This morning we bid a sad farewell to Munich, a city of which Jeanette and I have grown very fond, and boarded our bus for the fairytale Castle that King Ludwig II built near the small village of Fussen. Ludwig was a prolific builder of castles and had another one on the other side of this village. Not as impressive though.
The day unfortunately was cold and raining. The process for getting into Neuschwanstien Castle is very precise. Tickets have to be collected from the ticket office in the village, one and a half hours before your scheduled entry to the Castle. The tickets have a number (in our case 471 ) and a time you can go through the gate.
We found a restaurant in the village and grabbed a bite to eat before joining the queue for a local bus to get us up the hill to the castle. After about a 10 minute wait in the freezing cold and pouring rain a suburban type commuter bus showed up and was soon packed solid with people. Our bus driver flew up the twisting narrow mountain road at breakneck speed. I was clinging desperately to a pole trying to keep my
footing
Eventually we made it to the castle . The amazing views made us forget the cold and rain. Through into a castle courtyard, we had to wait another fifteen minutes in the rain before our ticket number 471 clicked up on the screen and the turnstile would accept our tickets and let us in.
Once inside, photography is strictly prohibited. Suffice to say this is an amazing place and well worth a visit. Most of the palaces I have visited were built to an almost standard layout dictated by the need of the King to control his access to various levels of society. But Ludwig didn’t like people and this place is built just to please himself.
His passion was Wagnerian operas and this theme is reflected in many of the rooms, including the room between his bedroom and office being in the form of a rock grotto from the first act of Richard Wagner’s opera “Tannhäuser“, and one wing of the castle is constructed as a replica of a medieval Singers Hall.
We walked down the mountain and then had a four hour drive to get to Salzburg, arriving there around 7pm.
Hardys’ Travels 