Luxembourg

4 of us including me, Zubin, Rishabh and Rohit went to The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg the last weekend.

Luxembourg as a touristic place has 2 main attractions: its natural beauty and its castles. After a long 5.5 hrs train journey, we reached Luxembourg city. Since we had limited time, we didn't spend any time in the city and went straight to Echternach.

Echternach is one of the small towns in the region of Mullerthal (Luxembourg is geographically divided into five regions - Ardennes, Mullerthal, Luxembourg city, Moselle and Red rocks). Mullerthal is also called as "the little Switzerland". We reached Echternach around 2 pm and spent a lot of time in finding a place for eating with constraints of being cheap, a place where people understand English and the biggest one being the constraint of finding vegetarian food. Ultimately we found one (though "horror stories" were revealed to me later!).

View of the centre of Echternach

After having some good meal, we started with the real tour. Echternach is very famous for its forests and many trekking trails. Following Lonely Planet's recommendation, we went for the "best trail", i.e. a 2.5 km trail named as Trail B. The recommendation turned out to be indeed very good. Despite a tiring and sweating start (mind it, this was my first real trekking in life!!!), we really got attuned to the roads.

The photos session begin but also the difficulty and challenge of taking pictures in the dark when we were in the middle of the forest. Rishabh has a good digital SLR, good photography sense and good command over the camera. Rohit too knows more than me (we have the same camera). I was feeling a little bad about not exploring the features of such a good (and expensive) camera in the last 6 months. Zubin was hardly taking any pictures :-P (a little shameful of not having a "hi-fi" camera like the three of us).

Zubin on the foot of a fallen tree

A confined area with steep ladders leading you further

You may see the not-so-good quality of photos (dark) above but that's close to real! Two characteristics of the Echternach forest are special: its dense-packed lanky (long and slim) trees and its rocks. The lanky trees are either be very green or dry with many thorns (could be season-specific feature).

Trees' density could be double or triple of these! Many big beautiful rocks

Four of us on a fallen tree's trunk

I really like them and they look even more beautiful when seen from the roadside. If only I had my Madhuri Dixit, I would be running around the forest singing romantic songs! The rocks are really large and many shapes are close to devils with one eye or no nose or big mouth.

The calm of the forest and its fresh air, it seemed to me, not only rejuvenated us but also cleaned/opened some sort of physical obstructions in my body, which might be a result of the city living with polluted air and very less physical work. The spiritual atmosphere of the place was very good and the relationship between human interference or indulgence and the atmosphere (physical, spiritual) was very clear. I think this applies to the whole of Luxembourg when comparing it with other European nations, as is my feeling. I really wanted to sit there in the middle of forest and meditate for some time but that would mean unnecessary waiting for my companions.

It started getting dark and we started getting a little worried about the trail. Trail B finished somewhere and Trail B1 was seen. We had to get out somewhere on the road from where we could catch bus.

While searching for a way out, we also came across one (as it looked like) arena. Not sure whether it was used by kings/knights in the past or it is a recent construction for some performances, but we were happy to see it. After some photographs and some rest, we continued with our search and finally found a way out.

The arena

Thanks to the guidance of a bhalaa maanav, we found the bus stand. Now comes the criticism. If there is something not good about Luxembourg, it is its public transport. The buses and the trains are the best looking lot I have seen in Europe but the frequency is very bad and poor guys like us who depend on public transport suffer great deal waiting for buses. On almost all connections, the frequency is once an hour or at best twice an hour at peak hours. Further, there are not many direct connections even between famous stops.

Having said that, the frequency of buses is agreeable with the population and with the fact that most of the families would have cars. But after all this, something egregious happened with us. We were waiting for a bus after finishing out Echternach trek. A bus, supposed to depart at 20:25, came and left at 20:15, while we were just going towards it to board it.

Another not-so-good thing about Luxembourg (may be an Asian's criticism) is the extreme-chill life people live there. Most of the shops - even restaurants - were closed by 6 pm and thus you are reduced to a few options. The debacle of bus timings and restaurants scarcity had a combined adverse effect to the extent that we had nothing but an icecream between 3 pm and 10:30 pm.

A single building, a hotel in a whole sq. km area of more!

After all the criticism, few words of high praise about the hotel receptionist (guy) of the youth hostel of Hostelling International. In such a chill country life, it was great to find a guy who waited for us at expense of his delay and served life-saving good breakfast food as dinner 2 hours after the actual timings of hotel restaurant. I was quite confident that despite a tiring day, most of us would be unable to sleep with such an empty belly. This event also made me realize how affluence is killing all our tolerance and that despite all affluence, times like these may come, leading into self-reflection.

On Sunday, we visited the castles in Beaufort and Vianden. Although Vianden is more famous, I personally liked Beaufort more because of the beauty it holds in its ruin. We didn't spend much time in Beaufort because there was a (supposed) free English guided tour at Vianden at 1 pm. Those 20 minutes spent there were good enough since it is a small castle. Got a few photographs of the castle, a few rooms including the torture room (not putting pics here to avoid any haunting imaginations) etc.

Sunny day from the Beaufort castle

Beaufort castle (one of my best photographs)

On our way to Vianden, we read a pamphlet given in Beaufort on the feudal system of the middle ages. It was quite an interesting read to find how such a small country was divided under so many small towns/forts leading to so many castles and much feud later (wondering if the word feudal and feud are etymologically linked!). It also talked about how sons of higher families were either doomed to become knights (the stronger ones, the elder ones) or end up in monastery (the youngers or the weaks) and how these knights ended up encroaching upon the monastery lands and later into robbery and dacoity and later got the reputation of "robber knights".

I liked the part where they were sarcastic about knights' idle ways of life. In Vianden, we took a free (again!) chair lift to the top of a hill. The chair lift was OK - I had a misimpression that it would be adventurous but it was dead slow for adventure standards. It was actually just a mean of transport.

Free chair lift to the top of the hill

We had our lunch at the hilltop. This is where I came across horror stories about penetration of non-vegetarian food into life, at least in the West. Examples like French fries fried in beef-oil to make it crispy irritated me and I suddenly came into contemplative mood as to where draw the boundary.

Anyways, we had a spiral trip through the woods from here to the Vianden castle. Rishabh clicked a very beautiful photo of the Vianden city along with the castle.

View of Vianden city (courtesy Rishabh)

The free guided tour of Vianden (comes free with the family pass) never happened. We were told it has never happened in history except for pre-planned and pre-booked tours.Vianden castle is also good though not as great as was highlighted in Lonely Planet. Some photos from the Vianden castle are here:

Vianden castle (courtesy Rishabh)

Solid entry into the Vianden castle

Robots of the past - wonder how easy they walked 100s of miles

Devil's eyes (just one of the rooms)

The devil himself (जल्लाद के अस्त्र शस्त्र पर ज़रा गौर फरमाइये)

मैंखाना (look at the barrles of alcohol)

So, all in all, a very good trip. A few tips for people planning to spend their weekend there:

1. Reach there by Friday night if possible. Spending saturday morning in Luxembourg is more worthwhile than spending it in the train.

2. Get the family weekend pass of 34 euros for maximum 5 people if you are in a group. Very cheap and gives free access to all internal public transport and many castles and the chair lift.

3. If you have car or motorbike, life can't be better in Luxembourg.