Part III: Berlin to Amsterdam (Germany and The Netherlands)

August 5

I didn't sleep much on the train. I never sleep well in vehicles. I regrouped with Massimo at the bicycle car upon arrival at 7:00 am. We unloaded our bikes, and walked out of the station to look for breakfast. We went to a cafe across the street from the station, where a fellow in a business suit, presumably on his way to work, was having his morning beer. Ah, Bavaria! I ordered a piece of pizza and a Coke. Massimo was lost without his brioche. We ate for a while and I eavesdropped on the conversation at the next table -- a tourist at his table talking with a German at the next table in English. The German was saying that Germans are outward-looking people and like to learn new languages, whereas in France they refuse to speak anything other than French.

We went back into the station to the EurAide office, which I highly recommend for their helpfulness, although I hesitate to mention them because they are already massively overworked and I don't know if they can handle any more enquiries! I got information on "The Tent", where you can rent a space for your sleeping bag in their large tent, or camp on your own for only DM10 per night -- a real bargain in Germany. We went to The Tent and checked me in, and I pitched my tent. Then we went back to the train station to catch a guided bike tour of the city. We didn't make it back in time; Massimo is a very slow biker, it surprises me that he's headed out on a long-range tour. We toured on our own for a while, bought some food at Viktualiensmarkt (an outdoor food market, rather expensive, it seemed to me) and then ate lunch at the Alte Botanische Gartens.

We then joined the afternoon tour with Radius Cycle Tours (DM12 if you have your own bike) and toured around town with Mike. Not to be confused with Mike's Bike Tours, the other guided tour company in the city. The tour was cheap, and Mike was interesting but not terribly exciting. It was a long tour, and the crowd was friendly and social. Massimo was completely lost, though, as it was all conducted in English.

A river that runs through Munich comes out from a tunnel and over an obstruction in the riverbed here, causing a standing wave that can be surfed....

After the tour was over, I left Massimo at the train station, where he was preparing to catch his train to Denmark. I headed out to buy a German phrasebook, which unfortunately didn't get much use. It felt like a long day and I accomplished a lot. Well, it was a long day, I didn't sleep on the night train and I started the day at 7:00 am!

Munich is a lovely, lovely city. It's tidy, clean, and uncrowded. Perhaps this is partly the sudden contrast with Rome. In Rome, driving is a free-for-all, and on a bike at least, breaking rules like riding the wrong way down a one-way street isn't just acceptable, it's necessary. In Munich, to break any rule is to break apart a carefully-assembled jigsaw puzzle. Everything is carefully laid out and designed, and it all works. One always follows the system, and one has confidence that the system will work, which is not the case in Italy.

I saw a group of Munich traffic cops in white jackets and gloves, directing traffic like they're directing a symphony orchestra. The officer holds his hand up imperiously, walks slowly, smoothly, gracefully, and, I kid you not, bows to a transport truck as he waves the driver through.

Munich has beautiful parks and gardens everywhere, everything is neat and tidy. People are polite. If someone is standing on a bike path as you approach, they will jump back guiltily out of your way. There are bike paths everywhere. I really like Munich. And I can sleep cheap at The Tent. Now all I need is to find cheap food.

August 6

I was going to spend the day in Munich, but at the last moment I decided to make the trip to Dachau. An easy 1 - 1.5 hour bike ride from The Tent, on bike paths almost all the way. I love Munich! Just go up Dachauerstrasse, and follow the signs to Dachau and the KZ-Gedenkstätte.

"Arbeit macht frei"

The concentration camp memorial is free to enter, and there was a free guided tour at 12:30. The tour group was, unfortunately, much too large. The guide spoke very slowly, probably to make sure everyone understood, but at one point someone in the group muttered that it's probably only a half-hour tour but she talks so slowly that it takes three times as long. I bought a copy of the museum souvenir book (DM25, available in many languages) which was useful but I didn't keep it with me all the way as it was rather large and tended to get banged up in my bags. I ditched it as excess baggage some time later. It's tough to pick up souvenirs when biking.

The museum basically consisted of blown-up reproductions of documents from the time. The souvenir book duplicates the museum and in fact the exhibit works better as a book than it does as a museum. Everything was in German. There is a film which runs several times a day in English and in German, which was very worthwhile.

