By now, my hand was next to my pillow. Suddenly, I shuddered. I scooted my butt to the edge of the bed, then lifted the pillow.

Underneath were about six of the little brown bugs.

I leapt from the cot, doing a little frantic jig and rapidly burshing my arms, legs, shoulders, and torse down with my hands. What the hell was this? The Third World? The Middle Ages? How does a hotel in Europe get bedbugs in this day and age?

I didn't ponder such things for long. I was too busy stuffing my charging cords back into their case, collecting my laundry from the line I had strung out the window, gathering up my scattered books and papers, and jamming it all into my suitcase. I scooped up my shoulder bag, heaved the heavy suitcase, and stealthily made my way downstairs.

Why the stealth? Not sure. I think I was afraid I would get caught and forced to remain.

At the bottom of the stairs, separating the reception desk from the room access and front entrance, there was a metal accordion grate like at a shop. I had already scribbled a note in Italian: "That bed was full of insects. I am not staying!" I spindled the note and shoved it through the ring on my room keys, tossed it through the grate to land on the floor, and quietly let myself out the front door.

Where did I go? Why, to the three-star hotel around the corner, of course. The young guy who eventually arrived at the check in desk to buzz me in, blinking 1:30am sleep from his eyes, said they were all out of single, but he could give me a big room at a reduced rate. As I handed over my passport, I apologized for the late hour and explained what had happened. He looked up from the check-in form, horrified.

"But, where were you staying?" The Al Giaciglio, I told him. He shuddered and made a face like someone had fed him awful medicine. "Ah! Al Giaciglio. That place..." He trailed off, shaking his head as if to rid it of the foul name he had just uttered. "You didn't pay already, I hope." No, I told him. "Bravo," he congratulated me.

As he handed me the keys and a remote control for the TV, I got a case of the flailing arm willies that shimmy shook me from head to toe. "Sorry," I said. "I just... It's like I can feel them all over me."

He nodded, knowingly. Then, with concern: "You want a drink or something?"

Although I took a 20-minute shower, scrubbing myself all over repeatedly, I still keep feeling them: little tickles on my ankles, my shoulders, my back, my forehead, my neck. I keep compulsively brushing myself off every time a hair on my leg or arm moves. The early evening mosquito bites on my face and neck that had stopped bothering me hours ago are once again tingling, causing me to swipe at nothing.

So here I sit, in a wonderfully bland room in the Hotel Minerva, next door to Ravenna's train station. My laundry is hung all over the room to dry. The TV over on the table is keeping me silent company. My electronics are all snuggled into their outlets in the various corners of the large room, and I am about to use the phone line to go online and post this tale.

Oh, sure, I appreciate all these amenities and conveniences, and the neat lines of the otherwise indifferent modular furnishings actually help convey a sense of supreme cleanliness, for which, at the moment, I am supremely grateful. Still, I'm paying more than twice as much—and damned happy to do so—as I would have had I not snuck away from Al Giaciglio and its bedbugs in the middle of the night.

Despite tonight's adventure, I remain a one-star hotel man at heart—in fact, tomorrow night I'll be bedding down in Modena's youth hostel. But you can be darned sure that next time, before I agree to take a room, I'll be checking under the pillows first.

The Road to Sorrento

Delta did exactly zero things to impress me on my trip from JFK to Rome. The total waiting time from getting out of the car to striding up to my gate was 90 minutes, including 18 minutes shuffling up the sidewalk jut to get up to the front entrance.

Then, they stuck me in seat 42E, the very back row of the plane (the check-in desk never asked me "aisle or window?" just gave me a boarding pass). Problems with the back row? Noise from the galley behind you, folks waiting for the bathroom (also behind you) abusing your personal space and leaning on your headrest, and the seats only recline about 1.5 inches. Also, Delta hasn’t yet invested in those plane seat headrests with the little adjustable wings that help sandwich your head in an upright position for a slump-free and crick-less nap.

The only saving grace was that I had the whole row to myself. Huzzah! I never manage to sleep sitting up on planes, so for the first time in about 40 overnight flights, I would be able to stretch out across three seats and actually doze off a bit. Then, just before we taxied onto the runway, some guy got out of a middle seat ten rows up. As he picked his way down the aisle, the already strapped-in flight attendants sternly called out (apparently not for the first time) "Sir, you have to stay in your assigned seat until after take-off. Once the captain has tuned off the seatbelts sign, you can look for another seat."

"Screw that!" He spat at them in a self-important tone, settling into the other aisle seat of my row. "I’m not about to sit in a middle seat!" He then proceeded to arrange all his worldly belongings in fussy piles taking up the entirety of the empty seat between us.

I sent hate-vibes at him during the whole, sleepless nine-hour flight.

Fiumicino had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to open only four passport control windows to handle the dozens of incoming morning flights. The line stretched the length of the immigration room, around the corner, and down the corridor to the base of the escalators down from arrivals. It took nearly an hour to get through.

Then, the doors on the shuttle train from the airport to Termini closed on my foot as I put it on the first stair in order to clamber aboard. I yanked out my abused shoe, the doors snapped shut, and I watched the train pull away. Damn. Half an hour until the next one.

