Beyond fairytales: Europe's great rivers reveal secrets at every turn

With our destination in sight, a final traffic signal on a particularly complicated intersection goes green, disgorging a wave of bikes simultaneously from multiple directions. The chaos proves too much for the last member of our group, who comes crashing to the ground amid the confusion.

Riding in Amsterdam, we soon learn, is not for the fainthearted.

The Netherlands is our final stop on an eight-day adventure, taking in the highlights of the Main and Rhine rivers aboard one of APT's two new river cruise ships, the Ostara.

And while sightseeing along the city's famed canals or a cheese-tasting tour might have been a more sensible first-excursion choice, the chance to rub handlebars with the city's 900,000-odd cyclists proves irresistible.

As we pedal off from the dock towards our first bike ferry, a tiny Smart-shaped car, not much bigger than a top-load washing machine, pulls up beside me.

"What's that doing on a bike path?" I splutter. "Oh, that's not a car, it's classed as a scooter, so they're on the paths now, too," our guide says with a shrug.

Thankfully, once beyond the city centre, the calmer countryside soon opens up and the advantage of the motor-assisted bikes becomes more obvious.

Heading north we find ourselves in a lush corridor of green as we pedal through Nieuwendammerdijk with its colourfully painted, bell-shaped timber houses, some dating back more than 500 years to the city's proud ship-building origins. Sheep graze happily in front yards and geese with white chin-strap markings honk noisily at us from a canal like comical traffic police chiding us for disturbing the peace.

Clicking our bikes into "turbo", we speed on towards one of the many new developments jumping up on the city's outskirts.

"We call that one the toilet seat," waves Mike as we pass a particularly jarring, L-shaped residential building with a large hole in its centre.

We arrive at a series of huge warehouses in a gritty industrial neighbourhood where a group of spraycan-wielding artists are dabbing at already heavily graffitied walls.

Once the site of one of the world's biggest shipbuilders, the former Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Company buildings quickly fell into disrepair when operations ceased in 1984.

Today, the area has been transformed into a lively centre of contemporary art and culture. Inside the halls of the 8000-square-metre site, the Straat Museum is home to 180 huge graffiti canvases, some taller than a house, hanging from its vast ceilings.

Our nerve-testing Dutch bike adventure had seemed a fitting culmination to our odyssey along a river network that, some 208 years earlier, had witnessed the birth of the modern bicycle. In 1817 inventor Baron Karl von Drais wheeled his wooden "running machine" out along the shores of the Rhine and changed transport forever.

It had also been more than 25 years since my student days in Germany, living in a northern town whose identity had also been shaped by centuries of conflict - shifting control from Sweden to Prussia, and later, East Germany.

As I leaned on the ship's railing watching Nuremberg, crucible of the Nazi party, fade into the distance, I thought about all this great river had seen over the centuries, from the Thirty Years' War to the invention of Gutenberg's printing press and the composing of Beethoven's first notes along its banks. Less than a day's drive away, the latest chapter in Europe's bloody history was still playing out.

A modern feat of engineering first envisioned by the Roman emperor Charlemagne in CE793 and only fully realised in 1992, the Rhine-Main-Danube canal, linking the North Sea in the west to the Black Sea in the east, has played a central role in the rise and fall of empires.

It became the northern border that ultimately halted the expansion of the mighty Roman Empire as its army tried and failed to tame the wild tribes of Germania beyond.

Despite those failures, the Romans left behind a rich history, and nowhere is that more visible than in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bamberg, briefly the centre of the Holy Roman Empire and today ranked as one of Germany's most beautiful towns.

Unlike our port of origin, Bamberg had been deemed of little strategic importance during World War II and was spared the worst of the Allied bombs, leaving its 9th-century medieval centre largely unscathed.

We wander along the banks of the Regnitz through the "little Venice" area, where water laps at the doorsteps of its timbered houses, and head up the well-worn cobbles of one of the five hills that make up the city.

Passing the famed Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall) in the middle of the river, we arrive at the immaculately manicured monastery rose garden and pass under a low stone archway. We are immediately rewarded with sweeping views over a jumble of steep, sagging red roofs below and the bright green copper turrets of Bamberg Cathedral.

Again and again on our travels we are reminded of how war and conflict have shaped not just the river canal itself but the towns along its banks. At Rothenburg ob der Tauber, nestled deep in Franconia's wine country, that fear of invasion led the town's founders to construct a vast stone edifice that ringed the bustling trading centre. Today it's possible to traverse a restored four-kilometre walkway set into that wall, offering a unique top-down view of the ancient city within.