I think it must be awkward, in a way, to live in Dachau now. The name of Dachau is known worldwide for only one thing, the concentration camp, so whenever you tell someone where you are from, that's what they'll think of. It's actually a pleasant little suburb of Munich, and there's a sign from the town council outside the camp urging visitors to please, please visit the rest of the town

I wasn't as moved or as shocked as I expected to be. Maybe I felt that I already knew the story so it was not a shock to me. Maybe it was because this was a concentration camp, a work camp, and not a death camp. I thought a lot about Aleksandr Solzhinitsyn's book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which relates the experience of a Soviet concentration camps under Stalin. So many features of the Dachau camp were identical to the camp described in Ivan Denisovitch that I presume there must be, somewhere, a manual on how to run a concentration camp. A sort of primary textbook or reference on the subject. Strange to think of such a thing existing.

I like German food, by the way. It's simple, hearty, and based on strong tastes. Onions, potatoes, pickles, sauerkraut, cheese, and bread. Oh, the bread! Every bread is "lead bread", every bread is multigrain or at least not white. (Ok, it is possible to get white bread rolls, "semmeln".) The variety is nice, I like it much better than the Italian "hollow roll" approach. There's plenty of cold cuts and wurst, too, but I haven't tried much of that. And the bread really is dense, loaves which are half the size of North American loaves weigh the same.

August 7

Well, I bought my ticket to Berlin. I'm regretting not cycling in Bavaria, and not going to Prague, but I made my choice. Tomorrow night I go. I bought it at the EurAide office, again very nice and patient service. I really felt like I was in the rhythm of travel. Here I am, seeking out bargains ("I can leave any time in the next three days, are there any specials? Yes, I can leave at any time of day."), taking night trains to save on accommodations, and doing all those things that backpacker travelers are supposed to do. Today I regretted the fact that time is running out. Only four more weeks.

I spent the afternoon at the Deutsches Museum, a large technology and engineering museum. Interesting, but not to rave about. I guess I wasn't really in the mood.

August 8

I spent today doing nothing. I did a bit of bike-cleaning in the morning, dropped my baggage in a locker at the Hauptbahnhof, bought some groceries, and bought a book (Sphere) at the EurAide office in the Hbf. Then I went and sat in the Englischer Garten reading. Just sat and read and ate all afternoon, and I finished the book. I later hung out at the Chineser Turm for a while, a radio station was sponsoring a concert there but all I saw was some recorded music and prize draws.

On my way back to the Hbf, I got my first flat tire in Europe! Glass in the front tire. By the way, there's a type of tire valve in Germany that I haven't seen before. In North America, there are Schrader (automobile-style) and Presta ("French") valves, but there's a third one here that my pump doesn't fit. I know this because while I was pumping up my tire, a German stopped and asked if he could use my pump too, but it didn't fit his tire.

Had a beer and some Internet in the Internet cafe in the Hbf. Realized that I'd missed an emailed invitation to visit an acquaintance in Geneva.

The German railway is a whole lot spiffier than the Italian Ferrostradale. The two Italian conductors who brought my train into Munich were all disheveled and hanging out everywhere. The conductor on this DB train marches along smartly and carries a computer on his belt. At every turn, the German reputation for order, efficiency, neatness, and organization is being confirmed for me. Of course, things are more expensive here, too.

August 9

The day after a night train is always a little odd. Comes from lack of sleep, I guess. It makes for a long day.

I arrived at Berlin Zoo station, hopped off quickly, collected my bike, and the train moved on to the Hbf. My front tire was flat so I changed the tube on the platform, dumped my gear in a locker, and went on a walking tour. "The Walk" was quite good. The guide, Greg, was animated, and seemed interested; this was the first of the tours I've taken where I didn't think "I could do better." And it only cost DM10.

Afterwards, I was pretty tired and had a hard time making decisions. Finally I went out to the "young backpackers' camp" which is pretty far from downtown (i.e. not on my maps) and was hard to find at first but now that I know where it is, it's not so bad and there are plenty of bike paths. It took me two hours the first time, though. Finally I found it by consulting the detailed neighborhood and transit maps that are posted at every bus stop. The hostel is similar to Munich's "The Tent" but slightly less fancy. And still only DM10, which is a huge bargain for Berlin.

August 10

Today I went to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, and was surprised by how much I didn't know about the Berlin Wall. Eighty people were killed by border guards trying to escape East Germany. People were climbing it, digging under it, and smuggling across it all through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The wall had guards with shoot-to-kill orders, minefields, killing zones. And it came down in And still only DM10, which is a huge bargain for Berlin.

