I’ve upgraded us to a BMW, as we’re in Munich,” my husband said. “It only cost an extra €5 a day, and I know how much these things matter to you.”

We are about to embark on a romantic week’s holiday à deux in upper Bavaria, a week that is going to take in King Ludwig’s castles, the Alpine and Romantic roads, the lakes and, lastly, a two-day city break in Munich.

And I am determined to discover not just the usual touristy things about southern Germany, wonderful though beer gardens, rococo palaces, bratwurst and sauerkraut undoubtedly are. My mission is to uncover the edgy, vibing, hip-hotels side of Bavaria, too. If there is one, that is.

Okay, first things first. The bad news is that you may have to start in a UK airport to get to Munich. The good news is that when you arrive, it is so efficient, so modern and so clean, you could eat off the floors. (Actually, I did eat the Augsburg Airways dense, seeded brown roll that I dropped while we were waiting all of two minutes to be handed the keys to our hire car.)

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So, a few minutes after deplaning, we were drilling off like a black bullet on the A3 towards Berchtesgaden, where the InterContinental chain has opened a low-slung hotel, golf and spa resort on top of a small mountain on the edge of the national park.

After an hour or so marvelling at the eye-bleeding speeds that are legal on the autobahns, we were only a few miles from our destination and I suddenly saw – God knows how I could read it, the speed we were going – a little blue sign saying “InterContinental”.

“Turn off, turn off!” I screeched. My husband stopped the car, left indicator flashing. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Please proceed on the indicated route,” begged the sat nav on the BMW’s dashboard.

Instead, we turned up a twisty Alpine road, late-spring snow still on the ground. “As soon as you are able, do a U-turn,” came the robotic command. We carried on. “Do a U-turn! Do a U-turn!” the BMW ordered. It was me against the fembot. “I do hope you’re right,” my husband said darkly.

For once, I was. After tossing the car keys to a bellboy, we entered a huge lobby hung with the biggest lamps I’d ever seen. A fragrant log fire blazed from a sunken brazier. Businessmen were hurling bar snacks down their throats, bartenders were pouring steins of dark local beer and a sultry chanteuse at a piano, straight out of Lost in Translation, was singing a song about love.

Suddenly, it seemed nuts that Brits don’t do Germany (tourism in Bavaria is 90% German), and it seemed even nuttier the next morning. The hotel has a “mountain spa”, with a heated pool open to the pine-girdled peaks of the Kehlstein (where, it so happens, Hitler’s hideaway, the Eagle’s Nest, still perches 2,625ft above you). It also has herbal spas, steam rooms and a Michelin star. It doesn’t just have mountain bikes for guests, darling, it has Segways.

At breakfast, we sat munching our cereal noisily and looking out of the huge picture windows framing the panorama. I pointed to a meadow, just the sort of place where you find long-lashed cows, yellow-plaited milkmaids, goatherds, cowbells and rich milk. My husband was worried we’d come too early for frisking in Alpine meadows, and I wanted to reassure him. “The hills are alive over there,” I said, pointing at the bright-green slope. “Yes,” he grunted, as the spoons clattered against breakfast bowls, “with the sound of muesli.”

Nobody can leave upper Bavaria without interacting with Mad King Ludwig II or doing Munich. So we left Berchtesgaden (so close to Austria that we smugly drove to Salzburg for dinner, and found a groovy restaurant called Carpe Diem – highly recommended) and took the Alpine Road, a twisty hairpin drive that averages between 2,625ft and 3,280ft all the way. We whizzed past deep lakes, looked up at fierce mountain ranges and, after nipping back into Austria for lunch, chugged across the vast lake called the Chiemsee, in the middle of which, on an island, King Ludwig erected one of his three huge palaces.

Ludwig spent only 11 days at the Herrenchiemsee. He ate from a table-cum-elevator that was laid on the ground floor, then pulled up to the first, so he didn’t have the awful bore of seeing his servants. Oh yes, and the hall of mirrors here is longer than that in Versailles, and the king’s bathtub could drown a blue whale.

