Home At Last... Older and Nicer Perhaps?

So - home at last.

This final blog needed to wait a few days since, as computers do, my mainframe took one look at me after three months away, 10kg the lighter and as fit as I've ever been, allowed me briefly to copy all my pictures off the camera on to the hard drive, deleting them from the memory card as I did, then crashed.

Never mind. Our friendly computer repair man here in Cirencester has sorted it out, and all is now back in action, and I can access my final frames.

It's good to be back after 4170 miles, driving carefully as instructed left, and enjoying our gorgeous Wychcroft home (see below), and the warmest of welcomes from an at first understandably nervous Sue. I was too, but within minutes, it was almost as if I'd never been away, but positively so.


What have I learned? A lot. Much of which I've already, really, written about. It's been serious fun keeping the blog, and it's been so good to see so many old and newer friends along the way, connecting and reconnecting across Europe.

My good friend and colleague at the BBC, veteran and brilliant Radio 4 Documentaries Producer Simon Elmes, asked me before I set off at Easter if I'd be interested in doing a radio programme about my Euro-journey, pegged to next year's 20th annniversary of the fall of Communism and our continent's reunification. Jonathan Marks has also wondered whether there's a programme in here.

I'm sad, but glad I have so far said no. This trip was too personally important, and it was special to be able to enjoy each day and each mile/kilometre for its own sake, without having to think (beyond the blog) of accountability to anyone else. Very un-journalistic.

But blogging and the internet made it anything but a lonely experience - something which perhaps, as a creature very much in need of constant connection, I had most feared. My little PDA and the Blackberry deal with O2 worked brilliantly and relatively inexpensively, considering how much I emailed and the roaming calls I took. I was even able to keep up a little bit of psychotherapeutic continuity with clients old and new, and now look forward to taking that up again rather more formally, and from a normal phone/in a normal consulting room.

Who's been reading this? I'm not entirely sure, but as I said in an earlier blog, you know who you are. Sue, see below, wasn't among them - but hey, she's had other exciting things to do. It wasn't about reaching huge numbers of folk. A blog more for me, really, than for you. I do know, though, that my daily readers included my very lovely daughter Katharine. Who has just got a First Class Honours degree in Drama at Exeter University. Whoop! whoop! as she would say.



So, finally, a photo of Sue, Raven, me and Wychcroft in the background. Hens and cats missing, but they too were delightfully welcoming.

Journey over. For the time being. Iberian peninsula next year? Perhaps Beijing-Katmandu? Sue has even said she might come with me and we could do that on the tandem.

But first, in August, a week on the BBC Club narrow boat in Northern Wales, then three weeks tandeming with Sue up the Loire valley in France, chateau-after-chateau. Hoping for less rain and less wind than I had cycling the upper reaches of said river in April.

With the warmest of wishes. If you've read this, that means you really did read the blog. Thanks.

Mark

Raven's Seat

And I couldn't resist either a further almost-final shot, taken in Little Venice in Central London today, of Raven's Brooks B17 leather seat after 4000 miles of intimate massage...

It looks, and feels, a whole lot more comfortable than when I set out at Easter.

Cycling into London from the English South-East, I have to say, came close to prompting a forgiveness of Belgium after all.

It was grim. Dirty, appallingly-signposted cycle tracks, ending in dead ends and glass-strewn back alleys. Unlovely in the extreme, and enough to put even the most dedicated continental cyclist off continuing a trip into deeper England.

I guess I really have been spoiled by Germany and The Netherlands, and even by France. And am look forward to going back to all those places, with tandem and Sue, soon - indeed, the Loire in August.

Indeed, both a blogging and cycling addict.

A Final Word on Climate Change

My name is Mark Brayne and I am a Blogger.

An addict, clearly. But Dorie said she'd appreciate some final, final thoughts, so, unable to resist another tipple, here's a first batch.

Climate Change. Take a deep breath.

The picture illustrates, from Dunkirk, the quandary we're in. Oil refinery in the background - the real stuff of global addiction. And windmills closer up - perhaps little more than an alibi function, too little too late?