Luckily, at Termini I managed just to make the InterCity train to Naples, and was delighted to discover it was one in the old compartment arrangement. In this era of straight-through carriages that always make me feel more like I’m commuting than traveling, I revel in this throw-backs where you get to investigate a microcosm of six people crammed uncomfortably close for a few hours.

Across from me, in the other window seat, sat a hulking teenager with a do-everything cell phone permanently attached to his right ear by an umbilical earbud. Like a first true love, he ignored the world to pour all his attentions and devotion into this slab of plastic and microchips. First he played video games on it, then used it to chat with friends, and later fell asleep listening to tinny mp3s. In the seat by the door, a raisined little Italian man in a salt-and-pepper beard and cheap, threadbare, but scrupulously clean clothing carefully worked his way through four different newspapers over the course of the ride to Naples. Across from him, a dumpy Korean tourist clutched her purse on her lap and darted her eyes constantly for the full two hour trip, as if she suspected us of being the pickpockets she had been warned about.

Just as we pulled away, a nice older couple from the South Island of New Zealand arrived, panting and sweaty from having dashed for the train (which had switched arrival tracks at the last moment), and collapsed across from one another in the center seats. They were clearly excited to be in Italy, en route to Pompeii, and had a remarkable knack for looking out the wrong window at the wrong time—staring at a bleak suburban wallscape, for example, when the Mediterranean was glittering out the other side of the train.

I took it upon myself to catch the woman’s eye periodically and silently point to the other window at appropriate times so they wouldn’t miss things, starting with those oh-so-Romantic broken, weedy stretches of ancient aqueduct arches that parallel the tracks through farmland of the Castelli Romani. (Unlike the Acqua Vergine and other Imperial Age aqueducts that still run fresh water into Rome from the Appenine foothills to the east, the aqueducts south of the city weren’t kept in good repair by the popes, and long ago gradually crumbled to create scenes straight from a Piranesi print, complete with milling sheep.)

By the time we were in the Campania heartland, the woman broke our compartment’s silence, first to ask politely if I spoke English, then why we kept passing water buffalos? I explained about the mozzarella, and they broke into delighted grins. A bit later she asked "And are those olives?" No…but those are, with the dusty silver and dark green leaves. As we fell to chatting, they bemoaned having spent so long waiting in line at the Vatican, so I told them about reserving Uffizi tickets, and later, in Paris, to buy the Carte Musées et Monuments in order to save money and skip lines.

Occasionally, the little red cart with from the bar car would slide past our compartment, its pusher tinkling the bell occasionally and merely glancing quickly into the compartment to see if anyone showed interest. Much more proactive was the Old School itinerant drinksman. I thought these guys had disappeared, chased off by the now for-profit railroad and its exclusive license with Chef Express to provide crappy food and overpriced drinks on all the trains. But no, here was a small-time entrepreneur, trolling the corridors, swinging a heavy plastic bag at the end of each hairy arm, calling out a patter of "Caffe, caffe…bibite, aranciate, coca, acqua, birra…bibite!" Later, a barrista in Sorrento confirmed that the only bit of the entire national railways he knew of that still featured these bibite (drinks) guys was the Formia-Napoli stretch, where they were so entrenched and so much a part of tradition that no one seemed able to get rid of them.

At Napoli Centrale, I wished the Kiwis luck and hauled my bag down the station platform. I was about to take the stairs down to the basement and the long, twisting corridor leading to the private Circumvesuviana train line strung along the Bay of Naples, when I thought, "Damn. They’ll never find this on their own. No one does." Grumbling about the continued short-sightedness of Neapolitan authorities in not putting up a big sign for tourists saying "POMPEII"with a giant arrow pointing down the staircase, I backtracked until I found my Kiwis—looking, as expected, vaguely lost. I accompanied them down into the warren of underground tunnels, showed them where to buy tickets, and warned them about not accidentally getting on the Metro—the turnstiles for which are, confusingly, directly across from the Circumvesuviana ticket windows even though the Circumvesuviana tracks lie several hundred yards away, down more twists and turns of tunnels.

Waiting on the platform, I extended my adopted circle of tourists to a quartet of backpacked Americans by stopping them from hopping on the first train that came along, as it was headed for Sarno and they (as I) wanted the one for Sorrento. They squinted at me, unconvinced by this stranger offering advice. I shrugged and explained that, on this train, they’d end up clear on the wrong side of Vesuvius, wondering where the sea went and what all the buffalo were doing here. (I left it to my Kiwis to explain the buffalo-mozzarella connection.)

Aboard the correct train, I pointed out the gypsy family working its way through the car—mamma with an infant slung at her breast and small child in tow, little girl squeezing an accordion in a semblance of music as a distraction—and motioned everyone to keep their hands on their wallets. Then I left the tourists alone and got to finishing off my mystery novel as the ancient train shrieked and clattered its interminable way along the southern crescent of the Bay of Naples. It stopped every two to five minutes in identikit suburban towns to disgorge loud packs of schoolchildren sausaged into too-bright, too-tight clothing. I bid the Kiwis goodbye at the Pompeii Scavi stop, advising them not to miss the frescoes in Villa dei Misteri, and stayed on until the end of the line: Sorrento.

