- Clean, well ordered. The campsite toilets are like hotel toilets (and by that we mean the Hilton, not the Walsall Travelodge). There's no litter, no graffiti, nothing ever seems to be broken.
- Everyone's been polite and friendly, speaking excellent English (as well as German usually).
- Flat flat flat. Not completely, but a hill is a bit of a high point
- Strangely free of tradition. People have been living here for millennia, but almost everything seems new. The supermarkets are full of Mediterranean food, the farming is modern and efficient with no obvious emphasis on traditional local products. The towns (Ribe excepted) seem to have few buildings more than a century old.
- Maybe related to that, they seem ready to innovate. The alternative energy park near Thy was demonstrating wind turbines and wave energy generators that are actually being built and supporting a substantial industry. Wind turbines are plentiful across the countryside.
- Expensive (though apparently not as bad as Sweden).
- Not many people. The roads are quiet (and in many areas most of the other drivers have been German holidaymakers), the towns are small and well spread out. Feels a bit like New Zealand sometimes.
West Jutland
Our first stop in Denmark was Ribe; Denmark's oldest city. We camped in an amazingly plush campsite on the outskirts, but it was an easy walk into town.
We might not have heard of Ribe if Simonl Calder of the Independent hadn't failed to hire an Avis car in northern Denmark, and consequently failed to get to visit. His article complained about Avis's customer service, and that he couldn't get to the town without a car. In fact we found it has a rather grand railway station, but he wasn't to know that.
The historical centre is a network of pretty cobbled streets lined with old houses. Many are built from a timber framework with brickwork infill, dating back to the sixteenth century when much of Ribe was rebuilt after a fire. Others are cheaply built terraces of single storey houses from the seventeenth century, with a scattering of more elegant neoclassical houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the outskirts there's a grassy rectangle surrounded by a moat, which was once Ribe's royal castle. Little remains now.
Ribe was Denmark's first substantial town, and for years its biggest port. It fell on hard times, so couldn't afford to rebuild, so the town centre is well preserved. Walking round, and knowing this story, it's clear that Denmark has never been richer than it is now. There are some nice old buildings in Ribe but they're not grand – the old half timbered places reminded us of Knighton or Ludlow, it certainly wasn't competing with Bremen or Venice. Many look like tarted up slums. It looks like a town built by people who were earning a pretty tough living. In contrast, today, everything is immaculate. You can't help peering in through the windows of a seventeenth century hovel, ceilings too low to stand up properly, and seeing chic designer lamps, original sculptures and classically smart 1960s Scandinavian birch ply furniture.
Ribe is working hard to recapture some of its old prominence. Every evening in the summer you can join the town's night watchman as he patrols the streets and tells you about the history of the town. We were lucky to catch one of the last tours. It was impressively atmospheric, trudging the quiet cobbled streets behind the watchman as he sang the traditional songs, pointed out interesting buildings and told tales of Ribe's history of ships, pirates, witches and floods (fortunately for us, in very good English as well as Danish).
We were doubly lucky to catch that tour, because the following day brought wind and torrential rain, and we spent a day huddled in our cosy van while the wild weather raged outside. As it started to abate we continued north up the west coast of Jutland, through flat sandy country along straight roads lined with maize fields, cereal stubble and potatoes.
The coastal road runs along a line of dunes between the wild north sea and a series of freshwater lagoons (Fjords in Danish, very different to those in Norway). The beaches here are clearly very busy in Summer, but during our visit they've been populated only by a few brave souls and their dogs, getting sandblasted as they walk. We planned to spend Stella's birthday walking along the beach but the wind was so strong that day that we could barely stand up.
So we huddled in the dunes and watched the waves crashing and foam dancing around for a while and then retreated inland to shelter in the woods for the night. In places the dunes are vast, scattered with holiday villages but also nature reserves. We know enough to know we're seeing glimpses of the great autumn migrations but not enough to know exactly what is flying past us.
Wildest wildlife spot so far was a tiny adder sunning itself on the side of the path in the dunes. We didn't put a hand in the photo for scale, as although it was tiny it was armed, but it was about the diameter of a pencil.
This morning we're enjoying the calm and the sunshine just outside Thy National Park.
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