Even more otherworldly and jaw-dropping is his Neuschwanstein Castle, at Schwangau. It’s not edgy or hip, but I promise that even your children will enjoy it. Its über-romantic location inspired the sparkly castle in the opening credits of Disney cartoons: set high on a rocky outcrop, it seems an impossible feat of engineering, overlooking lakes, valleys, waterfalls. And inside, this Victorian folie de grandeur is so wildly, camply over the top, with every inch of every finished room painted with frescoes from the operas of Wagner, it makes the Palace of Westminster look as decorative as a Portaloo.

SO, I HEAR you cry, what about the trendy, cool stuff you promised? Okay, here goes. Now I get to be the sat-nav lady. Head for Munich, but stop at Tutzing, on the Starnberger See, and go to the Buchheim Museum (www.buchheimmuseum.de), named after the photographer, painter and collector Lothar-Günther Buchheim. Its core collection of German expressionist art is renowned. Back in the car, head into Munich (45 minutes). Go straight to the Haus der Kunst (www.hausderkunst.de). Check out the exhibition within, especially the Robert Rauschenberg (until September 14), and walk around the building, admiring the intact Nazi architecture – it was built by Troost; Hitler laid the foundation stone – to the Goldene Bar at the back.

Have a beer and a salami sandwich in the beautifully proportioned, frescoed and mirrored 1930s cafe, then mosey out and look at the surfer boys a few yards away, riding the wave on the Eisbach River. Yes, surfers, in the middle of a city park (the heavenly Englischer Garten) in Munich. Underneath the Goldene Bar, by the way, there’s a nightclub, called P1, where Bayern Munich football players hang with the likes of Paris Hilton.

But we don’t go there, because we are staying at the Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski, and, what’s more, we’re in one of the 42 redecorated, ultramodern suites, and we don’t want to leave, much. It is sublimely comfortable and has a flatscreen television that you can twirl to face the sitting room or the bed – and there’s a TV in the mirror of the bathroom, which is the sort of thing that impresses me more than anything.

Yet leave the Kempinski we must, because Munich is 850 years old this year, and the city is really putting on the glitz from now until the Oktoberfest and beyond, with cultural events aplenty. For example, there’s a large Kandinsky exhibition planned to run from October until February 2009 at the Lenbachhaus. We caught the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Kunsthalle, and the vibrating clouds of colour were all the more impressive for knowing that Rothko refused to show in Germany during his lifetime because of the Holocaust.

As for shopping, well, my girlie picks are: Dallmayr, on Dienerstrasse, for the 17th-century splendour and visual feast that this store, the German version of Fortnum’s, offers its 1m visitors a year; Manufactum, a brilliant shop selling all the things you didn’t think you could find any more, such as wooden badminton rackets, proper shuttlecocks and wooden stepladders; and Ed Meier, where you can have a pair of bespoke shoes made for you, by hand, in one year, for as little as £475. If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

I’ll be back to pick up mine this time next year. Till then...tschüs!

Travel brief

Getting there: fly to Munich with Lufthansa (0871 945 9747, www.lufthansa.com), from Heathrow or London City; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com), from Stansted or Edinburgh; or Air Berlin (0871 500 0737, www.airberlin.com), from Stansted or Manchester.

Where to stay: the InterContinental at Berchtesgaden (0870 400 9650, www.ichotelsgroup.com) has doubles from £208. In Munich, the Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski (00 800 426 31355, www.kempinski.com) has doubles from £194. More modest is the Belle Blue (00 49 89 550 6260, www.hotel-belleblue.com), where doubles start at £79.

Where to eat and what to visit: Carpe Diem (www.carpediem.com), in Salzburg, serves exotic finger food; from £4.60 per portion. In Munich, shop at Dallmayr (www.dallmayr.de) for fine foods, Manufactum (www.manufactum.co.uk) for iconic design and Ed Meier (www.edmeier.de) for shoes. Club at Munich’s most glam: P1 (www.p1-club.de).

More details: www.germany-tourism.co.uk.

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