I shuffled along with everyone else down the platform stairs—the last line I’d have to stand in for the trip, hopefully—and muscled myself and my bag through the turnstile. I jounced the bag along narrow, red-cobblestoned sidewalks to the eastern edge of town and a small pile of dusty pink cubes clinging to the cliff's edge 200 feet above a little swimming pier. The black paint of the sign at the top of the main building's walls was flaking so badly it was almost impossible to make out the words "Albergo Loreley," the full name continued on the next building "et Londres."

I dropped my bag in room 15—hideous pea-green modular furnishings, no TV, A/C, or phone, but drop-dead views—and, while the light was still good, snapped a few pics of the room and its bougainvillea-lined balcony with the panorama of the sea and busy Marina Piccola port below. Stuffing the camera into my waist bag, I quickly soaped my hands and face to wipe away the grime of the road and weariness of a sleepless night, and headed right out the door again before the bed could tempt me to crash.

As I turned the simple skeleton key twice round in the lock, a smile spread across my face. Somehow, that did it. Sliding the deadbolt into place on the first of dozens of new hotel rooms that would crop up every night, that slid me into the groove. I was back. Back on the road and back on the job. Pocketing the key, I trotted down the stairs, poking my head in the slightly ajar door of room 6 for a peek and some mental notes on the decor, wondering if I'd make it to the curving, bamboo-shaded terrace in time to get an antipasto misto and plate of pasta alla Sorrentina before the chef knocked off for riposo.

Coming to Terms with the German Wine Thing (and the Viewless Rooms Thing)

I decided to skip the most famous town on the Romantic Road, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Last time I was there, dragging the boy scouts through Europe, I ended up in a shouting match with a giant tour bus. Well, the bus mostly just shouted, "BEEP!" It was one of those double-high jobbers where the passengers sit way up, leaning against tinted windows, their feet dangling well above the heads of people trying to walk around the thing on the ground. I wasn't trying to walk around it. I had planted myself firmly in front of it, and was yelling at it.

While it kept repeating "BEEP!" I gave a long and, I thought, very cogent series of arguments regarding the definition of "pedestrians only," what this particular brand of mass tourism has wrought upon the beautiful places in the world, and how driving such a monstrosity right into the postcard-quaint cobbled town square lined with its half-timbered buildings spoils the very postcard view the people on board came to see.

The bus just kept shouting, "BEEP!"

Its driver was adding something of his own, and though I couldn't hear him through the soundproofed glass, his vast vocabulary of hand gestures got the point across. Some of the tourists on board apparently decided I must be part of the "local color" and took pictures of me. A few of my boy scouts thoughtfully dragged me away before I could get arrested, and to this day, every once in a while, one of them will say "Hey, remember that time Reid got in a fight with a German bus?"

So I skipped Rothenburg.

Instead, I pushed on west and north toward the Neckar Valley and my final castle, the Hirschhorn. The swift Neckar River winds through the southern reaches of the Odenwald Forest. It is lined with half-timbered villages and castles like a mini-Rhine, but suffers a mere fraction of the tourists, and along much of the river the trees still march right down to the water's edge. However, the forests blanketing the hills did look a bit odd. Generations of systematic logging have left it to grow back in overlapping, mismatched, rectilinear patches, not always aligned, so the greensward is covered in a network of subtle seams and slight color variations like a much-patched road.

Still, only modest swatches of the Odenwald had been permanently shaved away to make room for villages and small farms along the riverside. As I approached the Neckar and began twisting along its length toward the castle, I even saw grape vines strung up on one hillside. "Oh, no!" I said to myself. "Not again!" Sure enough, my guidebook described this as a "…small, but high-quality, wine-producing area."

And on my last night in Germany, too.

The thirteenth-century Schloss Hirschhorn overlooks a bend in the Neckar where a little waterfall dam provides a pleasant white noise background of rushing water to the chirping of sparrow hawks wheeling below the high walls of the castle and the tolling of bells in the little steepled and red-roofed hamlet by the riverside. I spent the afternoon on the castle's popular terrace, set like the prow of a ship at a panoramic point with sweeping views down the valley, and whiled away the time contentedly arranging my notes and working on my hotel reviews while nursing a few chilled beers.

As the afternoon light turned pale orange, I realized dinnertime had arrived and that the folks sitting around me were clinking forks to plates. I raised the dregs of my last beer, silently toasted the view, and drained the glass. I called for a menu and ordered the set-price feast. It opened with melon and ham, followed by beef strips, then a platter crowded with a tiny steak, a pork chop, and a medallion of, well, a different cut of pork. All of it drenched in sauce. Oh, and potatoes. Mustn't forget the potatoes. Ah, well. It's not like I came here for pizza. Suggested to accompany the menu was (yep) a local dry white wine. Well, when in Germany…

I ordered the full bottle.

Just before 9pm, the hotel manager came out and sat at the table nearest the back of the terrace but still against the cliff wall so she could see the panorama. I nodded to her in greeting and went back to reading my book. The waitress brought out a tall mug beer for her boss, and the manager just sit there, along with the middle-aged American couple and the middle-aged German couple, and me, enjoying the sunset, which was reflecting rather spectacularly off the clouds on the other side of the river.

