The Neckar river is most commonly associated with Heidelberg, long a very popular destination, but before it reaches there, it flows through the beautiful city of Tübingen, around 20 miles south of Stuttgart.

The city has a population of around 85,000, almost a third of which are students at the prestigious 500 year old University of Tübingen, which counts former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger among its alumni. The presence of so many students has led to Tübingen having the lowest average age of any city in Germany. The youthful and vibrant feel is reflected throughout, but no more so than by the river.

Very similar to Oxford and Cambridge, punting on the Neckar is a long-established tradition. The first ever reference dates from the 16^th century and there are reports of student societies indulging in it for recreation in the 19^th century.

The boats, known as Stocherkahn, are a regular feature on the river during summer months. However there is a competitive edge to this otherwise very relaxing activity, when, on the third Thursday of every June, student societies take part in the Stocherkahnrennen, with over 50 boats competing for a trophy that was first won in 1956.

That year only eight boats took part, but over the years the event has grown to become one of the highlights of the summer term, with the river bank packed with students cheering along the boats. In keeping with the light-hearted nature of the event, before it gets underway, the crew sporting the best fancy dress also win a prize.

Hand to hand combat

The race takes place over a roughly 1.5 mile (2.5km) course which circumnavigates the Neckarinsel and finishes at the Neckarbrücke, and lasts about 20 minutes. Rules are rather vague, but crews consist of eight, with only one allowed a pole, the rest having to power the boat and ward off competitors with their hands. The winning team are presented with their trophy and a keg of beer donated by the city and thereafter lead the rest of the day’s (inevitably bacchanalial) festivities. Members of the losing team are compelled to drink a half litre of beer and organise the following year’s event.

The best vantage point to watch the proceedings is obviously the Neckarinsel, which can be reached by steps from the main bridge spanning the river. This is a beautiful spot offering fantastic views of the houses, all in different pastel shades, which front onto the river, with the truncated tower of the Collegiate Church of St Georg in the background. The island features the picturesque Planatenallee, an avenue lined with plane trees.

For post-event hospitality with an ongoing view of the river, the best place to be based is  undoubtedly the huge Neckarmüller Brauerei, which has a large terrace on the river bank and offers traditional Swabian fare and beer brewed on the premises.

The river isn’t the only attraction in the city. The picture perfect Markt, featuring the half-timbered Rathaus, the Schloss Hohentübingen, offering views of the river, and the Hölderlin Tower, one time home of the 19^th century poet, are all equally impressive. When considering the Neckar region, vibrant and lively Tübingen is definitely worth a visit. – Mark Arrol

One of the great myths about Germany is that the trains run on time. Increasingly, they don’t. ‘We are one of the richest industrial nations in the world, but we have one of the worst railways in the world!’ screamed a recent headline in Bild.

A key issue is a lack of funding, with only €69 per capita annual spending on infrastructure compared to €165 in the UK and a whopping €362 in Switzerland.

A further issue is the sheer size of Deutsche Bahn, which has myriad business interests across the globe (including Arriva in the UK), to the point where transporting the average German by train is only a small part.
I have had plenty of personal experience of delays over recent years, with a service from Stuttgart to Heidelberg an hour late on a visit in 2016. The following year, waiting for a cancelled train at tiny Sinsheim station in the snow and ice was not an experience I’d care to repeat.

And on my latest visit when travelling from Düsseldorf to Hannover my train was 20 minutes late setting off, not great in itself, but then proceeded to lose a further 45 minutes, meaning I arrived over an hour behind schedule in Hannover.

The next day my 75 minute journey back from Hannover to Magdeburg took just over two hours, with no apparent reason for the delay. After watching a game of football in Magdeburg and needing to catch a flight back to the UK, with my faith in Deutsche Bahn precarious, I left the match early. It was a wise decision, because the train, despite leaving on time, finally arrived an hour and quarter late! Three journeys, three major delays.

All this is a huge shame because rail travel through Germany, something I first experienced whilst living there as part of my degree, is one of the great pleasures in life. The quality of the trains themselves, once they arrive, is superb, and now as the parent of a disabled child I am immensely impressed by the availability of specialist facilities, including a fully accessible toilet.

Tickets are comparatively cheap (if you book in advance) and the extensive network means that it is easily the best means of seeing great swathes of the country. There can few pleasures as great as sitting on a state-of-the-art ICE train and watching the beautiful German countryside rolling past. If only they could run on time!

You probably think I’ve taken leave of my senses to suggest that Germans often have a zany side to their character, but just hear me out, for when it comes to museums, Germany’s range of collections is truly weird. How could anyone even think of opening a Pig Museum in a disused slaughterhouse (in Stuttgart) or a Museum of Snoring (to the south of Hanover) anywhere at all?

