A Journey to the Mysterious East

A very quick roundup of our route since the last entry: Poznan to Berlin, Potsdam, Lübeck again, Hamburg, Hannover, the Harz Mountains, Goslar, Gotha, the Thüringian Forest, Leipzig, Colditz and now Dresden.

It's interesting to look back at what impressed us and what didn't.  We're being economical on this trip so we're not much impressed by places that have fantastic theatres or deluxe restaurants.  We've seen so much over the last year that places that once might have impressed us if we'd turned up for a few days city break from work fail to move us now.  What we've enjoyed most is the places that have distinctive local character.

Germany, like Britain, has a lot of old cities that boomed during the Victorian period, resulting in wholesale redevelopment and the loss of much of the historical cityscape.  They have a term 'Gründerzeit' for the buildings that sprung up between German unification and the First World War.  The 'Gründerzeit' areas look much alike (and much like Cardiff's Pontcanna or Newport town centre).  Also like Britain (but more so), it has a lot of cities that were devastated during the war.  They've often gone to great lengths to rebuild the main buildings of the historical town centre, but you also get large areas of hurried reconstruction that look much alike (and much like Portsmouth or Swansea).

We've repeatedly crossed the old internal border between what was the Federal Republic of  Germany and what was the German Democratic Republic.  After two decades the border is blurring, and the remaining differences are often hard to spot.  Where we are now – well to the east in Saxony – you see more empty or neglected buildings than you would in the west.  In many towns there's still a sense of having been rebuilt in a hurry on the cheap, and not quite finished – old houses covered over with cement render, new flats bolted together from concrete panels, garden gates welded up from reinforcing rods.  It feels a little like the difference in atmosphere between Bristol and Swansea; you don't necessarily need a wall with guards and minefields to create divisions (although no-one swims the Severn Estuary to get to Bristol, an important difference).

Many of the large towns and cities have lovely features; usually the old town hall and an impressive church or two, but after visiting a few of them it gets hard to remember which lovely thing was in which place. Fortunately for us the sun has usually been shining wherever we'd visited, which always makes a somewhere look better. Here is a quick round up of the things we particularly enjoyed in some 'big name' places.

Hamburg is one of the places that suffered both from a Victorian boom and 1940s bombs.  There's nothing left of the mediaeval Hanseatic City.   It's a big city with a lot going on, a lot of characterless shopping streets but has an extremely impressive town hall, interesting docks right in the town, and a U boat.

 


When we researched Hannover we were warned that most of the interesting old buildings were destroyed in the war, but in fact we found it has a beautiful 'Altstat' of timber houses, a lot of nice Victorian buildings and was a nice place to wander around.  We kept stumbling across big 'lion and unicorn' coats of arms with 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' mottos that looked very familiar from home – Britain and Hannover shared their King for many years. It has a very well marked tourist route (red line on the pavement taking you around all the major sights), a huge flea market every Saturday next to the big, colourful modern sculptures called 'Nanas' and a pretty square where people sit out in deckchairs.





Leipzig has a beautiful town square and a fabulously ornate Art Nouveau café selling huge Austrian style gateaux.




Colditz castle is a very pretty building in its own right, but also has a really interesting museum about the ingenious escape attempts of the prisoners of war.



Some places deserve a bit more detail. Berlin is spectacular.  We can't believe we've never visited before.  There's little there that's pre-1870, but the centre is full of massive, imposing, impressive (and intimidating) buildings. A lot of it did feel a bit like Rome, which I'm sure was exactly what the Kaisers and the Führer intended.  But as you might expect from a major capital, it's buzzing with life, things are going on everywhere.



We blundered into the aftermath of the 'Occupy' protest infront of the Reichstag.  We walked through crowds flying kites on the runways of the old Templehof airport.  We strolled with the crowds and the street performers on Unter den Linden.  We spent hours tracing the route of the Berlin Wall and reading the free outdoor information boards. We visited 'Checkpoint Charlie'. We saw 'Trabi World' but decided not to go in. We also spent a couple of hours looking around the excellent DDR museum, trying to get a feel for what the country was like in that crazy period and what on earth Hoeneker and Co though they were doing.



After Northern Germany and Poland, it lifted our spirits to see the Harz Mountains appear over the horizon, which for weeks had been flat, flat, flat, broken only by wind turbines and water towers.  We climbed high enough to have a chilly night, followed by a long walk through beautiful autumnal beech woods and lunch on the terrace of a proper mountain restaurant with a view across a deep wooded valley to the wind blown peak of the Brocken.



