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Read the first chapters after visiting Germany and Austria and they were excellent too - missed visiting the headwaters (there are actually 2 places sort of claiming them) of the Danube but still visited a bunch of the places mentioned in the book

(2015-6) read the last 4 chapters (Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania but only roughly as the story moves all around the Danube area the author is in, both in time and space); excellent stuff - even if some of the current at the time (1986) had become dated only a few years later when the seemingly forever communist regimes collapsed like house of cards everywhere;

as someone born and raised in those parts and steeped in the local culture (at least what was approved officially or tacitly under communism, so some of the stuff is new for me too) I really, really enjoyed these 4 chapters a lot but I can see how they may seem boring and uninteresting (as for example a lot of English or American South literature is to me) to people who have no ties with those places and have no idea who the people mentioned (whether writers, poets, leaders, nobles, rebels - a book that mentions the savage executions of Gheorghe Dosza and of Horia and Closca when talking about the corresponding cities gets extra points from me by default) were