I thought a lot on the bike about what's awaiting humankind in the coming years, and probably a lot sooner than most people realise. And came to a list of fairly straightforward conclusions.

• We, as just another species thrown up by evolution, are programmed to procreate, and multiply. We can't help that. That's the way - like other organisms from amoeba through ants right up to gorillas - we're built.
• Our problem - no great insight, this - is our gigantic, conscious brains. And the science-based ability they have given us, discovered only in the past few hundred years, to switch off evolution's normal selection survival-of-the-fittest procedures. The result? A recipe for disaster.
• Malthus in fact got it right - he just got his timing wrong. It's not that we're burning fossil fuels that's the core problem. It's that there are too many of us doing that for the planet to cope.
• As animals first and humans only second, we are not capable of regulating our numbers. And we are not capable of sufficiently limiting our consumption.
  
• The result is that, like yeast in fermenting beer, we are partying like there's no tomorrow. Which, as for yeast in beer, there won't be. The sugar/oil will run out, and we'll be killed off by our by-products - alcohol in the case of yeast, and CO2 in ours.
• It's not easy to say this, but history will probably judge medical advances to have been the key development that sealed our doom. In particular antibiotics, and the realisation, with the discovery of germs, of the importance of hygiene.
• Does science have the solution? Well, it's science and technological development that have got us into this pickle by interfering with the planet's natural systems of self-regulation. So I don't agree with those who condemn discussion of technology-based solutions (iron filings in oceans, mirrors in space, CO2 pumps and the rest) as dangerous meddling.
  
• We've already dangerously meddled, and although I'm not at all hopeful, without meddling further-but-better, we have no hope. On which click here for an outstanding article by Mark Lynas earlier this week in the Guardian, and here for a powerful piece in today's/Friday's Independent about the death sentence climate change has served on Bangladesh.
• Straying into really dangerous territory here, the truth is that liberal democracy and the liberal market economy have failed mankind. They cannot allow the difficult, unpopular decisions and leadership which could steer us away from disaster.
• Is dictatorship the answer? Past evidence is not encouraging.
  

So, as I head for home in just a few days now, do I think it's still, despite this complete Doomsday scenario, worth hoping and living and loving and longing.

You bet I do...

And Finally, Aboard the Ferry Home

As I cross the Channel from Dunkirk to Dover on my conclusive way home, this probably will be my last substantive blog post (though I might be tempted to indulge once more on climate change) .

Pic of Raven to illustrate, with rather bleak Dunkirk terminal and appropriately-named Norfolk Lines ferry (Norfolk being my home county in the UK) in the barbed-wired background.

So what have these 4000 miles (well, will be 4000 by the time I reach London tomorrow) really been about?

There are things one reveals in a blog. And there are things one doesn't. But let's say with TS Eliot (Prufrock?) that a pilgrimage is often about setting out on a journey of personal meaning and finding that the search takes you right back to where you began.

England, France (lots of it), Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Austria again, Hungary (at important length), Slovakia, Poland, Germany (again, and even more of it), Holland, Belgium (left with relief), France again and England...

Perhaps retrieving one's soul on a journey like this is a bit like the trauma therapy to whose practice I now return.

To lay to rest the ghosts, the unreal hopes of the past, the pain, the incomplete Gestalts (see much earlier blog posting....) you have to revisit and reexperience them, so you can, with luck and perhaps a touch more wisdom, move on.

Moving on of course having been the core theme of my journey with Raven - settling in over the months to a comfortable average, when on the road, of about 70-80 miles a day, or 100-120 km.

Mostly camping, with the odd youth hostel, plus welcome stays at friends homes, thrown in. It has been seriously fun, a very old dream realised.

I head for home in Cirencester, arriving Sunday afternoon after a stopover in London, feeling quite a bit fitter, in many different ways, than when I set out all those cold and sunny and rainy and wind-blown weeks ago.

To say that the world in its thousands and millions has awaited eagerly each new blog posting would be a mild exaggeration. But I know there are some of you out there who have enjoyed reading this.