While in the Harz region we also visited the gorgeous little town of Goslar. The architecture here is renovated medieval and the place is full of half timbered houses, beautiful slate roofs, intricate wooden carvings and many twisty, pointy spires. The old town hall has the most luxuriantly decorated council chamber and there is also a very elaborate mechanical clock in the town square, with all sorts of figures coming out of it (but none as funny as the Poznan goats).  We loved this place as it was so different to everywhere else that we'd been recently.





A bonus of travelling in a motorhome is that we have generally been able to avoid large commercial campsites. Instead we've relied on our German 'BordAtlas' book of 'Stellplatz' (like French 'Aires')  These are cheap, or often free, places to stay with a motorhome. They range from places that are like basic campsites to carparks to people's back gardens. Sometimes they have lots of facilities, sometimes just water, sometimes nothing. In a motorhome you often don't need anything except a quiet place to park. At the best of them we've had a free night's stay with water, waste dump and electricity. Very often we've found that they are in beautiful spots, by a river or lake, in a small town centre or here in Trebsen (southwest of Dresden), in the hotel carpark by the church. 



Today we're off to look around Dresden, then heading for the hills in the 'Saxon Switzerland' national park on the Czech border.

Leaving Poland

We've had a really enjoyable, albeit brief, trip to Poland.  There's plenty more to see and do but we're about to head west again, partly because life in a motorhome is getting more tricky as campsites close up for the winter, and partly because we have a parcel to collect from Lübeck post office (we hope).

After our last blog we visited the Slowinski National Park in the north of Poland, on the Baltic coast. Here we spent a lovely day walking through the forest, spotting a red squirrel with the biggest bushy tail we've ever seen, climbing the sand dunes (which apparently move so rapidly that they are “regarded as a curiosity of nature on a European scale” according to our guide book) and strolling along the beach looking for amber.



We continued our way east along the Baltic coast to Gdansk, then cut back inland to Malbork and Torun.  We had a couple of nights in the little town of Znin, then to our current location in Poznan.  The weather has got colder and wetter but we've had enough sunny intervals to get out and about, in fact most of the rain has conveniently fallen during the nights.

Gdansk is spectacular.  Richard has wanted to visit it since he read a couple of Günter Grass novels in the 1980s.  One of the novels described how the old town centre was devastated close to the end of the war, but how the proud townsfolk were determined to rebuild it just as it was (at least those who were able to stay – see below).  They've done a great job of it.

Town Hall, before and after restoration

The old centre is lined with brightly coloured and ornately decorated old houses, but they have also restored (maybe not as thoroughly) the outlying streets so they also have the tall terraces and varied gables of the old city.  It's an atmospheric maze of streets. The limitations of the restoration can be seen here and there; the old carved grave slabs on the floor of the cathedral are almost all cracked and pitted, one house has replaced the pieces they could find of an elaborately carved doorway and it makes a sorry jigsaw.



But the thing they've really been unable to restore is the society.  Grass described a thoroughly mixed and largely harmonious Polish / German city with a lively community.  In modern central Gdansk there's hardly a shop that's selling anything for anyone but the tourists, all the grave slabs in the cathedral bear German names but the only German spoken is by visitors.



Malbork used to be Marienburg, the massive brick fortress HQ of the Teutonic Knights who originally established Prussia.  It was a very important national symbol to Prussia and to newly unified Germany which lovingly restored and embellished it during the 1880s and 1890s. Unfortunately all that restoration work went to waste, as those later German nationalists led by Mr A Hitler also loved it and refused to give it up without a fight. The new Polish owners had to start all over again.  It is a spectacular monument to the power, wealth and piety of that strange band of warrior monks who spread the Good News through the Baltic at the point of a sword.



Torun was unusual amongst the places we visited, as the Red Army seems to have been able to stroll in while no-one was looking and it didn't suffer much damage.  It's a compact mediaeval town with a lot of interesting old buildings. It is also home to a large university population and has a 'young' and educated feel about it. The people we spoke to there in shops and restaurants spoke excellent English and were happy to chat to us and tell us local stories.

Torun.  The Teutonic Knights' outside toilet (seriously!)

 
Since Lübeck it's been Brick Gothic all the way.  Baltic Poland and Germany are built on alluvium, the biggest pieces of rock are glacial boulders rarely bigger than a washing machine.  It's many hundreds of miles to the nearest decent building stone, so their mediaeval houses, cathedrals and fortresses were all built of brick.  It takes some getting used to – at first glance many venerable Gothic buildings looked to us like a Victorian railway station. The lack of building stone had another strange effect – in Malbork some of the 14th century tracery and figures were made from 'artificial stone', something we associate more with the wares of 21st century garden centres.

