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.
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