And for all the profusion of professional words generated and edited over a long journalistic career, I've probably - no, definitely - enjoyed maintaining this blog and communicating with you in this way more than with anything I've ever written.

No editors to tell me to rewrite and refile. No concerns about implications in what I say for Reuters or BBC. And a closer sense of connection with you than even radio. Which considering my passion for that medium is saying something.

Doing the daily blog has given structure to my travels, and narrative-building context - a dialogue as I spin along mainly with myself, but given that's who I did the trip for, I guess that's OK.

So, a continent discovered and rediscovered, and wonderful friends, new but especially old, along the way, to whom my warmest and deepest thanks. You know who you are, and some of you also know just how important you've been.

Thanks of course (sounds like the Oscars...) also to Raven, my most trusty steed and companion, and the perfect therapist who never interrupts my flow of thought or feeling with a badly-timed or inapprropriate intervention.

She does need a new chainwheel, chain and sprocket, and a thoroughly good clean. (The attempt to change chains in Antwerp failed because the Rohloff sprocket was already too worn.) And I have finally replaced the rear brake blocks, although not yet the front.

As the sum total of maintenance needed, that's not bad for 4000 miles. So thanks also to Robin Thorn and his team at St John St Cycles in Bridgwater for designing and building the world's best trekking bike.

For all the half-way scare about an inflamed Achlles tendon, my 58-year-old physical system, including especially knees (the right one of which had keyhole meniscus surgery only last Christmas) has also held up pretty well.

And a final special thanks to someone who hasn't actually been reading the blog, busy as she is with her many other enthusiasms, namely my wife Sue.

She had the vision to encourage and support me in undertaking this venture, even though it wasn't always easy for her either.

As the saying goes, framed on our bedroom wall: A relationship that deals with truth walks always the fine line between chaos and cosmos.

So, in anticipation of a bit/even more of the latter, homeward.

And thanks for listening.


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Bye-Bye Belgium

On my last evening in Europe - well, on the European mainland, anyway - I could post some pretty pictures of Bruges, which is indeed Very Pretty, and say, Dear Belgium, all is forgiven.

But I won't, as all isn't.

To the bitter end, Belgium's road surfaces were s**t, often consisting (see pic) of lumpy concrete poured in a road-building style that went out of fashion elsewhere in Europe with Hitler's autobahns in the 1930s.

Big bumps every three metres, and not much fun for a Fietser, a Kerekpar or a bike.

Also, Bruges was EXPENSIVE. To the point of being a tourist rip-off. Four quid a beer. Evening meal of (small) portion of chips and half a (small) grilled chicken? Little change from 20 smackers.

But hey, the frites, on their own from a small roadside stall, were as brilliant as their reputation. Indeed, there's a museum in Bruges dedicated solely to Frites. Ought to be called Belgian fries, not French fries.

Also see satisfied pic, with tourist church tower in the background. Delivered to the table by the friteur with an "Enjoy Your Meal, Sir".

I did. But I enjoyed even more reaching France an hour later. No cycle tracks, but good roads, and cycle-considerate drivers.

So, Dunkirk ferry to Dover in the morning and after three months and well over 6000 kilometres, it's not just bye-bye Belgium but bye-bye continental Europe.

I'll pen some mighty pilgrimage-concluding mots on the boat, so for the moment, a few further random observations at this interesting, even a bit disconnected point on a journey I am beginning to realise I will rather miss.

For instance, how do you navigate in a country that has virtually no road signs?

The Belgians evidently don't believe in helping you to your destination. Brussels has almost no direction signs at all, and the countryside isn't much better.,

Without a compass - I chucked my old plastic one away just outside Berlin when it started giving me different Norths depending which direction I was pointing - I've developed a nifty system of using Raven's shadow as a kind of direction-finder.

Taking account of the time of day, the outline cast by bike-and-rider tells me where is East is in the morning, South at midday and West in the evening. Duhh.