Poznan Tourist Information gives you a free city guide which starts “While Poznan is not the first city on the travellers itinerary...”.  Cheer up guys!  It's fine!  Nothing to be ashamed of!  The old town is centred on Stary Rynek, the old market square.  This area was also badly damaged in 1945 and rebuilt as a lovely cobbled square surrounded by colourful houses and arcades, decorated with wall paintings and sgrafitto. 

At the centre there's a spectacular renaissance town hall with a clock tower that puts on a little show at noon; a bugler plays and two mechanical goats butt heads 12 times. Stella particularly liked this.

North of the centre there's an area that was redeveloped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a showpiece of modern Prussian style (yes, them again).  It might not be what the Poznan people would have chosen but they've inherited some spectacularly bonkers neo-Gothic buildings as well as a bit of neoclassical and art nouveau which we think they're now quite fond of.

Poland has had a truly horrible history that you wouldn't wish on anyone.  Everywhere we visited up until Znin had been part of Prussia up until 1945, captured by the Red Army, the population expelled and the land handed over to Poland.  I've been very aware that all those elegant Victorian apartment blocks were once occupied by Germans who in 1946 suddenly found themselves in displaced persons' camps (if they were lucky) with no prospect of going home.  They probably didn't find they got much sympathy at the time, because of what their countrymen had been up to for the previous few years.  Poland was carrying out it's first post-war census, and finding that one in three of its people had disappeared. We haven't been to the south of Poland and therefore haven't come close to its most popular tourist destination - Auschwitz. We don't really want to.

Since Poland joined the EU we've heard so many more Polish voices in Britain and seen so many more Polish products in the shops.  It's been great to be able to observe the Poles in their natural habitat!  The flatness of this country has grown a bit wearing, but it's a great place for people with dodgy knees.  It has fantastic old cities (even if some of them were built in 1953), fabulous forests and wildlife, really interesting and delicious food, and remarkably low prices. 

We're going to leave wanting more.  Krakow seems to be one of the main places to see, but we never got that far south. Wrocklau is a hidden gem, so we're told. We were very tempted to make a dash from Gdansk to the border with Belarus to visit the Bialowieza National Park, but decided it needed more time and more planning to make the best of it.

Even the climate, for our visit, has been no worse than Britain.  We have seen the odd snippet of information that reminds us that we can't afford to hang around too long (e.g. the old wooden bridge over the Wisla at Torun kept being damaged by floating ice).  The sky over Torun was still crowded with geese streaming south.



Pretty soon we're going to have to follow them.

First Impressions of Poland

Our first impressions of Denmark turned out to be wide of the mark, and our first impressions of Poland are even less likely to be accurate as the place is so big, but we'll have a go.  This is all based on a day in Szczecin and a drive from there back to the coast near Koszalin...

• There's lots of space in this corner of Poland.  We've driven for miles through fields and forests with no sign of habitation.

• The standard of driving is right down there with the Calabrians.  They're not quite as bad as the Italians in town, but their faith in God and the protecting spirit of Pope John Paul II gives them the confidence to pull off some breathtaking overtakes on the long single carriageway country roads.  (In 2009 they had 12 road deaths per 100,000 of population, compared to 3.8 for the UK).

• People are very Catholic.  We saw people in Szczecin praying in front of a statue of Pope John Paul II in the middle of a busy park.  In front of the statue there was a mound of fresh flowers and lit candles.

• It's startlingly cheap, especially when you've recently arrived from Denmark.  We had a very substantial meal in Szczecin in a small bar which cost us a total of about £5.60.  Diesel is just over £1 a litre, a loaf of good bread costs 60p.  With local products looking so cheap, imported goods must seem terribly expensive, I can't work out how there can be so many Audis about.

• The food is really good.  Back during the cold war we used to joke about pork and cabbage.  Maybe it's improved but I can report that the pork is delicious and tender and the finely shredded cabbage is crunchy, sweet and herby.  Also, the pierogi is just as delicious as Italian ravioli. The street market in Szczcin is heaped with raspberries, plums and apples that are local and properly ripe, better quality than you would find in Cardiff market.

• It's a struggle for them to get their infrastructure up to the standard in the 'old' EU.  The contrast with the former East Germany is revealing.  East Germany had a big infusion of funds from the former West Germany to help it.  From what we saw every building has been at least rendered and painted, every strategic road has been widened and resurfaced and the place looks very much like the former West.  In Poland they're having to work their way through their 'to-do' list with their own resources (plus European Regional Development Funds).  Lots of old Victorian buildings in Szczecin are dropping their façades into the street, the secondary roads are potholed and the reinforcing rods are bursting out of the bus shelter walls, although improvement work is under way everywhere we look.