August 10

Today I went to Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, and was surprised by how much I didn't know about the Berlin Wall. Eighty people were killed by border guards trying to escape East Germany. People were climbing it, digging under it, and smuggling across it all through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The wall had guards with shoot-to-kill orders, minefields, killing zones. And it came down in 1989. I remember the fall of the wall, but I was too young to remember it at its height of infamy, and I guess because of that I never really understood what it was all about. On the eastern side, the land was cleared to create a featureless plain. On the western side, people would walk up to it and paint on it, and when people on the west side heard gunshots over the Wall, they would gather and demonstrate. The museum is worthwhile, although very crowded. 8DM, discounted if you can dig up a group.

The depressing thing was the parallel that the museum pointed out with other freedom struggles: India, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Philippines, and more. A reminder of how many people are even today screwing each other over in the worst possible way.

The Wall itself isn't quite as big a deal as I had expected it would be. Perhaps Berliners prefer not to be reminded of it. There are a couple of places where sections of the Wall are still standing, and at one spot you can even touch it. Someone was whacking a corner of it with a hammer to collect a piece. At the time, I thought that was silly, it's just a lump of concrete, and once you knock a piece of it off, there's no way to tell it from any other lump of concrete. And yet, the Berlin Wall is not just any old piece of concrete.

Berlin is madly under construction. Cranes stand across the skyline, building everything you can imagine: a new parliament building, a new railway station, and buildings of all kinds. Potsdamer Platz is touted as the world's biggest construction site, and that's not hard to believe. Where the Berlin Wall once stood, the land was cleared on the eastern side so that there would be no cover for people approaching the wall. Now this land is prime real estate, right in the middle of the city. The InfoBox is an building on stilts containing exhibits explaining the construction and how it is all being co-ordinated, with a lot of emphasis on the environmental planning aspects.

Went back to the hostel in the evening and chatted with the two Brits in my tent. They're doing a one-month whirlwind tour: Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Italy, France, Spain. Only a couple of days each, no pause for breath.

August 11

Went to the Ethnology Museum today. It's in the southwestern part of the city, on the grounds of the Berlin Free University. It only costs DM4, and is well worth it. It has an extensive collection of items covering four continents and many time periods, with identification but not a lot of context. Almost everything is in German.

August 12

Rode 222 km today, a new record. That's 140 miles to you non-metrics. Berlin to Schwerin by back roads and only one little detour. The hostel was hard to find, but in a beautiful location on a lakg" width="353" height="272" border="1">

August 13

Rode about 70 km to Lübeck. Cold, rainy, headwind. Demoralising. On arrival, it was raining and I was tired and couldn't make decisions. Finally I settled on an urban campground, Campingplatz Schönböcken and booked two nights.

August 14

Did some bike cleaning in the morning, and then headed into town. Walked around the old town for a while (I'm getting a little blasé about "old towns," I think), did some shopping, and then sat on the riverbank for a while.

In the evening, as I was waiting for my laundry to dry, I went for a walk around the suburbs and used my walkman for the first time in Europe. The first three songs I heard were by Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and the Kingston Trio. There's something odd about that. Part of my dissatisfaction with Lübeck is that it looks too much like home. Really, I could have been walking down the streets of almost any North American suburb and it wouldn't have looked much different.

August 15

Rode to Hamburg. I would have given it a miss, but my map suggests to me that there are not many bridges further down the Elba River, so crossing might be more difficult. Reminds me of the story we were told about Munich: that Munich is where it is because two people built bridges, and one guy burned down the other's bridge so the traffic would pass through his town. So, Hamburg gets my business. The hostel is a large industrial one, but nice. Good common facilities. DM29.

A surprising (to me) number of German highways have sidepaths like this, which make for excellent riding.

I don't like Hamburg all that much. It's the most littered German city I've seen, including Berlin (in Berlin, spraypaint is everywhere, but not litter), and the drivers in Hamburg are the worst in all Germany. I was honked at for the first and second time in Europe here, and had two near accidents.

Oh, and I got excited over wind power generators. We don't have them where I come from, and I'd never seen one other than in pictures. They're big. Like, really, really big. And the blades spin fast. Like, really, really fast. It's not fast like an airplane propellor, but the blades are so long that if you watch the tip of a blade, and consider how great a distance it is traveling, it's moving really, really, fast.

