In the morning we visited the huge abbey Melk. They had a lot of pomp, library rooms with thousands of old books and a park.
We crossed a bridge to the other riverside and stopped short in Willendorf to look at the place where the famous Venus of Willendorf was found. It is a 30000 years old small statue. The museum was not open (only on Saturday and Sunday), but the original statue is anyway in Wien.
We ate lunch in Schwallenbach and a wasp stinged me. Luckily I had no allergic reaction, although I am theoretically slightly allergic on wasps (at least some allergy test told that a few years ago).
In Spitz we hiked up to the ruin Hinterhaus. It was even possible to go up the stairs of the castle keep. The whole ruine is still in a rather good shape.
Another abbey (this time of Augustiner instead of Benediktiner as in Melk) and the ruin, where Richard the Lionheart (Löwenherz) was prisoned here, were waiting for us in Dürnstein.
The region Wachau looks a bit like the Rhone valley in Switzerland or like the wooden hills of Tessin. It has many charming villages.
In Palt, close to Krems, we stay over night. We had a very good dinner and a special biological local wine without any manual additions like sulfur. The wine has not the clear color as usual, but the taste is still great. We enjoyed the wine so much that we plan to order some of that wine (Green Veltliner and Blauburger) to Switzerland.