• Szczecin was obviously badly damaged in the war and was repaired rather cheaply. The 'New Old Town' (as the locals apparently call it) is a jumble of surviving historical buildings and cheap prefab apartment blocks. It's not so much a beautiful town as a town with some beautiful things in it.

• When a Pole admits to speaking 'a little English' you can assume they speak it pretty well perfectly.  They must be setting a very high standard, maybe comparing themselves to Joseph Conrad.  This is fortunate for us, as Polish is a total mystery to us.

• The average haircut for a young Polish man is a little too short, giving them an unnecessarily intimidating air until you get used to it.

• Men driving trucks wear blue hillbilly dungarees, men working on the roads wear the same but orange.

• The profit to be made from picking a basket of mushrooms in the forest, then selling it from the hard shoulder, is enough to entice hundreds of elderly Poles out into the countryside at this time of year. There are also quite a few young women standing by the roadsides, but they don't appear to have mushrooms to sell.

The weather is still lovely, warm and sunny here despite a little rain overnight. We've read that usually at this time of year it is less than 10 degrees Celsius during the day so we know we're very fortunate to have chosen this year to visit. Let's hope our luck holds as we continue our journey to the Slowinski National Park and Gdansk.

Two Poms in Pomerania.

Well this is another 'catch up' blog as we've been without internet access for a while, but busy doing things nonetheless.

We had a couple of lovely days in Copenhagen. The weather was just starting to change to warm and sunny, and we found a great spot to park, by the coast and close to an S-tog (district railway) station so we could travel to and from the city on the train.

We visited most of the major sights but probably our favourite place was Cristiania – the old 'hippy' community. It was celebrating 40 years of existence when we visited, which meant that it was a lot busier, with more events than usual. We stopped to watch a visiting Italian brass band playing in the street, and after them a group of drummers and dancers – with some pale Danes struggling to be African in feathered costumes.



Next we called into the 'Grey Hall', a magnificent mid 19th century military riding hall with a spectacular wooden roof. A lecture and debate was under way, plus a bar selling vegan food and drinks, an exhibition of architectural drawings, paintings of Christiania-ites and giant jellyfish hanging from the ceiling. As the debate ended, a violin / clarinet duo started up playing gentle slow paced tunes, a grey haired hippy couple danced to it, and we shared a beer and enjoyed it.

The 'town centre' of the place is like some kind of permanent festival site, there are lots of colourful murals and graffiti, improvised businesses with hand made signs and big signs saying 'No hard drugs, no violence, no weapons, no bulletproof clothes, enjoy Christiania'.

Further out, on the narrow 17th century battlements that extend between the old moats, we found a lovely, quiet, informal place to live. There's lots of space and trees and idyllic spots overlooking the moat, and we particularly liked the funny floating art work.



Houses ranged from smart wood clad chalets with gated gardens, to converted eighteenth century military buildings, to patched up old road menders' cabins. It's nice to walk around an area that is completely car free, though there were plenty of cyclists, many riding the Christiania-built bikes with carriers at the front for holding shopping, children, dogs and friends.



After Copenhagen we decided we needed to be away from the cities for a while and so we spent the last few days in Denmark exploring the coastline and the chalky cliffs of Stevns Klint and Møns Klint. We stayed two nights at the lovely little fishing village of Rødvig, where we enjoyed the mini heatwave sweeping across Europe, walked along the cliff top, ate apple cake and watched the birds flying south. 

This is why we wanted a van with back doors.

On the island of Møn we braved the steps down to the beach (nearly 500 steps) so that we could look up at the gorgeous, glittering cliffs and walk along the beach looking for fossils. Stella didn't enjoy the steps back up, but the mouse, tiny toads, variety of small birds and a sighting of a black adder helped make the climb more bearable.







On 29th September we caught the ferry to Puttgarten in Germany, and started to make our way east along the Baltic coast. We've visited a series of the old Hanseatic trading ports, places that used their mediaeval wealth to build soaring spectacular cathedrals and imposing merchants' mansions, all in brick. We have read the term 'brick gothic' many times in tourist guides over the last few days.

Lübeck town hall

Today (3rd October) we crossed from German Pomerania into Polish Pomerania, swapped one stretch of reedy coast where we can barely understand anything for another stretch of reedy coast where we can understand nothing! We've settled this evening in a smart campsite on the outskirts of Szczecin, getting our bearings, getting some Zloty and planning to visit the city tomorrow. Fortunately the campsite owner speaks excellent English.