At night I took a stroll down the Reeperbahn, which is supposed to be the sort of red-light district, I guess. No big deal. Also strolled through the Hamburger Dom, which is a sort of carnival with rides and cotton candy.

August 16

I got up late, and got thoroughly lost in Hamburg's "free port" (a customs-free warehouse zone where goods can be stored and transferred without paying duties because they're not considered to have entered the country until they leave the port) and southern suburbs. It took me three hours before I determined I was on the right road out of town. That's yet another reason why I think that Hamburg is somehow not really part of Germany. I felt like I was moving so slowly all the way to Bremen, but I saw a bicycle race on the way. I got to Bremen late and had trouble finding the hostel; I didn't check in until 8:30 or 9:00 pm. And it cost DM32! German hostels are so expensive. Tomorrow, I'll treat myself to the Beck's brewery tour.

August 17

The Bremen hostel has the best breakfast buffet I've seen yet. Yay! Unfortunately, I discover that Beck's doesn't do brewery tours on Mondays. Argh. I bought train tickets to Deventer (DM91), in the Netherlands.

The only useful thing I did today was go to the Markt in the evening, the old town square. There is a very nice old church, very well-preserved, or actually I should say well-reconstructed, since most of the old buildings that you see in Germany were actually destroyed or at least severly damaged during the war, and what you see is a reconstruction. There are very nice looking reconstructed old houses, a beautiul rathaus, and so on. In the evening there were booths selling food and drink (expensive, DM4.50 for 1/3L; I picked up a couple of 500mL cans of beer on the way back to the hostel for DM3.60).

August 18

I'm sharing the hostel room with some German high-school kids, who were up until 2:30 am, coming in and out, bringing their friends in, and so on. Annoying. But I get myself to the train station in the morning, and zip-zip to Osnabrück and Deventer.

One unusual thing about this trip is that I haven't been doing much reading. Normally when I travel, especially by train or plane, I buy newspapers, magazines, books. But English magazines here cost DM16-25, and even newspapers like The Times cost DM6. So I get no news, I'm isolated from the world.

I wonder what percentage of Canada's population is outside of Canada at any given moment? It may be quite a lot. There are a couple of Canadians in every hostel in Europe, probably a bunch in hotels, a few in the big train stations. How many other Canadians are riding DB trains right now? I'm not the only Canadian on this train, I saw a guy with an MEC backpack and a Canadian flag get on.

I got off the train in Deventer, and rode through the marketplace. It was similar to German town squares, but subtly different somehow. And rode south to Arnhem.

Bicycle paths are fabulous here. Germany was good, but the Dutch are fantastic. The trails are well-marked and have direction signs and distances to destinations. There are lots of cyclists. I was interested to see a back-to-back recumbent bicycle. That was an interesting contraption. Two people sit back to back, one facing in each direction, and very low to the ground. When they stopped for a traffic light, one reached out and touched the ground with his hand to keep the bicycle upright. And man, they were fast!

On the way from Deventer to Arnhem, I passed through the town of Zutphen, and did a double-take when I noticed that the bridge I crossed was labeled "Canadians Bridge". During the Second World War, Canadian troops liberating Zutphen entered the town by this road, and they named the bridge in commemoration of the fact.

I arrived at the hostel, after a long, agonizing period of indecision. Go to the hostel for f30, or the campground for f10? I decided on the hostel because I wanted to meet meet people, which I knew I wouldn't do in the campground. It turned out to be the right decision, I met several interesting characters. Nils from Sweden sold everything and is bicycling to Tenerife. He plans to be away for two years. He phones Sweden now and then to give little travel stories to a radio station back home. Nathan, from the USA (born in Alabama, now lives in New York City) was quite a character. He's a seminary student, very interested in languages, has a two-year-old son named Troy, and his Dutch wife just gave birth to another boy yesterday here! There were quite a lot of cycle-tourers here.

August 19

Breakfast was moderate - the bread was lighter and whiter than German bread, plus cheese and coldcuts, jam and peanut butter.

I went to the Openluchtmuseum (open air museum) today. They had an indoor parking shed for bicycles, cost f1. Ah, to be so civilized regarding bicycles. I was right in line as they opened the gates to the museum -- boy did I feel organized! Except that I should have left my day bag at the hostel instead of lugging it around, because the hostel is so close to the museum. The highlights for me were the paper mill and the bakery selling fresh bread. I like fresh bread. There was a nice play area for children, with various kinds of active toys -- pogo sticks and scooters and so on.