After a while, she was joined by her husband, the chef, who stripped off his apron and poured himself a glass of red wine. She clinked it with her beer stein, staring him in the eyes with a smile in silent toast. They sat for a while, talking in low voices, drinking their beer and their wine, until the sunset faded from the clouds and the sky darkened to navy, then indigo.

I decided to retire early—I had a flight out of Frankfurt in the morning, and still needed to finish packing. I worked a crick out of my neck, marked my spot in the book, and headed back to my room. Before I set about packing, I took a minute to gaze out the window, because, for the first time this trip, my room had a view.

I saw a grassy lawn spilling steeply below the stone of the high castle walls. Sparrow hawks wheeled on the thermals beneath my window and keened to one another as they hunted in the dusk. The grassy slope was bordered by crumbling castle walls that stretched right down to mingle with the red-roofed village below. Beyond, past the vineyards, the Neckar curved silver into the forests of the night-dark hills.

Braumeisters and Bullseyes

They call the Pegnitz a "river," but on my drive downstream I didn't see it get any wider than about 35 feet, if that. Most of the time is remained a little brown brook meandering through the wildflowers and half-timbered hamlets. It moved so slowly that stretches of the surface were flecked with lilypads topped by tiny white blossoms. Parting the pads were dozens of paddlers, for this was a Saturday morning and folks were out in force to enjoy nature (Germans adore the outdoors), by canoe and kayak, or walking their dogs down streamside footpaths, or strapping on harnesses and belay ropes to tackle the numerous little rock pinnacles that had calved off the walls of the narrow valley.

I could tell I had entered Bavaria because suddenly, the Guten Tags became Gruß Gotts (in traditionally Catholic Bavaria, the Protestant "Good Day" never really replaced the old "God is Great" greeting), and the first station the radio's auto-search feature hit upon as I crossed the border was called "Bavaria 1"—and it was playing oompah band music. That and ordering a beer didn't elicit contemptuous looks. What's more, no longer was anyone trying to force wine "from one of Germany's best grape-growing regions" down my throat.

I worked my way across back roads through the gentle farmland of upper Bavaria, avoiding the official Romantic Road route with its giant buses and ready-made tourist traps and churches charging $5 to see their Renaissance altar carved by Riemenschneider. My goal was the secondary capital of the Romantisches Straße region, the aptly-named Dinkelsbühl, a dinky walled medieval town that is a little too perfectly preserved and polished, the result of dedicating itself to servicing the needs of mass tourism. Still, it suffers a mere fraction of the international hordes that overrun nearby Rothenburg ob der Tauber (a veritable Bavarian Disneyland of gift shops schneeballen pastry makers).

In fact, the only horde in evidence this day in Dinkelsbühl was a troupe of American teenagers hailing from up and down Middle Atlantic. They spent the afternoon alternately wandering the streets (the girls in giggling clumps, the boys in strutting trios) and hanging out in the local pool hall/Internet café, where I had to wait until one of their harried-looking minders arrived to shoo them back to their hotels—to don the red vests, grab their instruments, and pack into the church to give their concert—before I was finally able to get a terminal to myself.

I was staying in Dinkelsbühl, in a huge $40 room under the beamed attic ceilings of a microbrewery called Weib's Brauhaus, because the castle I had picked in the area was fully booked. (Not bad: it was the only one of the ten on my list that had no rooms available.) I dropped my bags, told the young waitress who checked me in that I'd see them for dinner, and hit the road again to drive to Colmberg and check out its castle. Damn shame I couldn't stay there, as it was handily one of the best of the lot, but at least, after a little bullying and a little pleading, I finally convinced them to give me a pretty extensive tour (more to get rid of me before the dinner rush than anything else, I think).

Heading out of town, I decided to try a different road—never go the same way twice—and nearly ran over two medieval peasant girls, an archer with a full quiver and a six-foot bow, and a monk in a brown frock leading a goat on a rope, all of them crossing the road towards a sunken field with some tents. I pulled over and followed the motley crew into a medieval market and full-blown archery competition.

Little kids dressed in their medieval finery were nervously petting a pair of docile ponies and the monk's goat, which attempted to eat the kids' medieval finery. Two women were selling chunks of homemade soap scented with local wildflowers. An old man sat methodically weaving baskets out of straw. A wood carver hawked his hand-carved bowls while older boys tried their hands (and feet) at working a foot-pedaled lathe to turn out decorative posts. A seamstress was selling Renaissance dresses, doublets, and vests. And a man in the booth next to the massive pigs roasting in spits sold me a giant bottle of beer for €1.50.

There were also professional bow makers and fletchers, demonstrating their craft to the curious, hitting on the peasant girls, and then turning serious to sell their best works to some of the archers, who were killing time as they waited for their time slots in the competition. Seventy-five archers had come to test their skills against targets set in a mowed-out section of the field—and this wasn't just some medieval fair fancy. These guys were pros. Only a handful of them were dressed in period costume and using simple long bows. Most were clad in jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps, wielded impossibly complicated-looking compound bows, and peered through a monoscope mounted on a tripod next to them after each shot. I dunno; I was kind of rooting for the guys with enough sense of fun to show up in tight jerkins, leather pants, and blowsy shirts.

