France may have a reputation for village boulangeries, but in my experience many of the latter have been driven out of business by local supermarkets. Germany, however, has very much preserved its local bäckerei, which are still village hubs all over the country. Not only are these places great for all kinds of bread – brötchen or bread rolls alone usually come in over a dozen different types – but they also serve good and inexpensive coffee and many also offer simple and nourishing meals, with some sort of stand-up counter or limited seating. In short, they are a bargain.

And Germany acknowledges its bread experience in a couple of museums: in the south, there’s a Baden-Württemberg’s Museum of Bread Culture in Ulm, on the banks of the Danube. In the north, there’s Lower Saxony’s European Bread Museum in Ebergötzen, not far from Göttingen.

This is not the place to detail Germany‘s complex beer culture, with all the beer varieties, beer halls, beer gardens and beer festivals, but it is worth pointing out a couple of interesting beer experiences. In Düsseldorf, for example, you can take a tasting tour of the traditional breweries in town which still make Alt-bier, old beer, which is similar in colour and taste to British ale. It’s a real contrast to Cologne’s delicate pale kölsch,  just a few miles away.

Down in Bavaria there are tours of the famous hop fields of Hallertau, run by Elisabeth Stiglmaier. Plus all the beer-making Benedictines, as in monasteries such as Weltenburg by Regensburg, Andechs south of Munich, and Ettal down by Oberammergau. They all have their own breweries and beer gardens.

For a high density of local breweries and a truly nourishing smoky beer (Schlenkerla), the place to be is Bamberg. And no true beer pilgrims should miss out on the Zoigl villages of eastern Bavaria, where the concept of homebrew is taken to a whole new level.

Prost!

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.

It may end up as the longest river in continental Europe, but the Danube starts small at a spring in the heart of the small Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, and doesn’t become navigable until the city of Ulm, a distance of roughly 200km. Accordingly this first stretch of stripling waterway does not figure widely in tour operator brochures, which tend to focus on big river cruises, and yet it is one of the prettiest waterside routes in Germany, ideal for cycling.

Donaueschingen is a handsome little place, and its celebrated Danube (Donau) spring bubbles out of the ground between the town’s palace and its brewery. These days it has been railed in to make a little pool surrounded with balustrades which tourists treat as a wishing well, throwing coins into the water.

After just 20 km it vanishes completely

Shadowed by the cycle route which goes all the way to Budapest, the river sets off full of hope, initially through parkland and water meadows, but then after just 20 km it vanishes completely near the village of Immendingen into an underground system of watercourses, leaving behind a weedy, puddled riverbed which only really flows during seasons of heavy rain and melting snow.

Fortunately this weedy bed is slowly refilled by tributaries, and then for the next 30 kilometres the re-born river wanders mazily through lovely pastoral landscape of fruit orchards and cattle grazing, burrowing through a limestone gorge in the southernmost skirts of the Swabian Alb. A lot of the riverbank land hereabouts is owned by the very prosperous Benedictine abbey at Beuron, with its fabulously decorated baroque church, and abbey produce – particularly meat – on sale in abbey shops.

Beuron is the first of several major abbeys that line the river, and the next town, Sigmaringen, is the setting for its first major castle, a Hohenzollern property stuck dramatically up on a riverside rock, where the Nazi-controlled French Vichy government was incarcerated during the Second World War.

At the next, very pretty, town of Riedlingen, whose main square is lined with ancient, slightly wonky, half-timbered and gabled houses, there’s a choice of routes: sticking to the river for the straight run into Ulm, or diverting up the Ach valley to the resort town of Blaubeuren, where the river Blau emerges dramatically from a giant hole in the ground.

The Blau meets the Danube at Ulm, the first big city on the Danube, whose cathedral has the tallest church spire in Europe at 161 metres. From Ulm downriver there are more castles, monasteries and notable cities, but now that the river is navigable, mainstream tourism kicks in. Upstream of Ulm a river-following cyclist is in his or her own world; below Ulm, he or she will begin to meet up with others, and then from Passau, to blend with the crowds.

Plenty of organisations (see our Tour Operator pages) offer packages along the Danube Cyclepath (Donau Radweg), but route finding is a doddle, and there are plenty of bike-friendly guest houses, so it is just as easy to organise it yourself. A handy guide is The Danube Cycleway, published by Cicerone.

Andrew Eames’s book about travelling the Danube, Blue River Black Sea, is available from Amazon.

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.