Tübingen – Schloss Lichtenstein

Day 20

We had to get up early this day, as we were going quite a long way. You see, the Rhine and the Danube actually begin in sort of the same area, an area that has some really amazing limestone formations. It was pretty cold that morning, especially while we were waiting on the platform at Sigmaringen to take the final train on to the tiny train stop at Fridingen. (I know there was a heat-wave on in southern Europe, but it most definitely was not anywhere we were; temperatures rarely got over 25 Celcius, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the temperature that morning was closer to 15-18 where we were.) We glimpsed Sigmaringen Castle on our way by, but it hadn’t quite made our list of “top castles to see” so we didn’t mind that we weren’t seeing more of it.

Fridingen is barely a station, just a strip of platform barely the width of a sidewalk. We hopped off and tried to get our bearings. The first issue was crossing the train tracks. There was a track crossing, with a button to activate the safety bar, so we pushed the button and activated it. Then according to the sign, it wanted us to “give a shout” to put the bar back down?? We had no idea what to do with that, so after like 10 minutes of waffling around we gave up and started hiking.

The thing about this area (all the Swabian Alps, actually) was that it used to be sea floor, and then was elevated by the continent rising and squishing together, and then weathered by millions of years of river action. It’s called ‘karst‘ landscape. So it gives the impression of being on two consistent levels, the plateaus at the top and the river valleys below. And it means that the path upwards was quite steep in places. But it was starting to warm up, there was a little bit of sun, and it was so quiet with no engine noises anywhere in earshot.

Our destination was a limestone cave called Kolbinger Höhle, and we ate our simple sandwiches in the picnic area outside and finished just in time for a very cheerful old German man to come out of the ticket hut and start shouting to anyone around that the first cave tour would begin soon (at 1:30 iirc). There were maybe a couple other people around, but we were the only people to buy tickets for the first tour. It was pretty amazing! The man is 74 years old and very passionate about the cave. He was quite happy to have just two people on his tour, even though he only spoke German; he spoke in very simple German to Tharash, who would then translate what he could to me in English. If there had been a big group of people, we couldn’t have done that, so that was really cool.

He told us all kinds of stories, here are the ones I remember in no particular order (with paragraph breaks to make for easier reading): the upper part of the cave had once been the home of a hermit, and the tall vaulted chamber had been his ‘church’. Bats come in through the old entrance and winter in. There used to be a wooden bridge across the tall chamber from that old entrance, but it rotted away from moisture. Way down in the bottom of the cave was found the skeleton of a bear cub.

Early 20th century explorers/tourists came in with torches and left soot marks (reminds me of when we went to the similar cave at Horne Lake a year before). The rocks of the cave are different colours because of different minerals. The highest point at the back of the cave is only 8m under the surface. The cave must be lit with LED lights because using other kinds of lights will allow moss to grow and damage the stones.

There were some fairy tales about dragons, and treasure, and dragon treasure associated with the cave. Stalactites are hollow; the water doesn’t run down the outside but through the inside like a tube. Only one stalagmite in the cave is musical (resonant), and he had me try it, but even as a musician there wasn’t a lot I could do with one note XD. If another opening was made in the cave, it would ‘die’; all the stalactites/stalagmites would stop growing.

Once upon a time he was on a tour when halfway through all the lights went out, so he took his little hand flashlight and went to the end where there was an emergency telephone… which was out of order. So he returned to the tour group to find they’d all gotten out their cellphone flashlights, so they continued with the tour like that. Another time, another guide had gotten stuck inside the front door and couldn’t get it open, so our guide popped it open, stuck his head inside, and said “hello!” in a super cheery voice.

Concerningly for my earthquake-paranoia, there was evidence of past earthquakes in the cave – certain cracks in the walls and ceiling, and patches of fallen stalactites over which new stalagmites are growing (so it happened a while ago, my paranoia doesn’t care). Something about Krampus and a white horse?

The longest story was about the mayor of Kolbinger; once upon a time, a criminal was hiding in the cave after having [murdered someone??]. The people from the nearby town of Kolbinger found him, but they couldn’t keep him locked up because they were so poor they could barely feed themselves, let alone a criminal, so they sent him away and told him to come back in the spring, keeping his hat as collateral. Then in the spring, they were hardly expecting to see him return, and in the meantime they found that their mayor was also terrible for some reason, but then the criminal returned. And that, despite his crime(s), made him appear so honest that they made him their new mayor.

After that, we had some tea in the ticket hut/café, which was really nice after the cold cold cave. The rest of the hike became increasingly sunny, and we saw some really spectacular views from the cliff edge. Going down was actually really slow for me, worrying I’ll slip and fall down – or that the ground will shake and toss me off. >.> We saw the entrance to another cave, but that one’s not open to tourists. Still, it was neat to stand in the cool entrance and think “our ancestors not so many thousands of years ago (comparatively speaking) would have lived in exactly this situation”.

We made it down off the hill and walked to the train station in the town of Mühlheim, I think. We had a snack there, and played a game involving dice and numbers called Qwixx. We got on an earlier train than Google suggested, but that just meant that we actually had enough time to go take some pictures of Sigmaringen Castle! Score! And the train back to Tübingen was actually on time the entire way, the only time that German trains were really on time on our whole trip.

We still didn’t make it back to Tübingen until 8:30pm, so we went to a falafel place by the bridge for some wraps. They were okay. Then we went to an ice cream place because Yllamse told us we had to try spaghetti-eis. She actually told us that as far ago as Trier, but the situation just hadn’t been right for us to get any. It was a lot of ice cream, even though I think they used some kind of meringue to add volume to the base. It was a waffle-bowl, with a huge pile of vanilla ice cream put through a ricer to make it form noodle-like shapes, and then with strawberry sauce on top to imitate tomato sauce and white chocolate shavings for parmesan. I gotta say it’s good but 400 ml of vanilla ice cream is a lot. And then it starts melting and stops looking like noodles. But it was good.

Tübingen – Hohenneuffen