Rhine Falls & Stein in Zurich

[thepoint]

We will be on AMA River Cruise and option is to take a tour to the Rhine Falls and to Stein. Has anyone toured the Rhine Falls while on a river cruise. Can you please give me some information regarding the tour. Thank you.

[Host Jazzbeau]

When we did the AMA Rhine post-cruise extension to Lucerne and Zurich they offered two optional excursions: (1) Mount Pilatus from Lucerne, which we ended up doing on our own at a considerable savings -- this involved taking responsibility for planning the trip and finding the bus at the end so most passengers were probably happy to pay the premium for the convenience and having a tour guide – but we enjoyed our time apart from the larger group, so we felt it was a good trade-off. (2) Rhine Falls/Stein am Rhein -- it would have been more difficult to do this tour on our own, and we enjoyed the AMA version. They take you to the Rhine Falls and you get in a small motor boat that goes right up to the base of the falls and gets pushed around in the current [think more like a Disney ride than Niagara Falls' Maid of the Mist]; Stein am Rhein is a quaint village (not as much fun for us because it was raining). Lots more details about this cruise in the link AmaCello Rhine 8-2013 in my signature below.

[jpalbny]

The Rheinfall is cool but you may think it's unimpressive compared to Niagara Falls, for example. We've visited twice on our own - once from the Swiss side, once from the German side. We have not taken the boat tour though. We looked at Stein am Rhein but didn't have time to stop, unfortunately...:mad:

 

Details and pictures are in my travelpod blog (here) for the German side and (here) for the Swiss side.

 

We did Mt. Pilatus on our own as well; same day as the visit to the Swiss side of the Rheinfall. All are easy if you have your own transport. As our host has pointed out, the Rheinfall is harder with public transport; Pilatus is easy.

[thepoint]

Great information. Thank you both. We will definitely do the optional tours.

[goldwingers]

We did the AMA pre cruise excursion to the Rhine falls & Stein am Rhein and enjoyed it very, very much. We also did the trip to Mt Rigi as the cable cars to Pilatus were undergoing yearly maintenance. Both were additional cost and were well worth the price.

 

Have a wonderful trip - we certainly did!