It's worked brilliantly, although it does get a bit unreliable when it's pouring with rain, as it did again much of yesterday and this morning.

Still, combined with a 1:500,000 map (one cm = 5 km), it's got me to the Channel from Berlin, with only a couple of wrong turnings.

And finally for today. An amusing thought for the shrinks, or aspiring such, among my enormous readership (of not more than 10. Hi Mary, Richard, Fee, Petra, Diana, Renate, Dorie Clive.... And occasionally Mum, Agi, Claire and the kids...)

It's asparagus time in Europe, with "asperges" posted for roadside sale all over this French- and Dutch-speaking part of the continent.

Do you think someone with dyslexic tendencies who can't register other people's emotions properly, and who has an excessive appetite for fresh vegetables, might have Asparagus syndrome?

Groan.


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Wet Gent and the Colonial Past

I'm afraid Belgium - and roads/cycle tracks/pleasure-at-being-in - isn't getting any better.

The rain doesn't help. The view above is of beautiful, tourist-magnet Gent this afternoon and the charming square in front of the cathedral here. Drenched, and as seen from a café to which I have repaired for some waffles en route from Brussels to Bruges.

At least the food here is delicious - as was Tamas's Hungarian goulash last night and palatsinta pancakes shared with his partner Moni and with Oana, who did gratifyingly manage to tear herself away from the aftermath of that Irish No-vote.

Marvellous to see them, and to be immersed again briefly in the minutiae of Euro-politics as seen from Brussels.

But Saturday also provided - for the moment un-illustrated - food for thought about Belgium's, Europe's, Britain's and indeed my own family's colonial past.

My middle name is Lugard, as is that of my father, his father, and of our own eldest son Christopher. The name is that of my great-great-uncle Lord Lugard, one of Queen Victoria's most energetic and successful colonists in the late 19th century.

Lugard secured Uganda for the British empire, founded the united state of Nigeria as its first governor, was then a very successful governor of Hong Kong, and is credited with inventing Britain's then very effective system of colonial rule through local potentates.

He was also - something that's maybe in the Lugard genes - a hopeless romantic, falling entirely inappropriately in love with a married woman while a junior colonial officer in India, and then getting himself a military posting to East Africa in the hope, essentially, of being killed and thus ending the misery of his rejected love.

In failing to get himself shot, Lugard acquired for Queen Vic a large chunk of Africa, and his biography makes gripping reading - as good in parts as the Flashman novels, except that this bounder was real, and actually from all evidence a very thoughtful, decent man.

And, of course, a product of his colonial times. Times when European states squabbled very unattractively in the grab for Africa, laying the foundations while they were at it for the First, and therefore also the Second, World Wars which devastated Europe itself.

Belgium's part in that story is particularly unpleasant. King Leopold's personal grab included great swathes of what's now the Congo, and saw this country plundering Central Africa for rubber and resources, and, with the imposition of inappropriate administrative models, in turn setting the stage for the chaos and bloodshed, and genocide too, that have continued in bursts since independence in the late 1950s.

But thinking of Lugard, as I did while visiting King Leopold's extraordinary Africa museum just outside Brussels, where IS the line between benevolent intervention and the abuse and exploitation of which the museum now, rather belatedly, acknowledges Belgium to have been guilty?

The Belgian legacy in Africa is now viewed, within Africa and outside it, as very negative. Yet Lugard is still, largely, revered in Nigeria.

Was British colonialism better than that of other nations? If so, how? Discuss.

With both my parents born in British India to colonial civil servants and with Lord Lugard perched prominently in the family tree, ours is a family with British/English history, as well, perhaps, as hopeless romance, imprinted in its genes.

And indeed, as I approach the end of these three months cycling across Europe, I carry back with me a very strong sense of how closely the emotional well-being and comfort-in-their-own-national-skin of this continent's nations reflect their own parts in the turbulent and violent history of the past century-and-a-bit

World wars, colonialism, fascism, communism. Some sins acknowledged, some still denied and repressed. Some nations ready to face the past and accept responsibility where it is due. Others still finding that hard to do.

