The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

After our first rest day of the trip in Northeim, we set out the following morning with high hopes for a long day and a respectable distance covered. Things started out well, until we found ourselves in the middle of a forest, struggling up steep tracks and with no idea in which direction we were heading. We had been following the little green-and-white cycle direction boards which have so faithfully served us up to this point in Germany, but something had obviously gone wrong.

When we finally emerged on the other side of the forest and reached a direction sign, it emerged that we were nowhere near where we should have been and had in fact been going in the opposite direction.

I became very angry and frustrated at this, Astrid too of course, and it is therefore not surprising that we had our worst falling-out of the trip so far (yes, there have been some small ones already).

Then I did something very stupid which of course I now regret. Astrid wanted to rest, whereas I wanted to immediately make up for lost time, and in the heat of the moment I cycled off on my own. A few hours later we met up again in the village of Mackenrode, my state of mind somewhat calmer. Over beer and soup at a little café we agreed that this could not be repeated, especially since we will in all certainty become lost many times in the coming months – and not always with the benefit of mobile phone coverage.

As mentioned, this reconciliation took place in a village called Mackenrode. It turned out that we had just passed from the state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) into Thuringia (Thüringen). This meant that we had just crossed the once nigh-impenetrable border between West Germany and the DDR (East Germany). Or, otherwise put, the Iron Curtain.

Now, I had been very curious about this. The DDR existed for about 40 years, Germany has been re-unified for almost 20 years, and so it might be expected that most traces of the communist past would have disappeared.

This is not really the case. Immediately the roads (at least the minor ones) were full of holes, buildings were in a worse state of repair than in the West, and a general air of dilapidation pervaded. The fact that we began to experience the worst weather of the trip so far did not help, but I suppose Honecker and chums cannot be blamed for that. There are shiny new West German road signs, some new motorways and other infrastructure, but this part of the country remains visibly worse off than the West.

I do not want to give the wrong impression of the former DDR. If we were only to have cycled through an endless series of grey villages and been passed by countless trucks on the grey, grey highway, it would indeed be a very depressing experience.

What has made up for this is the people here. I know that this is a horrible cliche, but in this case it is true. In the café in Mackenrode, just as we were thinking about leaving, a small group of folks known to the owner came in for coffee and cake, seemingly a regular appointment; the most comfy chair had been prepared for the most elderly and infirm member of the party.They were tremendously friendly and wanted to know all about our trip, and also told us about their own travels to Scandinavia and Gibraltar in a caravan just after this became possible in the early ’90s. We also had our first taste of “ostalgia” from an older gentleman who joked about how things were better in the DDR, but with more than a hint of seriousness in his eyes. “One car a day passed here before. Now it’s thousands. Das war das richtige Deutschland!“, he sighed. It’s hard to imagine how life must have changed for people here.

We ended up staying and chatting for several hours. A Swedish man in a suit who was the only other customer also joined in. And, when we were finally outside again and getting ready to go, the woman who had served us rushed out with the €2 tip I had given and thrust it back into my hand. “Send a postcard from China with it”, she said. I will do my best to make sure I do.

This hospitality was repeated the following day when we stopped for coffee in Sangerhausen. Here the woman running the café insisted that we brought our filthy and heavily-laden bikes inside, despite this blocking up the bar and getting mud all over the floor. After my outburst of last week I don’t want to keep bashing Holland, but this sort of thing would probably not happen in Amsterdam.

A few days later, we were chatting to a man running a hot dog stand. He asked if we would need something to eat for the road. We explained that we were both vegetarians, whereupon he gave us some sweets for free.

I could go on and on, but you get the general impression.

There is a problem which we have faced a few times already now and which requires some sort of solution. The (rough) schedule we have is based upon certain fixed dates in the upcoming months connected to the visas we have for Russia and shall hopefully soon also have for Kazakhstan. To keep to these dates, it is necessary to cover a certain number of kilometres per day, roughly 60km each day with one rest day per week.

The problem which sometimes occurs is that we find ourselves on the edge of a large town or city in the middle of the day. It is too early to stop, and so since it is clearly impossible to camp in the middle of wherever we are approaching, we must carry on until we have reached the other side and some suitable countryside. This can make the day very long indeed.

We had this problem with the city of Leipzig the other day. In hindsight we should have stopped before the city, but instead we found ourselves many hours later on the other side of it in the pitch dark and rain, tired and extremely irritable. This led to yet another argument, unfortunately.

Here comes another cliche. I have come to realise that the challenge of this trip is and will remain as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. There is something profoundly unnatural about spending almost every minute of every day with the same person, performing the same repetitive activities in much the same order day after day. Of course we each have our own similar but nevertheless different preferences and ways of doing things, and these small differences can be the source of a lot of grief if not handled sensitively. For example, Astrid is slow and precise in all things. I do things quickly and untidily. It is therefore not hard to imagine how we can become quite annoyed with one another.

There is no cure for any of this except a lot of patience and kindness for one another. Time will tell if we are able to maintain this for the next ten months.

On to the scenery. We passed through Leipzig without stopping, which I now regret. It certainly seems like an interesting place, with both beautiful buildings and huge areas of rusting and abandoned factories. Definitely something close to the image I had in my head of the East. Saxony is a pleasant but unremarkable landscape of fields, rolling hills, and forests, and perhaps less economically depressed than Thuringia. Or maybe the weather was just better. On the second-last day of cycling before reaching the Polish border, we started noticing bilingual road signs. I thought at first that the second language was Polish, but in fact it turns out to be Sorbian (not Serbian!), which is closely related to Czech – we were at this point closer to the Czech Republic than to Poland. Unfortunately I have heard no-one actually speaking it.