So, what do these oddities tell us about the nation?

Firstly, there is a strong compulsion in Germans to show how things actually work. It’s the impulse behind their amazing engineering and inventiveness. So they celebrate this in museums like the Swabian Clockwork Museum (Mindelheim, west of Munich), not to be confused with the German Cuckoo Clock Museum (Furtwangen in the Black Forest).

Sometimes these how-to museums celebrate the wonder of the everyday, like the Bread Culture Museum in Ulm. This has a well-stocked museum shop, but nevertheless doesn’t sell bread, not even a crumb.

The university town of Giessen north of Frankfurt has a museum to showcase the virtues of the much-undervalued Watering Can. Giessen means to pour but I’m not sure the irony is intentional. This particular museum promises over 10,000 specimens, with ‘more added daily’. Giessen must be dull because it also boasts a Mathematics Museum; try getting the kids into that one at half term.

Creglingen, in Bavaria south of Würzburg, has a Thimble Museum to exhibit the wonder of that most humble of devices – appropriately known in German as a ‘fingerhut’. The brochure says the thimble is ‘more versatile than you can imagine.’ I have to confess I’d not given the versatility of the thimble enough thought until now.

Secondly, there can be a ghoulish streak to the Germans. They have an Executioner’s Museum in Nuremburg, whose marketing blurb concedes that the museum has a lack of displays – mostly because they are presumably long-buried. The brochure goes on to boast that the museum has wonderful views of Nuremburg, no doubt a comfort to the erstwhile clients of the place.

And finally the Plastinarium in Guben southeast of Berlin combines both the how-to trend with the ghoulish one. It’s the creation of Gunther von Hagens, whose controversial Body Worlds touring exhibition first shocked the world 20 years ago, and the museum illustrates the techniques used by von Hagens for preserving corpses and body parts. This involves removing the skin and replacing the water in the body with polymers.

There’s an entry fee, but you do get free admission if you sign up to donate your own body. So that’s two admissions in all: one on the day you sign up and one post-mortem.

Head first for the charming town of Tübingen, south of Stuttgart, where from the hill-top castle you can enjoy wonderful views of the countryside that nurtured early modern people. The museum of the University of Tübingen, in the cobbled castle courtyard, has a collection of 35-40,000 year old sculptures made by those people, and it is still a research base for the archaeologists who discovered them.

Inside, in a darkened room of their own, are miniature mammoth ivory sculptures of lions, mammoths, a bison and the prancing horse from Vogelherd Cave, some of the first art ever found. In adjacent rooms and corridors you can see some other finds that reveal more detail about the lives of the hunter-gatherers who were their makers.

Oldest known expression of imagination

The attractive town of Ulm situated on the Danube, east of  Tübingen, should be next on the itinerary. Here you can see the 40,000 year old Lion Man in the excellent Ulmer Museum. This mammoth ivory statue of a male human figure with the head of a cave lion is the oldest known expression of imagination, because to create such a fictitious creature required a well-developed brain like our own. The Lion Man is one of the most important finds of the 20th century because it shows that ancient people known to be physically the same as us (from skeletal remains) also shared our mental capabilities.

Next, head to Blaubeuren nestling in the shelter of the southern edge of the Swabian Alps and famous for its abbey and remarkable turquoise lake. The ground floor of its Urgeschichtliches Museum welcomes you to the fireside of a hunter-gatherer camp and provides the background to the discoveries made in many of caves in the surrounding hills. Upstairs little rooms are dedicated to various aspects of Ice Age art and includes one where you can see the oldest known musical instruments: the flutes from Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels caves made from swan and vulture bones, as well as mammoth ivory. If you enjoy walking, Blaubeuren is also an excellent base from which to explore the hills and pass by the famous caves that were the cradles of artistic activity.

And finally, if you are returning via Stuttgart, stop off to see the 40,000 year old sculpture of a woman from Hohle Fels in the new displays at the city’s Landesmuseum Württemberg. Nicknamed Europe’s ‘Eve’, this remarkable sculpture is a must for any Ice Age itinerary.

Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind is on at the British Museum until 26 May 2013. Tickets cost £10.00 (Members free) and can be booked online. It is accompanied by a book by Jill Cook.

Life in my hometown couldn’t be any more different from what it used to be. Nearly 20 years have passed since plans were announced to tear down our beloved landmark, the main station, building a new underground station in its place in the name of efficiency – at a  cost of a mind-boggling four billion Euros. ‘Stuttgart 21’ was born.

Initially, nobody believed they’d have the guts to destroy such an iconic landmark – it would be like removing Big Ben from London. But last August, when the demolition balls finally arrived, hundreds of thousands of us took to the streets, shouting our slogan ‘Stay on top!’, and a new word soon emerged: ‘Wutbuerger’ or angry citizens.