A complex and rich continent. With much more history still to be made.

The rain's stopped. Time to move on.


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Brussels at last

I can't say the experience of sorting Raven's tyre problems out has entirely redeemed Belgium, especially after 40 miles yesterday into Brussels along some of the worst cycle tracks and road surfaces I've yet encountered.



But Kevin and Joey and their bosses at Jupiter cycles in Antwerp went a long way to reassuring me that, even if Belgium is something of a failed state, it by no means has failed people.



In fact, Joey and Kevin were a) brilliant at their job (truing Raven's wheel with fine-tuned expertise), b) really decent folk, chatting away without concern for time about their passion for bikes, and, unlike the otherwise of course admirable Germans, where I was politely asked to stay out of the workshop of one bike shop, for insurance reasons, c) utterly unhung-up about me using their workspace and tools to change a tyre and a chain.



Lack of attention to detail in a state has its bad aspects, but it also has its upsides. Which is perhaps why also I'm increasingly, less than one week away now, looking forward to landing on planet England again.



Imperfect, bit messy, very backward in matters bicycle (or Fietser, as the Dutch/Flemish so delightfully call bikes), but home.



Hopes to spend a lot of time with Oana here in Brussels have been a bit stymied by the Irish inconventiently voting No in their Euro-referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Oana is utterly dedicated to Euro-affairs, and this is a BIG story here.



But we're having lunch and hopefully some dinner today, with currently Brussels-based former Hungarian language service friend Tamas Foti who is generously providing a roof over the head for a couple of nights, as he did for my daughter Katie a few weeks ago.



As in Otterndorf, preceded by Mother, two Braynes are better than one...



Change of subject.



Renate wondered why I haven't been writing in recent blogs quite so much about climate change. So, some heavy weekend thoughts.



Having spent so many hours so close to Europe's glorious nature and wildlife over the past three months, I sadly remain convinced that this is all going to end in tears.



It's tragic, as this is a good world, with wonderful nature, wonderful people, and largely with good intent.



But cycling alongisde Dutch motorways, experiencing the understandable aspirations of Eastern Europe for a share in this good life, or just being in Europe's big cities with their ant-heaps of people and, by historical standards, astonishingly high standards of living, has constantly brought home to me how completely unsustainable all this is.



Almost all of it based on fossil fuels. Which have no long-term future. Even without the impact of rising sea levels, desertification and the rest. And Europe, and humankind in general, are just carrying on as if nothing will ever stop this.



Europe is and will be, at first, more protected from the worst immediate impact of change than will be Africa, Asia or America.



But catastrophe is coming. It's just a question of how, and when. I fear deeply for the future of our amazing planet, and with it for that of my children and grandchildren.



But what a lovely planet it is.





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Belgium, and sweeping generalisations

I wish I could say I liked Belgium.

Riding over the border from six coastal days in orderly and proud Netherlands (orange everywhere for the Euro football team at the moment), and especially after Germany (of course), Belgium feels like old Eastern Europe without the hope of possible future change.

Little things like verges not being mowed; grass growing between the paving slabs on very uneven bike tracks; huge areas of industrial wasteland on the edges of Antwerp, where my GPS took me to two non-existent camp sites before I threw up my hands and came to the youth hostel.

Which is very friendly, but very tatty. Rather English, in fact.

Staying with sweeping generalisations, which have been fun on this trip as I've moved through Europe East and West, rich and emerging, I've long thought that Belgium doesn't really work as a state.

The Dutch-speakers keep to themselves, as do the French-speaking Walloons in the South. There's almost no mixing, and. as a visitor one just doesn't feel that the folk here care for their country in the way many other nations do in Europe. Good preparation, perhaps, for my own transition back to the UK.

But perhaps my moaning today has to do with the total change in weather. POURED with rain all 85 miles down from Rotterdam - with a brief interlude in Dutch Oudenbosch to allow capture of the above photo.