Back in Dinkelsbühl and the Brauhaus, I kept my eye out for the evil Brewmeister (I was on a quest for one, see) whilst I chewed my salty but tender steak-on-toast, but no one looking like Max Von Sydow made an appearance. I finally asked my waitress, and she said the owners were out, but that they'd be around tomorrow for breakfast. Ah, I thought, tomorrow morning then. That's when I shall finally meet the Brewmeister and have the chance to foil his evil plan.

Problem is, the Brewmeister turned out to be the most relentlessly cheery German I think I've ever met. Not only that, she was a woman, Melanie Gehring, and though she did indeed have a diploma in Braumeistering, she didn't seem all that evil. In fact, with the apple cheeks of late middle age and a mass of dyed-blonde curls piled atop her head in a kind of hammerhead bouffant, Frau Gehring was downright motherly.

When I politely asked if she could replenish the empty milk pitcher at the breakfast buffet, she exclaimed "Naturlich!" in her sing-songy voice, and bustled away, When she returned, she insisted on pouring the milk over my bowl of meusli herself. I think it was all she could do to stop herself from tucking my napkin at my waist.

With an attitude like that, she's never going to conquer the world.

The Hunt for the Evil Brewmeister

After many oddly wine-centered meals in Germany, I am sure I'll be for a beer in my future tonight. That's because I am staying at Burg Veldenstein, the castle on the hill above Neuhaus am Pegnitz, a village of smart little red-rooved houses each painted a different pastel shade—robin's egg, peach, canary, mint, pink. The lynchpin of the local economy is obvious at a glance down into the valley from the castle ramparts (not from my room; from my room I get to watch the driveway).

Neuhaus serves to staff the giant Kaiser Braü brewery, which takes up about one-quarter of the town below. Oh, sure, I saw a few tractors parked up against some of the houses during my stroll around town, but I'll bet they're used to grow barley and/or hops. In fact, as I discovered, the brewery even owns Veldenstein castle itself, and the place is so focused on beer that they don't even have business cards—just coasters printed with their address and phone.

Sure enough, at dinner the hotel's gregarious manager even scolded the two elderly German gentlemen seated at my table (in Germany, large tables for six or eight become common seating on crowded nights) for ordering wine with their meal. He gestured at my giant, foam-headed mug and entreated them to try "just a little glass." They demurred, and the owner eventually relented and left to get their wines. I lifted my massive glass and, with a giant smile and a tone suggesting they were truly missing out, assured them, "Schmecht sehr gut!" ("It tastes great!")

But something was bothering me. An almighty brewery down in the valley... it owns the castle up on the hill... Hmmm. Now, why does that ring a bell? I wandered out onto the castle ramparts, ducking under joists and beams laced with dusty cobwebs, and found a little stone bench built into one of the arrow-slit windows for footsore sentries. I sat for a while, watching a luckless fisherman standing in the high grass and working a bend of the slow-flowing Pegnitz at the base of the cliff atop which perched the castle. He gave it up after a while and stomped off toward the massive brewery, past which flowed the stream and the railroad tracks. What is it about that brewery…?

I went down to poke around town. The only thing of interest was a little baroque, onion-domed church dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. Inside, the ends of the last six pews on either side bristled with a dozen 10-foot-tall staffs, each topped by a foot-high statue of a saint. This gaggle of martyrs had clearly been chosen for their patronage of local traditional crafts and callings, represented by the painted shields below each saint's flowing robes—St. Michael for the masons, St. Crispin for the cobblers, etc. Even the church's two apostolic namesakes seemed picked less for their fame than for their patronage, of blacksmiths (Peter) and merchants/businessmen (Paul—though I had always heard the was patron of upholstery or something similarly inappropriate; perhaps his vigorous "selling" of Jesus all over the Mediterranean won him a kind of traveling salesman cred, the way St. Francis's deathbed ability to see a mass taking place miles away later got him tapped as the patron saint of television).

As I snapped a few pictures of Neuhaus's venerated statuettes, I wondered idly why the bells were tolling at 6:50pm, but when folks started filing in I realized it was calling them to mass, so I left quietly. A tiny, wizened old woman in a red cardigan, wielding an aluminum cane and long white hair that was trying desperately to defy gravity despite the berets she had clamped on it, came rushing out after me. I turned to face her as a tidal wave of high-pitched German washed over me. I caught the words "...patron of [something]" a few times, and she kept gesturing towards somewhere up and away on the hillside, then pointing back to the church.

Her face looked calm, so I figured I wasn't being chewed out for using my camera in the church. I fell to smiling vaguely, nodding, and saying "Ah, so," whenever seemed appropriate whilst trying to figure out how to politely extricate myself from the one-sided conversation before she realized I didn't understand her in the slightest. Suddenly, I realized the flood of German had stopped. I snapped out my reverie and saw that she was leaning on her cane and looking at me intently with piercing blue eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said in my best German accent, trying to keep up the charade and avoid embarrassment. "I didn't catch that." She pointed to my camera and finally said something I understood. "You were taking photographs in the church?"

Oh, crap. I am in trouble after all.

"Oh, it was just so beautiful!" I stammered. "And the saints…"

"Ah!" She cried, and asked which saint I was taking pictures of. My mind fell upon the last one I photographed, St. Bartholomew holding his skinning knife, and said "Barthamüs" as my brain started working overtime to phrase, in German, an explanation that my great grandfather had been a butcher (which is true) and hoping that would be enough to excuse my actions.