Protest groups sprang up like the ‘Save the Trees’ camps in the park next to the station, a green space also to be sacrificed to the builders. The fence around the building site became the symbol of the fight, covered in imaginative pamphlets and posters. The media started calling it the ‘Stuttgart Wall’ because it bears evidence of a divided city. Really, you can’t escape the topic:  there are books about the station, the protest, even the fence and the trees, also a film and, most recently, a musical.

When protest turned to open conflict something had to be done. Demolition was temporarily halted during mediation, which, incredibly, ended in a decision to go on building. Shortly afterwards, however, the conservative government of Baden-Württemberg paid the price when they lost the elections, after nearly 60 years in office. The Green Party carried the day, having promised to stop Stuttgart 21 before. We thought we had won.

But the story hasn’t yet ended. In fact, it looks like it’s only getting started: last week, Deutsche Bahn announced that they will go on building as the costs of opting out of contracts would amount to over one billion Euros. So, I guess, we’ll all soon be taking to the streets again.

Want to escape city centre strife? See our page on Esslingen, Stuttgart’s medieval suburb.

Compact, neat and proudly Swabian, Baden-Württemberg’s capital Stuttgart is a peculiar mix of the traditional and ultra-modern, both in look and feel. The city provides a high quality of life for its more than 570,000 inhabitants and is a worthwhile weekend break destination for international visitors interested in an eclectic mix of culture, cars and wine.

To explore Stuttgart, it’s best to go on a walk through the city centre. Königstraße, the main shopping mile, is Germany’s longest pedestrianised street, so no cars and leisurely browsing guaranteed. The covered Markthalle is great for international delicatessen, and the up-market Breuninger is as good a department store as they come. Nearby Schlossplatz is the square right in the city centre where everyone meets, with the Neues Schloss (New Palace), where the state’s ministries have their offices, on one side, the Altes Schloss (Old Palace), now home of the State Museum, on the other and lots of al fresco eating and drinking opportunities all around.

Not joining the locals and enjoying a coffee or lunch on the Schlossplatz – weather permitting, obviously – would be missing out on a major city asset: its great outdoor spaces and green lung. The Schlossgarten is a massive area of green right in the heart of the city, which has a huge influence on de-stressing city life. Stuttgarters are rightly proud of this, just as they are of their first-rate museums, such as James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (New State Art Gallery), with a wide range of masters all the way from Rembrandt to Picasso and into the modern era, and the new Kunstmuseum (Art Museum) Stuttgart, a giant glass cube of a building that is home to the city’s art collection, including a range of important works by Otto Dix, the German expressionist. The Kunstmuseum also has a top floor restaurant with a fabulous view out over the Schlossplatz.

Futuristic structures and a taste for the good life

Two of the city’s most remarkable architectural structures are related to what Stuttgart is most famous for – the car. The Mercedes-Benz Museum and the Porsche Museum are major attractions, and you don’t necessarily have to be a petrolhead to get something out of them. The Merc Museum has a wide appeal, tackling automotive history and philosophical issues of locomotion, problems of engineering and research. It is in a stunning building, a spiral structure reminiscent of the Guggenheim in New York. Its architecture leads visitors effortlessly through the development of the company, via the merging of the firms started by the two pioneers, Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz. The Porsche Museum is more for the hardcore car aficionado but should not be missed either since it is housed in a very futuristic structure which put Stuttgart firmly on the map for anyone interested in architecture. In 2011, Germany celebrated the 125^th anniversary of the automobile and since everything started here in the south of the country with Carl Benz’s invention of the motor car, Stuttgart and the surrounding area hosted a number of special events.

Last but not least, we should mention Stuttgart’s taste for the good life. The city is surrounded by vineyards and is the only state capital with its own municipal wine-growing estate. Stuttgart’s people like to socialise in combination with good food and wine and a good opportunity to join in is the Stuttgart Wine Village, one of the biggest wine festivals in Germany, taking place at the end of August and beginning of September. For wine lovers preferring a more individual approach, the Untertürkheim neighbourhood is the right spot, for a walk in the vineyards on the sign-posted ‘wine hiking trails’ or a tasting session of award-winning wines at the cooperative of local vintners.

More information on Stuttgart sights and events: www.stuttgart-tourist.de; Germanwings flies from London Stansted to Stuttgart, www.germanwings.com

More Wunderbar links: Read our blog for an insight view on the current and controversial ‘Stuttgart 21’ project, the redevelopment of the train station, and don’t miss our page on Esslingen, Stuttgart’s medieval suburb

Most British visitors stumble upon Esslingen by chance. Shame, because this medieval gem of a town a mere 15 minutes from Stuttgart definitely deserves more dedicated attention. Time spent in Esslingen is quality time, for a number of reasons.It is one of the few places in Germany that survived World War II unharmed and hence kept its stunning medieval and Renaissance architecture intact. The town’s history goes back 1,200 years and walking over small cobble-stoned lanes and past half-timbered houses makes you feel like an actor on some kind of elaborately-set stage. Peaceful, quiet, no need to rush.