As we prepare to leave following a brief visit to the sensory overload of Germany's biggest Christmas store, I spy the medieval crime museum and curse our lack of time for a visit.

Outside, a sign promises visitors a genuine Iron Maiden cage for dunking witches into rivers and a series of shame masks, including a shame flute hung around the necks of particularly bad musicians (I amuse myself with thoughts of which buskers back home would most deserve this particular punishment).

On our way out of town, I latch onto retired local architect Karl Heinz, who has tagged along with our group, and ask him about all the wild apple, pear and plum trees growing along the roadside.

The topsoils, he tells me, are up to seven metres deep in this region, making them among the most fertile on the continent.

"And these are a special plum called Zwetschgen - ideal for schnapps," he says enthusiastically before disappearing and returning, bottles in hand.

He offers us a choice - two tiny glass vials of schnapps or a Franconian wine served in a Bocksbeutel - a flat, round glass bottle shaped to resemble a goat's scrotum.

We elect for the schnapps and throw down the fiery elixir. It burns like paint stripper all the way down.

Returning to Wurzburg there's just time to squeeze in a visit to the Wurzburg Residence, one of the world's great baroque palaces.

As we arrive at the top of the imposing grand stone staircase, one of Europe's most impressive frescos opens up above us like an epic tale of clashing civilisations. Painted on a scale to rival the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and completed in just 18 months from 1752-1753 by Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the massive, unvaulted ceiling depicts scenes from each of the continents - except for Australia, which at that time remained largely a mystery to most Europeans.

We make our way across gilded chambers dripping with dragons and cherubs when a woman lets out an audible gasp as she crosses the threshold in front of us.

Stepping through the doorway, ribbons of gold snake across the mirrored walls and fantastic creatures leap from the cornices. Peacocks, pheasants and other game birds dart across the frescoed surfaces of the mirror cabinet, as light split into a thousand vivid shards of red, blue and yellow from the Italian-style crystal chandelier bounce off the silvery surfaces. The effect is like walking inside a kaleidoscope.

I'm therefore shocked by the contrast when in the next room stark black-and-white photos of the city taken shortly after the end of World War II show a Dresden-like scene of decimation. In the residence itself, once favoured by Napoleon, just the grand staircase and main fresco survived, with each of the 40, individually themed palace rooms open to the public painstakingly rebuilt under the post-war Marshall plan.

Awed by the sheer opulence of the palace, we pause on our way out at what can only be described as the world's most demented merry-go-round, a device designed to simultaneously entertain children while teaching them to kill people.

Sitting astride a series of wooden horses, each child is handed a spear. As their horse passes a wooden adversary, the "game" calls for the child to send a spear through a snake-shaped hoop and into the wooden head on the other side, ideally slicing off a replaceable plaster nose from their target's face.

After days of wandering the streets of chocolate-box pretty Bavarian towns, there's one major highlight left before arriving in Amsterdam - a trip through the Rhine Gorge, a 65-kilometre stretch of river, home to 40 castles and forts.

Long before the country's unification, the often warring principalities and fractured fiefdoms set up defensive positions above the important trading route, often to tax and steal from passing merchants.

That warring and tussling for control meant many of the grandest castles have been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the centuries, while others have been left as elegant ruins.

While other passengers marvel as the gleaming white towers of Schloss Stolzenfels come into view, my attention is focused on spotting a much smaller, pencil-shaped neo-Gothic tower in the middle of the river.

The Mouse Tower at Bingen was constructed as a toll station for the nearby Burg Ehrenfels as a way to fleece passing traders.

According to legend, when the local peasants begged their cruel and greedy ruler Archbishop Hatto II of Mainz for help following a poor harvest, he lured them to a barn with the promise of food, locked the doors and ordered his men to set it alight.

Returning to his nearby castle, he found it overrun with mice and fled to the tower on the island to seek refuge. But the mice swam across the water after him, devouring him alive and giving the tower its macabre moniker.

Scooping up our fellow cyclist - dazed, but thankfully unhurt - after her run-in with the traffic, we hand back our bikes and set off on foot in search of one last stroopwafel - a warm, caramelly delight we've fallen in love with since our arrival in Amsterdam.

As our car takes us out of town towards the airport, a couple on a fat-bike fly past metres from our bonnet, clearly doing more than the legal 25kmh.

"Bikes rule this city," our driver curses darkly. "Some days it feels like war out there."

I reflect on how conflict has - and continues to - shape the story of this ancient waterway. Perhaps Amsterdam's bike-clogged streets are just the latest chapter in a rich, fabled and complex tale that continues to unfold.

The writer travelled as a guest of APT