But before I had to drag my ancestors into it, the old woman gave a little cry and, with a delighted gleam in her eye, said, "Our patron!" She raised her fist in the air triumphantly. "Bartholomew, with his knife in his hand." She waved her fist around happily. "My family, we are butchers!"

I grinned. "My great-grandfather, too." She gave a glad little cry, said goodbye, and toddled back toward the church door, chuckling. I started walking away, toward the brewery, thinking that she turned out to be quite nice, if a little nutty…

Insanity! That's it! An insane asylum connected to a brewery connected to a castle up on the hill. It's Strangebrew! That's the set-up in the movie, history's silliest riff ever of the basic plot of Hamlet.

The next morning, excited, I drove down to Kaiser Braü itself and peered through the glass doors at the ranks of stainless steel tanks and computerized monitoring equipment supervising the brewing process. It was a Saturday, and no one was around. Damn. I had hoped to finagle a tour and perhaps even meet the Brewmeister, so I could ask him about his plot for world domination. There wasn't even a murderous hockey team made up of mental patients hanging around.

Foiled in my plans to foil the Brewmeister, I quit the brewery and turned my wheels south to follow the Pegnitz River towards the Romantic Road and another night of ensured beeriness. And this time, I would actually be staying in a brewery itself. No way THIS Brewmeister was getting away from me.

The Bane of the Solo Traveler

I just checked into a hotel installed in the medieval gatehouse of mighty Burg Reichenstein, overlooking the valley of the Rhine River from on high. I was handed a room key, lugged my luggage upstairs, and opened the door to my third parking-lot view in a row.

Chalk it up to the old "single rooms suck" law, which is aimed at punishing those who dare to travel without companionship. I may be here to write an article on sleeping in German castles, but what I'm really becoming an expert on is what medieval castle parking lots look like. To whit: gravely, littered with rental cars parked at odd angles, and amazingly, precisely, just a tad too small to turn around in properly. Most of the guest rooms in these German castles come with a panorama of the local river valley, vistas over unspoilt forestland, or at the very least a peek at the red roofs of the timeless village that grew up around the castle's feet. All of these fall under the category of views that my room invariably lacks.

The trend started with my very first castle of the trip. I had crossed the lower Rhine at Bonn, where the valley widens and pancakes into vast flatlands peppered by Germany's twin pinnacles of tradition and progress—church steeples and factory smokestacks—above which white gliders wheel on the thermals. Once across the plains, I turned south to join the parade of weekend motorcyclists slaloming down the turns of the Ahr River Valley, whizzing through evergreen forests that stand on tall stilt trunks.

The forestland soon gave way to the Eifel, Germany's largest volcanic region. Save for the giant, lazily spinning Mercedes symbols harvesting wind on ridges and hillsides, the bucolic scenery was straight out of a 19th century painting. A fertile land of green-gold fields unrolled in between the little Christmas tree farms planted in neat Teutonic rows, and the strings of eyelet lakes filling ancient volcanic craters. Hay was harvested into seven-foot-tall rolls placed just so around stubbly fields. The fields were being mown closer still by sleek muscular horses, round piebald cows, and roly-poly sheep freshly shorn for summer. Congregations of fat, contented-looking silky-maned blond ponies standing placidly in the dapple light of woods’ edge alternated with flocks of fat, contented-looking children with corn-silk hair romping in the pineshade of riverside campsites.

This fairy tale of forest and farmland was occasionally interrupted by half-timbered villages built around rocky promontories topped by craggy castles. Some of the ancient fortresses were roofless and shattered beyond repair, their stone walls yawning apart. Others looked comfortably lived-in, with steep slate roofs and tan stucco-cemented walls picked out with brightly painted shutters in heraldic red or blue stripes against white.

Luckily, my castle on that first night, the Kurfürstlishes Amtshaus, turned out to be of the latter type, a bastion of creamy yellow walls trimmed in dark red and topped by ranks of dormer windows clad in dark, mossy slate tiles, and its stood next to a white-steepled church above the bustling market town of Daun. Christa Probst, the owner, was genuinely surprised when, while I was completing the check-in form, I told her I was an American. "How did you find this place?" She marveled. "No Americans come to the Eifel!" She gave a nervous, disturbing little laugh. "This is an empty region. A poor region."

Frau Probst elaborated. "In 1850s, many people went away—to America, mostly. Sometimes their descendants come back to look for family, but it has been so long. Too long. Everyone is gone. This area is only good now for walking and for bike riding." And motorcycles, I pointed out. She gave her disturbing little laugh again. "Yes. We Germans, we love the motorbikes!"

I finished signing in and tried to express the idea that Americans might like to come precisely because the Eifel is not full of factories and other signs of modern commerce. It's simply farmland and forests—and very pretty ones at that—along with the odd reminder of the region's volcanic heritage, like mini Old Faithful-type geysers, giant smooth boulders plopped in strange spots, and those lovely little eyelet lakes. She stared at me bemused, as if there might be something a bit wrong with me, and handed me a set of keys.

My room had a lovely view of my rental sedan.