Not St Peter's in Rome, but a carbon half-size copy, erected on the initiative of local 19th century priest who, we were told, so loved the Church and the Pope that he wanted Oudenbosch to have a basilica of its own.

Quite impressive in fact - and a reminder of the ridiculous sums once spent on ridiculous buildings. Think also chateaux in France and Moscow metro or University. Perhaps we do learn with time - although think also Millenium Dome...

Hard to illustrate with a photo, but thinking therapy - the back end of this blog's title, which has been a bit neglected in my musings so far - I've been reminded in these last days of my mega-ride of the important work we've done and still have to do in changing journalism culture in understanding trauma.

It's rewarding work which I'm looking forward to reengaging with come the autumn. Listening and talking to journalists who've witnessed bad stuff, and giving them permission, as it were, to be human beings as well as reporters really can make a difference.

Not rocket science, but sometimes life-chaning.

Oh yes, and a first sort-of-breakdown to report. Raven's back tyre needed changing today, probably because I overinflated it when unnecessarily pumping it up in Northern Holland. But, not a bad maintenance record for nearly 4000 miles.

Brussels tomorrow, which new Dutch and Canadian friends here at the youth hostel tell me is a lot closer than I thought. A result of taking bike routes today which literally flank the motorways in Holland.

Can you imagine the Brits automatically building cycle tracks with every new motorway? We have SO far to go.


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Rotterdam Reached

Yesterday's post had one contemporary Anglodigit poised to save The Netherlands.

Today, I found the real thing.

The Dutch take their legends seriously, so here he is, Hans Brinker by name, the son of a Dutch sluicer, as they were called.

Little Hans knew that even the tiniest trickle through the dykes his father so lovingly maintained could destroy the earthworks that kept his country dry, much of it below sea level.

So behold Hans, digit inserted after he spied a leak on his way home one evening, supposedly retaining finger in place right through a cold night until a grown-up found him and did the sensible thing. Stuffed it with a handkerchief and went home for a coffee?

I hate that legend. And indeed, the statue outside the Madurodam park in The Hague, representing Holland in miniature, doesn't seem to be doing much to stop the flow, which continues to spurt resolutely out of the Astroturfed mock dyke.

Ah well. The other photo of me, in handsome profile, is inside Madurodam itself, model palace in the background.

Why? Na und? If you look very closely (I think) you may be able to see a very white streak of untanned face down the left side of my visage, just in front of the ear.

I don't like to look in the mirror too much on this trip, but I did notice at the campsite last night that wearing an appropriately-strapped bike helmet when cycling west all day for the past month has tanned the face, but not, of course, under the strap.

The right side of said visage doesn't have the same problem, and is rather less tanned in general.

So, to forestall too much shock to family and friends when I get back, I cycled today - of course, less sun - down to Rotterdam through The Hague (no Milosevic to call in on any more) and Hook of Holland (much trained through during my student days on the way to and from Moscow) sans helmet.

Daring, or what. My kids used to get bawled at by me if they cycled without helmet, and one indeed saved my life in 1997 when I crashed near Archway in London, riding stupidly over a Cola can which jammed in my front wheel.

No Cola cans today. And like 99% of Dutch cyclists, who don't generally wear helmets unless they're also in Lycra on racing bikes, I survived the 70-odd miles to Rotterdam, and hope I have evened out the facial tan just a little. Ah, the demands of fashion and appearances....

One other thought today that amused me. Dutch place names.

Nearly cycled through Monster this afternoon, but got lost between The Hague and The Hook. And definitely cycled close to Sexbierum yesterday. Works in German - the English translation would be Sexbeerum.

Tomorrow and Friday will be hard rides. I've taken it a bit easy this week, stopping for coffees and a bit of sightseeing - cf Madurodam. But Brussels is a tad further from here than I thought.

So, very early start in the morning from a mid-city Rotterdam campsite (hope they're open when I get there...) and MILES.


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Dykes and perspectives. And BBC Europe.

As I was saying before Blackberry email limits rudely stopped me saying more in that last blog (the downside of my new policy of taking photos at higher resolution)...

