Solo down the Rhine and into the Black Forest

Two Just You tours, solo-only by design and small-group throughout, cover the two stretches of inland Germany a coastal cruise never reaches: the Rhine valley between Cologne and Strasbourg, and the wooded hills of the Black Forest further south along the French border. Neither region depends on scenery alone; both are built on stories specific enough to reward travelling through them slowly, with a guide rather than a map.

A cathedral that outlived six centuries of its own construction

Cologne Cathedral, the first stop on most Rhine itineraries, took an almost unreasonable length of time to complete. Construction began in 1248, progressed for around three centuries, then stalled almost entirely for a further four hundred years, the half-finished tower left standing with a large medieval crane visible on top of it, itself eventually treated as something of a local landmark before the building was finally completed in the nineteenth century, closely following the original medieval plans that had, remarkably, survived the intervening centuries. At completion in 1880, it was briefly the tallest building in the world, a status it held for only four years before being overtaken, and it remains one of the largest Gothic cathedrals anywhere, its twin spires still the first thing most visitors notice arriving in the city.

A gorge that earned its reputation the hard way

South of Koblenz, the Rhine narrows and turns sharply through a stretch of steep, vineyard-terraced hillside known as the Rhine Gorge, recognised by UNESCO in 2002 for the density of medieval castles, more than forty within a relatively short stretch of river, built by local lords and bishops largely to extract tolls from the river traffic passing beneath them. The Loreley, a looming slate cliff at the gorge's narrowest and most treacherous bend, has its own long folklore tradition, a siren said to lure boatmen onto the rocks with her singing, a story that says as much about how genuinely dangerous this stretch of river was to navigate before modern engineering eased the currents as it does about any actual siren.

The forest that gave the world a clock with a bird in it

Further south and inland, the Black Forest takes its English name, a direct translation of the German Schwarzwald, from the dense, dark canopy of conifers that covers much of the region's steep terrain. The area's most famous export is a small domestic object rather than a landscape feature: the cuckoo clock, developed by Black Forest clockmakers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards as a way of supplementing farming income through the long winter months, using the mechanical bird call as a novel, attention-grabbing feature that distinguished the region's clocks from plainer designs elsewhere in Europe. The tradition survives today in small workshops around towns like Titisee and Freiburg, alongside the region's older reputation for spa towns and, more recently, its position on the doorstep of Alsace and the vineyard towns of Colmar and Riquewihr just across the French border.

Travelling solo

Just You's Cruising the Rhine, six nights, follows the river from Cologne through the gorge to Strasbourg, with wine towns and castle views built into the route and every departure designed around solo travellers from the outset.

The Heart of the Black Forest & Alsace, six nights, covers the forest itself alongside day trips into Colmar and Strasbourg, on the same small-group, solo-friendly basis.

Neither tour depends on scenery you need someone beside you to react to; a cathedral tower that took six centuries and a clock with a bird in it both make their own case, quite happily, to an audience of one.

The appeal of travelling this particular route alone is, in a fairly direct sense, practical rather than sentimental. A small group moving at a shared pace through a gorge lined with forty castles, or a workshop full of clocks with more mechanisms than any one visitor could take in unassisted, benefits from a guide who can slow down for whichever detail has caught someone's attention that day, an arrangement that suits a solo traveller rather better than it suits two people trying to agree on how long to linger at any single stop.