Some impressive buildings demonstrate that the quality ‘Made in Germany’ label is not a construct of industrial times only, such as the Old Town Hall, with its elaborate Renaissance facade that can be read like a book if you’re knowledgeable enough about this period. (Alternatively, just get a guide, they’ll explain it all for you). Or Kielmeyer House on the Market Square where the Tourist Office is located and the Hafenmarkt square with the oldest row of half-timbered houses in Germany.

Slow down and enjoy being part of an elaborately-set stage

It is perfect for strolling in the pedestrianised area of the historical town centre, browsing through some of the small, independent shops, and having a bite of traditional Swabian food. Entschleunigen, literally ‘to take the speed out’ is something that comes naturally here. A facility like the Merkel’sches Bad helps as well, an art nouveau swimming-pool that was built by a rich benefactor for the public at the beginning of the 20^th century. Apart from a mineral-thermal pool fed by a local spring, there are spa facilities and saunas, the latter many a German’s ultimate idea for spending some quality time. Sans clothes, of course.

Apart from being a real feast for the eye, the town also offers delights for other senses: surrounded by vineyards, Esslingen has a long-standing history of wine making and is home to Germany’s oldest Sekt (sparkling wine) manufacturer, the Sektmanufaktur Kessler. One very entrepreneurial Swabian, Georg Christian Kessler, set it up in 1826, after having learned the tricks of his trade in France at Veuve Clicquot’s champagne cellars in Reims. His ambition was not to duplicate the French but create a German bubbly, which he did very successfully. The Sektmanufaktur is in an atmospheric building, dating back to the 12^th century, and a tour through the rambling cellars including a tasting should not be missed. Kessler Sekt is quality stuff.

And then there’s the town’s Christmas Market, one which always comes top in lists of Germany’s favourite Christmas Markets. It has a medieval theme – what else – and the historic buildings around the Town Hall Square provide nothing if not a perfect backdrop for the lively scene of stalls, musical performances, traditional arts and lots of food and drink. Sounds like quality time!

More information on Esslingen: www.tourist.esslingen.de

Flights to Stuttgart from London Stansted with Germanwings

Overshadowed by its westerly neighbour the Black Forest, and out-mountained by the Allgäu and Upper Bavaria to the south, Swabia and the Swabian Alb are easily overlooked. But this is a formerly-volcanic high-plateau region (up to 1,000 metres) with some very distinctive towns (usually ending with –ingen) and lonely castles amidst striking scenery. Here are juniper-covered heaths, meadows full of flowers, beech woods, limestone rocks, lakes, fossil treasures, stalactite caves, waterfalls and thermal springs.

The key gateway is Stuttgart, and main city Ulm, at the downstream end of the finest early stretches of the Danube, where the river twists and turns as it slices through the limestone.

Life in Swabia was hard in pre-industrialisation days. The land was unproductive, the weather difficult, and the Swabian people developed a reputation for being stingy and crafty, rather like the Scots. With a strong regional accent, they are objects of gentle fun elsewhere in Germany, as in the much-loved traditional nonsense song Uff de schwäbsche Eisebahne, which tells of the voyage of a local train through Swabian countryside, and of the Swabian who didn’t want to buy a ticket for his goat, so he tied it onto the end of the train and was surprised to find it dead on arrival.

The Swabian people developed a reputation for being stingy and crafty, rather like the Scots

In fact their hard existence prompted many Swabians to migrate down the Danube, starting 300 years ago from the port of Ulm, to populate the furthest points of the growing Austro-Hungarian empire. They settled in parts of what is now Hungary, Serbia and Romania, maintaining their German identity, but at the end of the Second World War many tens of thousands were sent back. There’s a museum in Ulm telling their story.

Sigmaringen is home to the first spectacular river castle on the Danube, still lived in by a Hohenzollern prince, although the Hohenzollern family seat is actually to the north, on high ground near Hechingen. This fairytale property was built by King Wilhelm IV between 1850 and 1867 in the Romantic style, and it would be the most spectacular castle in Germany if it hadn’t been trumped by King Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein, a few years later.

One of the most popular slices of Swabia is the valley of the river Blau, and particularly Blaubeuren, the handsome resort town and monastery where the blue river emerges from the ground in what is effectively a vertical cave, the Blautopf. Take in both castle and Blautopf, ending in Ulm, and you’ll get some impression of what Swabia is all about.

Hohenzollern Castle.

The Danube Swabian Museum in Ulm.