It's interesting how the profuse birdlife of the dykes further north - oyster-catchers, peewits, starlings, terns, crows, seagulls of all shapes, swallows, house-martins and more - ceased almost entirely once I got deep into the farming flatlands.

Pests to the farmers are of course fodder for the birds.

And the new picture, hopefully in better resolution and colour than some of the earlier ones on this blog, is really a throwback to previous posts on the awe-inspiring sea defences here, and how the perspectives can be like a school art class.

You might not be able to see it clearly in the photo, but I've been fascinated how the Dutch build their dykes - this one is at least seven metres high, and probably a good deal more.

The seaward face, if you can imagine it, starts with smallish granite blocks at the levels between high and low tide, and then a hard, wide, feature-free strip of what feels like motorway road surface, before cresting sharply with more granite blocks in pentagonal shapes like an artificial Giant's Causeway finish.

I guess the idea is to give the sea as little as possible to get a grip on when she's in a really foul mood. Bit like anti-climb paint on lamposts.

Comparing the height of the water on the sea-side and the rather lower lie of the polders on the other side, it's pretty clear how important it is to The Netherlands' survival to get this right.

I have to say, having been there on the first anniversary of Katrina, that Dutch expertise makes the levees and sea defences of New Orleans, even post-Hurricane, look like children's sandcastles.

So, closing now on Brussels, where on Friday I'm greatly looking forward to meeting up again with Oana Lungescu, the BBC's long-standing and formidably knowledgeable Europe correspondent, and stalwart member of the old Europe reporting team we used to run together at Bush House.

Ah, the European language services. Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Croatian... So much hard work over so many years, and in the end they were all shut down. Makes sense, I suppose, but they were fun while they lasted.


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There are HILLS in NL!

Yes, there is a hill in the Netherlands.

I found it today on a modest 70-mile ride south down the coastal sanddunes to the very English-feeling resort (you could almost hold a party conference here) of Bloemendaal, just north of Zandvoort.

The hill was a pretty gentle affair, but I was amused by the signs warning the Dutch - who do indeed cycle in spectacular numbers, on spectacularly safe-and-boring sit-up-and-beg monsters - of the dangers of being tipped over the handlebars.

Just 10% gradient, 1-in-10, lasting about 20 metres. Still, it was nice to have to puff again, hauling my 50 kilos of gear (bike best part of 25 kg, and luggage the same again) up a bit of a climb after so many hundreds of Very Flat Miles.

Or actually, Very Flat Kilometres. So far altogether since Easter 3555 of the former, and about 5700 of the latter.

Sounds quite a lot, I agree. The secret isn't actually to do huge mileages every day or ride very fast, but just to keep going, regardless.

Once in the rhythm, it is enormously rewarding - endorphins, adrenaline, feel-good hormones as the body just does what it was designed to do, work physically.

Of course, the slim, taut, finely-honed Adonis look will be lost very fast when I'm home (pity there's no-one here apart from Raven to appreciate it...), but it's a very good feeling, however temporary.

So, lots of sand and dunes this afternoon - including under, and increasingly inside, my tent at tonight's campsite. It's a bit like Holkham in Norfolk - our favourite family beach - only 1000 times more extensive. And some of the most pleasant cycling of the whole trip so far.

The morning, though, was less edifying. Through the polders where The Netherlands' legendary agri-business rules, whether it's potatoes (endless hectares of them, all identical and perfectly-formed) or tulips (sadly out of season, so flowers have been lacking, rather like birds, on which more in a moment.)

The amount of heavy technology being used to farm these fields and the volume of chemicals being sprayed, super-efficient, individually plant-targeted from vast cantilevers behind tractors or purpose-built engines-on-stilts, just takes one's breath away.

All agriculture heavily fossil-fuel dependent - fuel for the machinery, raw material for the fertilisers and for the pesticides. No wonder food prices are exploding. And no wonder Dutch vegetables - tomatoes especially - taste of nothing.

Thought continued in the next blog....
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The digit that saved a nation?