Tomorrow, after resting for a day in the town of Görlitz on the border, we will cross the river Neiße into Poland. So that’s the second border, and goodbye to Germany. I am not sure what to expect in Poland, but I can say what I have liked about Germany: good roads and drivers who give plenty of room to cyclists, (mostly) friendly people, but most of all the fact that in almost any town, and even in the smallest villages, you can find a bakery with a Stehcafe. Here you can get a good cup of coffee and something delicious to eat with it for a few Euros, and sit for a while and be warm and comfortable; this is very important when you spend all of the rest of the time outside. And the bread is usually good too.

On our last full day of cycling Germany, we passed the 1000km mark. I reckon about 12500 more to go, but it’s a good start.

Quicker than I would have imagined, seven days of cycling are now behind us. I was a bit concerned beforehand about this rather repetitive way of spending each day becoming quite monotonous, but I need not have been. You become so absorbed in the cycling itself that the time quickly passes in a blur of winding roads, traffic signs, tractors, and villages. There is no opportunity to be bored.

Monday morning began with some early confusion about the route, after which we proceeded towards Utrecht. It was on the outskirts of this city that we saw quite a bizarre sight, one which the mysteries of Kazakhstan and China will have to do a lot to match. We found ourselves cycling alongside a canal upon which floated a long row of neatly-painted wooden houseboats, such as is to be found in many parts of the Netherlands. What was unusual about all these houseboats is that they were in fact a long row of windows with girls behind them, just like the Red Light District in Amsterdam but with a rural flavour. The long row of cars waiting to park opposite suggested that business was good.

Just after Utrecht, something happened which I had been very afraid of: I began to feel quite a lot of pain in my left knee. I was very afraid of this because the same thing had happened during the test trip in Germany last month, and by the end every turn of the pedals was causing an extreme shooting pain in both knees. I have been to the physiotherapist several times since and have been given various exercises to do to prevent this pain, but still it had returned after only 30km. At this rate the chances of reaching China were about zero.

We had agreed to meet Astrid’s mum and dad for lunch along the way, and it was at about this point that our paths crossed. We went and had a very delicious lunch together in De Bilt, during which time my knee had a chance to rest. During lunch we also discussed the problem, and various solutions were suggested. One thing which occurred to me is that I had had no pain on the first day in Germany, and on that same day had worn different, much stiffer shoes than the other days. So, I decided to try these shoes.

What a difference! Soon we had covered another 30km with absolutely no pain at all. Just to be sure, we bought a knee brace in Zeist to use if things got bad again, but thankfully the shoes seem to have been identified as the main culprit.

So here’s the lesson, boys and girls – don’t try cycling to China in your retro Adidas trainers with cracked leather and floppy soles. You will regret it, mark my words.

It took us two and a half days to reach the German border, during which time we camped in a beautifully desolate spot next to the lower Rhine, ate delicious Turkish toastie on the waterfront in Arnhem, and camped again in the back garden of a friendly chap who happened to be on his ride-on mower as we cycled past his house. In the morning he made us coffee and told us about his VW camper van and fixing up his house. He was a North-Hollander who had escaped to the tranquility of the Achterhoek, and seemed quite satisfied with his situation. This is always nice to see and perhaps quite rare.

At noon on Wednesday we crossed the first of many borders. Of course this one was the least remarkable of the lot, with only the sign in the photo below to let you know it is there. Still something to be pleased about reaching.

It was shortly afterwards, upon seeing the first characteristic yellow German road signs and hearing the first “ja, aber…” as we passed people in conversation by the roadside, that I at last had the feeling of being away, of having crossed into foreign territory. The real adventure had started.

After the first night on German soil, camped behind some trees after losing the way, we reached Münster on Thursday afternoon. This brought back some happy memories of my time here two years ago as part of Maria Pask’s Beautiful City project. We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon there, including making a visit to a sauna for some much-needed swimming naked in freezing-cold water, steam, and of course a long hot shower. Standards of hygiene will slip a bit of course on this trip, but three and a half days without washing properly is about as much as I can bear.This was followed by a large dinner and then, of course, a lot of cycling round in the dark just outside the city in search of a suitably-hidden place to camp.

The next day saw us cycle over 100km, ending just east of Paderborn and the same nighttime search. We will need to stop earlier in the evening so as to avoid this sort of thing from now on.

The reason of course that we have been trying to camp in secluded spots is because we really do not want an bother from the police or indeed anyone else. Of course, it would not be the first time!

Just after packing up and leaving this last spot, which proved in the morning light to be actually pretty visible, a police car drove up to us and then mysteriously reversed away again very quickly, perhaps because they had failed to catch us “red handed”. It may have been coincidence, but this was the very first evidence of the German police we had seen the whole trip, and it looked like they were looking for us. I don’t know if I am being paranoid, but we will in any case do our best to stay hidden in future.

One day further and we had reached the town of Höxter, where we had planned to spend our first rest day of the trip. Unfortunately this day ended up being a grey, grey Sunday, with everything shut and a most depressing air about the place. Some unfriendly people in the only café open completed the picture, and the decision was taken to press on a day further and rest on Monday, in Northeim.

And that is where I am right now, rested after my first nights’ sleep in a real bed for a week (what luxury!), a shower, and pizza courtesy of a strange Italian restaurant which had it seemed been hastily converted from a Chinese – there was still glass panels with Chinese watercolours between the tables. Still very cheap and delicious.

Oh, and after a lot of buggering about the map at the top of the page should at last be working.