I got the same panorama from my lodgings at Castle Liebenstein the following night, another Romantically crumbling Rhineside fort, so I abandoned my digs and watched the sunset from the ramparts and chatted with a couple from Montana while their 13-year-old daughter and her cousin clambered around the castle ruins in little black chiffon capes and baseball caps, popping in and out of view as they discovered hidden passageways on their determined ghost-hunt.

And now, the vista from my new digs in Burg Reichenstein: gravel lot, lots of cars. Well, at least it's a proper room. A corollary of the "single rooms suck" law states that any space in the hotel that was once a broom closet, storage room on the airshaft, or substantially sized bathroom may, in a pinch, be converted into a single room. I've stayed in all of those, plus a few worse. Once I was put up in the little manager's office off the hotel lobby, sleeping on the night watchman's cot wedged between the wall and the comically oversized hotel safe (that was in Enna, Sicily, where despite my copy of a months-old faxed reservation they insisted the hotel was fully booked).

Another memorable time in Marostica, a town famous for its biennial chess match on the main piazza using costumed people as pieces, another lost reservation meant I had to set up housekeeping in a little windowless room of the basement parking garage, most of which was taken up by the building's central heating/cooling unit, which would periodically roar to life, popping and squeaking and clanging, at irregular intervals throughout the night. In Germany, at least, I was getting actual hotel rooms. Just tiny, crappy ones.

However, as a consolation, my crappy castle singles do always come with the entertainment of watching folks try to execute 42-point turns in a tiny parking lot at the wheel rental car they're not really that used to. Since many castle rooms don't come with TVs, this is about as exciting as my evening gets. But since everyone now seems to be in for the evening here, the fun's over and I figure it's time I stopped putting it off. It's time to go rustle up some dinner.

Breaking the Rules and Wasting a Morning in Taormina

I must be seriously out of shape, mentally. This trip started with me breaking a trio of travel rules right off the bat: (1) I picked up a rental car at the airport (which always incurs an extra fee), (2) merely to drive it into downtown Palermo (never drive in a city--especially not an Italian city; and especially not a Southern Italian city--if you can avoid it), and then (3) paid for it to sit, parked, for two days whilst I traipsed about town on foot and by bus (always pick up the rental on the day you leave the first big city on the trip, that way you avoid paying for those few days of a needless rental, for the parking, and for that airport pick-up fee).

Another disturbing indication of my mental flabbiness occurred during the drive from Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport--now renamed (though not all road signs have got the memo) Aeroporto Falcone-Borsellino after the two crusading anti-mafia magistrates assassinated in the early 1990s. During the ride, I started getting really aggravated about all the slow, timid, and downright stupid drivers all around me. It was while I was accelerating to weave through the traffic, throwing Italian invectives and complicated hand gestures at other drivers, that I realized what was wrong with this scenario. One does not find European drivers to be slow and timid--especially not Italian drivers, and especially not Southern Italian ones.

That was all a week ago, when I first arrived in Sicily. Yet my mind has still, apparently, not gotten itself back into whack. I managed to infringe upon yet another travel rule before I even woke up this morning. Yesterday, when I checked into the Villa Gaia in Taormina, I asked the hotel clerk if there was anything exciting going on in town--concerts, spectacles, or simply anything new to see or do that hadn't been available seven years ago on my last trip here.

Turns out that, as with all the other ancient Greek theaters in Sicily that have been rehabilitated (and spoiled, visually, with ranks of aluminum risers where the stone seats have crumbled away) to serve as summertime stages for all sorts of entertainments, I managed to pick the one week out of the whole summer during which every single one of them is "between series."

Segesta had just finished a run of classical Greek plays and was gearing up to start classical concerts next week; Siracusa was taking a breather between experimental modern theater and a schedule of ancient dramas; and Taormina had just ended one set of theater and art shows and now had a team of workmen scurrying around trying to turn the 2,500-year-old Sicilian stage into a sheet of ice (on the day when local temps hit 100 degrees) for a revue of skating prowess that was to take place two days hence, which was to be followed the next day by a concert by Diana Ross (whether or not the Supreme would also be required to wear ice skates was not clear).

At any rate, I was out of luck in terms of actually getting some use out of the visual eye sores represented by the intrusion into these glorious ancient spaces of modern seats and scaffolding-pipe erector sets serving as grandstands and to hold lighting arrays. However, the hotel clerk told me, Isola Bella was now open to the public. I had only ever been able to admire from afar this tiny, gardened islet cupped in one of the pocket-sized swimming bays on the coast below Taormina's promontory. Yes, the clerk said, this summer they were ferrying the public to the island on tours at 10am and 3:30pm every day. I knew I had to take off next morning (in order to go swimming with my passport, then drive to Cefalù), but this sounded like a worthy diversion, so when she asked if I'd like for her to call and book me a spot for the next morning, I said sure.

Travel rule: Never rely on a hotel clerk to provide some service you can do perfectly well on your own. At worst, the clerk's going to turn out to be all rotted out underneath the smiles and language of deference and will end up scamming you into something shoddy and at an immense profit to themselves. At best, you're relying on someone else's ability to recall a passing promise made to some stranger from New Orleans they're trying to get to sign the check-in register so they can go back outside and finish that cigarette your arrival interrupted.

What I got was the "at best."

