Easter Tour Day 9 (Munich) - Schloss Neuschwanstein

Today, we went out early in the morning to visit the Schloss Neuschwanstein. This is a fairy-tale castle built in 1869-1886 for the Bavarian King Ludwig II. This afamous king was more concerned over building magnificant buildings for himself than to bother about political affairs and the castle is also sometimes called the Disneyland castle.

The Schloss Neuschwanstein is pretty far away from Munich itself is pretty inaccessible, so it was lucky that we had a car. We drove close to an hour to get there. Unfortunately, we had terrible weather for sight seeing. We could hardly see the castle from afar. We had to buy the tickets first somewhere rather far away from the castle. After buying the tickets, we had a hour and 20 minutes to get to the castle before our guided tour started. However, we learnt that we had to walk for 45 minutes up this steep slope to get to the top of the castle. There used to be a bus, but it was not in service because of the bad weather, and the cost of horse carriage was too much. We felt it was quite silly to walk, since we had come in a car. The route for walking and horse carriages was unsuitable for cars, but clever us decided to take out the map. We were sure we could find an alternative route to get up to the castle by car and save our lazy selves some walking! Anyway, this plan didn't serve us very well.. To cut a long story short, we got lost and guess what? Yipppe! We landed up in Austria! We didn't even realise we were in Austria, and even asked an Austrian for directions. Of course, he told us we were way off track and pointed us in the direction we came from. Only then did we received SMSes on our handphones, welcoming us to Austria, and realise that we had ventured cross boundaries. We then headed back to where we came from and passed by the cross-country checkpoint, which had been empty and we had dismissed as some normal guard house of some sort.

By the time we finally gave up bashing our way up to the castle and found a parking space, we had only 25 minutes or so to get to the hill top and we had to run and rush like mad to get uphill. We were even faster than the poor horses, dragging up carriages full of japanese tourist.



The heavy mist made it even more difficult to locate the castle and simply drive towards its direction when we got lost. Even at the foot of the castle, you can't see the top of the castle because of the mist.


How the exterior of the castle is supposed to look like.

Outside the castle

Well, besides being the fairy tale castle, I would definitely NOT recommend you guys to make a trip here.

1. You have to take an hours drive up here to the castle
2. Then you have to take an approximate 30 minutes hike up
3. The castle is only open to you if you are on a guided tour
4. Despite speaking English, it was difficult to understand the guide through her heavy accent
5. And the guided tour was over in 30 minutes!!!
6. There isn't really much to see...

Yes, the guided tour was like for 30 minutes, and at the end of the tour, the guide says bye and you have to go down these flight of stairs down and down and down, till you reach the souvenier shops and the servants kitchen and then reading some more about the history of the castle you find you have nowehere else to go except for out of the castle. I guess what makes it worse for us this time is that the mist prevented us from taking photos of the castle from the outside, when we weren't allowed to take photos inside the castle too. In addition, the viewing bridge some distance away was closed too. Not that we could have seen anything from the viewing bridge.

One intersting thing about this castle is only that its only half completed, because the king actually drowned mysteriously before all the rooms were furnished. This may also be why there's nothing much to see and the tour is so short...Hmm..

After we returned to Munich, we had no idea where to head for dinner. Since we told Dom so much about Donisl and its pork knuckles, we headed back again. I order some other pork slices and Dom orders the pork knuckles which we share. (it's really a sin to finish one on your own) and SC and Qiang order one each!

Pork knuckles again

Hungry man

Happy man

Yumyum

This is half the fats in one pork knuckle!!
Ok, at least SC takes out half the fat while eating the pork knuckles, so its not as bad. Qiang has this photo taken so he knows just about how much fat he has consumed.. aahha!

At night, Edgar gives me a scarf and hat, cos he has some free samples from the company he's working part time for. This is only female model he has and his neighbours are all guys, so I get to keep it. Thanks Edgar.