A Brief Travelogue

The Mosel river valley lies just to the East of Luxembourg, in the German Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region. Look at it on the map, or Google Earth if you have the necessary software. You can’t miss it: a wiggling ribbon of waterway running between Trier and Koblenz that looks for all the world like a bunch of grapes hanging from a vine - and nowhere more so than right in the middle, round the small provincial town of Traben-Trarbach, where the river curls and loops back on itself in a manner guaranteed to make geography teachers the world over wax lyrical about the imminent formation of oxbow lakes.

It’s a wide, navigable river, lying at the bottom of a steep valley, and the valley sides are indeed covered with vines, because this is the heart of the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine district, where they produce the Riesling, the Müller-Thurgau, and the Kerner. It’s popular with tourists, too, which is presumably why Bertha the Earthtruck took a short detour in this direction in the summer of 1974.

I don’t remember getting there. I was still in the back. I do remember us stopping to stretch our legs, shortly after we turned off the main road near Koblenz. The road hugs the river all the way up the valley, and we found a parking place where we could walk down to the water’s edge, and it must have been a dry summer because the water was low and there were rocks exposed in the shallows, and I imagine some of us took off our shoes and dangled our feet in the water, and it all looked a bit like this…

It had been a long day. We’d travelled all the way from distant Amsterdam, and been held up at the German border, and by now the sun was starting to set. It was time to find a quiet spot away from the main road and get our heads down for the night. So we piled back into Bertha and drove on-a-ways, coming eventually to a little village called Enkirch. Here Yaya found a small road leading away from the river, back up into the hills and along a densely wooded ridge that bordered a smaller valley, running parallel to the Mosel. After about a kilometre we decided we were far enough from civilisation not to cause offence, so we swung into a convenient lay-by overlooking open fields and woodland. Then we unpacked the Primus gas stove, and set the stereo playing softly, and ate a hearty meal of vegetables and brown rice in the gathering twilight.

We were on our way to Istanbul. And all was right with the world.