I duly slept in a bit later than I had planned to do when I had planned on an early start. I took breakfast in the garden, where I taught an older American woman sitting near me to ask for "Hag" if she wanted a decaffeinated espresso. Then I watched in horror as a newly-arrived middle-aged Australian man abused first his girlfriend, who showed up a few minutes after he did, then was nasty to the hotel clerk and ordered her to take away the "nasty pastries" and go inside and bring him some sliced bread instead--"Can you do that, d'ya think?" he sneered--which he proceeded to slather with avocado and slices of raw tomato he produced from a plastic shopping bag. He then ordering the clerk back inside to bring him a phone, whereupon he called his boss (who was apparently staying down in the beachside resort community of Giardini-Naxos) and suddenly turned all oily sycophancy, bitching crudely about this "god-awful little town" and eagerly arranging to go down to Giardini-Naxos to see the boss's hotel and make arrangements to stay there instead.

In the face of his maltreatment, I put off bothering the put-upon clerk about my Isola Bella arrangements until about 9:15, at which point I inquired politely. She blanched, said "Scusi!" and dashed back inside. A minute later, she returned, apologizing that it was no longer possible to take the 10am tour, as I would have already had to have left to take the gondola down to the beach. "Do you want to do the one at 15:30?" I sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly, and said "No. Unfortunately, I have to get on down the road."

Still I tarried in town (more on that in a moment), and spent 45 enjoyable minutes wandering the back streets where Taormina's annoying, polished resort air falls away. Laundry flaps on balconies, street corner shrines support tiny vases of dried flowers, and an itinerant fruttivendolo (fruit and veggie seller) operates out of the bed of a teensy three-wheeled ApeCar pickup, selling his produce to a small clump of local ladies of a certain age and with each sale gallantly offering to carry her purchases back to her house.

Thin Walls

You name a noise, the guy in the room next to me is making it. It's 2 am, and he has been at it for the better part of an hour now. In fact, I'd wager good money that the body of the man in room 28 of the Hotel Pratic in Paris is emitting every sound possible outside of actual speech.

It began with a prolonged session of rat-a-tat's, a queer sound that would start off grouped into two long burbles, then repeat as a short burst, pause for several seconds, then start in again with the double long burbles. At first I thought it was some kind of weird Morse code. Then I realized it was snoring. Oh, great, I thought. He's going to snore at me all night.

Oh, how I wish he had merely kept it to snoring.

The man in room 28 soon took to harumphing and clearing his throat. He took to sniffling, snorting, and blowing his nose quite triumphantly and repeatedly. He took to wheezing, hacking, and making little strangling sounds, rounded out by a good stiff bout of coughing (which ended with the inevitable hocking of lugies; this popular pas de duex was encored several times throughout the evening). At one point engaged in a single, memorable sneeze that I don't think the residents of this Paris neighborhood will soon forget.

Then, at a certain point, he grew weary of the nose and throat division and began to explore the whole range of noises that upchucking afforded. First came the wet, squelching streams of vomit, splatting against the aluminum of what I can only assume is an identical copy of the tiny dustbin in my own room. This was followed by a protracted session of systematic, cyclical retching. Almost hypnotic. Almost rhythmic enough to lull me back to sleep. But then he had to go and finish it with a staccato series of irregular dry heaves. And just to be sure I was still awake, he ended with one large, reverberating — and somewhat relieved sounding — belch.

You thought it couldn't get worse, eh?

To top it all off, running like a melodic theme throughout the freakish aria that has become my evening's aural torture was his resounding, boisterous, earth-shattering, powerful, positively monumental flatulence. We're talkin' the sort of grandiose emission of noxious vapors that wakes up the neighbors (case in point); that registers on the Richter scale; that causes flowers to wilt. When this guy broke wind, it was a meteorological event.

He farted with great fanfare and with wild abandon. Sometimes it was a high pitched, fluttering whine that lingered before lilting up at the end like a question mark, sounding like nothing so much as the mating call of some odd and (thankfully) extinct bird. Sometimes it was an old fashioned Bronx cheer, sputtering along strongly for a good long moment before trailing off smoothly; other times it was an antique locomotive engine letting off steam, whooshing out and hissing angrily. Occasionally it idled: a souped-up motorcycle at a stoplight. The worst was when it started as a low muttering growl in the distance, then crescendoed steeply to roll like a mighty thunder across the landscape, finally to recede and end with a short — pffft—.

Well, all misery must at some point come to an end, and eventually the one-man orchestra in room 28 ran out of orifices with which to create sounds. He drifted off with only the occasional sniffle, cough, or fart to mark his journey into sleep. He didn't even bother to start snoring again. It was wonderful. It was glorious. I could stand such occasional noises. I could stand the muffled zoom of the odd car out late on rue de Rivoli a block away. I could stand infrequent drip-drip that my room's sink makes every night no matter how hard I twist the faucets shut. I could even stand the oddly regular creaking of bedsprings that was emanating from the wall on the other side of my bed, coming from room 26.

Oh, no.

And so, the woman in room 26 began her long, slow, loud, and none-too-shy-about-it ascent to orgasm. It was not to be her last of the evening. Her lover must be a stallion. It is a shame I shall have to kill him in the morning.

Copyright © 1999 by Reid Bramblett