Next stop was the Airborne Museum. It was a reasonably good exhibit. I went there primarily because I had played the computer wargame, Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far, which is set in this area.

My last stop of the day was the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery. Unexpectedly, I cried. I admire simplicity -- and military cemeteries are simple. There is no distinction of rank or position, no headstones larger or smaller than others, just row after row after row of clean, white stones. The impact, and the implications, are stunning. The memorials were all very well kept. There was another memorial to air despatchers just down the road from the cemetery, with fresh flowers. Many of the graves appeared to have been recently visited -- and yet they are all British, American, Canadian, or other foreign soldiers. World War II has not been forgotten here.

I've decided to go all the way to Amsterdam tomorrow. It's only about 100 km. Hit the road early and I could be there by... well, I tried to play that game from Hamburg to Bremen and lost miserably. I won't predict, I'll just say that I'll make it some time tomorrow.

August 20

I didn't know this at the time, but on August 20, 1993, a 15-year-old boy named Kerwin Duinmeijer was stabbed to death in a racist attack. Kerwin was black. There is a memorial statue to him in Vondelpark, and every year on August 20, people gather in remembrance. There are not many English web sites that describe give details (there are many more in Dutch), but try this one: http://come.to/kerwin.

I waited until 11:00, made a reservation at the Vondelpark hostel in Amsterdam, and hit the road. The ride to Amsterdam was uneventful, and I checked in to the Vondelpark hostel at 19:21. There were lots of bike paths in the countryside, and I followed a beautiful scenic canal-side road from Utrecht. After arriving, I went for a walk in the park. There was an anti-racism rally going on in the memory of someone named Kerwin. An outdoor jazz concert, too. Nice.

August 21

It was raining heavily this morning so I ate two leisurely breakfasts and took a long time before finally deciding to go outside. I walked around for a bit, bought a ticket for the Heineken brewery tour (all proceeds donated to charity), and killed a couple of hours waiting for it to start. The tour itself was rather dull, actually; a series of slide shows about the history of the company and the beer-making process, a couple of beer commercials, and a walk through a few parts of the former plant. They don't even make beer here in the centre of the city any more, because of the smell, they've moved their plant somewhere else. The reason that people go for the tour at all is that it ends with a half-hour

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Time for the guided tour of the city. The company: Mike's Bike Tours, Amsterdam. The guide: Andrew, the Scottish wannabe stand-up comic. The start of the tour was very, very disorganized, and after all the introductions, the hemming and hawing, the platitudes and so on, we got started about half an hour after the advertised time. The tour didn't include very much about Amsterdam history, it was mostly about clubs, bars, beer, and drugs. Andrew really enjoyed making fun of people in the group, and picked on one poor fellow incessantly. It was heckling to the point of rudeness. The tour included a mandatory stop for a drink at Bar Chicago in order to promote their evening shows. There was a lot of cross-promotion throughout the tour. It was sort of fun, but it wasn't everything that I wanted. Maybe I'm unusual in that I didn't come to Amsterdam in order to get high.

I see that 7:00 pm in the hostel is when people sleep. I returned for a nap, and from my bunk I can count 10 other people in the room sleeping before heading out for the night. So I went out and saw the red light district. It struck me that most of the ladies did not appear to be Dutch -- I thought that most seemed to be Asian. Later, coming back through town, I stopped and hung out in the square called Leidseplein, where a South American band was playing. You know them, you've seen them -- or their cousins. There's probably one such band playing their pipes and drums and miniature guitars in the streets of every major city in Europe.

August 23

I think the Vondelpark hostel is probably a good place to catch a cold. No-one gets enough sleep, and I'm seeing a lot of people coughing and sneezing. This is starting to include me. I wonder what interesting microbes must be in the pots of jam and chocolate spread at breakfast.

And that was that. I bicycled to the airport at the appointed time -- there is a very nice forest park on the way which I almost got lost in, but I managed to find my way through and bicycled right up to the airport. How many airports can you easily reach by bicycle, with bike paths all the way? I love the Netherlands. I killed a few more days in Toronto before catching a train back to Winnipeg and returning to real life.

I haven't done a trip of similar scale since then, but I'm feeling the need. I'm still riding my bike every day, but I haven't had the time to take an extended holiday in a long time. Perhaps I will soon. I hope so.