I wonder if the legend is true of the boy who saved the Netherlands by sticking his finger in a leaky dyke.

True or not, this country certainly has a lot of dykes, and for 85 miles today, including along the extraordinary 20-mile long Afsluitdijk across the mouth of the former Zuijderzee, I was solidly in their shadow.

At times it felt like a school art class, teaching how perspectives can be drawn with straight lines converging at one point on the page representing infinity.

I'm switching tack with pictures for these last two weeks of the ride, taking and posting fewer but in better quality.

Above single photo is therefore of one formerly small boy, Digit At The Ready, remembering how in childhod that dyke story seemed a burden of terrible power and responsibility. It's up to me to save the world. Except of course that it isn't.

Tonight's camp site, by the way, is rubbish. And I discover that virtually every restaurant and bar in NL, at least all the ones I've seen today, shut on a Monday.

So, without my usual evening beer and a charging point for my mobile, let this be a refreshingly short blog...


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The Netherlands are FLAT

Oh dear cubed. Another 100 mile day. This time round the houses on the official Dutch-German North Sea tourist route, and into quite a lot of headwind.

So, must be getting fit, or something. Perhaps it had to do with spending over nine hours, longest day yet, very happily in my comfortable, supple saddle, spinning along from Germany into the top right-hand corner of the Netherlands.

Am writing this in the bar of yet another gorgeous campsite (OK, I'll stop comparing them), half watching Germany play Poland in the Euro2008 footie. Ah, Germany have just won 2-0.

I could have taken 1000 photos in both Poland and Germany as I pedalled through of cars flying the relevant national flag, sometimes four at once, one from each window - legitimate national pride in a continent where nationalism has killed 10s of millions in the past century.

But I didn't - so as a substitute in the collection above, a flag-bedecked village street here in NL. Same idea, just orange instead of reds, whites, blacks and golds.

Tonight's camspite is on one of the extraordinary dykes that keep the Netherlands, entirely appropriately named - Low Country -, dry and the sea out.

My tour is taking me right round the edge of the Dutch coast, and I am reminded at every turn how the Dutch and the North Germans have seized their lands from the sea. At great cost.

In the 19th century, I found while still near Otterndorf, 100,000 people lost their lives in just one storm flood, at a time when the coast was much less densely populated. A huge, Tsunami-sized catastrophe.

Very many of Holland's famous windmills were of course built in the 19th century as pumps to keep the water table down in the polders - the fields - reclaimed from the sea.

See one such beautiful beast above. I wonder if the locals complained then about all these windmills in their back yards in the way today's Brits, but not Germans or Dutch, moan about wind-powered electricity generation. Very probably.

Protecting land and livelihood requires sacrifice. There's the huge financial cost of building the world's most sophisticated sea defences around the entire coast - see pic above of some of the technology.

And some communities too have to give up their homes and move. The other picture above is of where a church had to be demolished in the 1970s to make way for a new five-and-a-half-metre high sea wall.

The original gravestones repositioned on the new dyke indeed give food for thought, as global warming begins to push sea levels even higher.

Tomorrow, across the world's longest flood-protection dyke, towards Rotterdam. In two weeks, I'll be home.


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Otter's Village

OK, so tonight's campsite, just before Leer on the German-Dutch border, is also gorgeous.

Balmy post-thunderstorm evening; kids and grebes playing in the lake; refreshing post-88-mile day swim behind me; and about to order a second Bitburger beer.

This solo long-distance cycling is sometimes such hard work...

Heading now with determination towards Brussels, having spent a fascinating evening yesterday with the delightful Holst family, Jana and Henning and their three charming small sprogs (warm thanks to you all), in Sheringham's twin town of Otterndorf.

Yes, Otterndorf, or otter village, really does exist, as often, not to say obsessively, enthused about by our enthusiastic mother Audrey.

And it's every bit as lovely as Mum says it is. (Mum was by the way over here staying with the Holsts just a week ahead of me - they always say two Braynes are better than one...)

Sheringham should and can be thoroughly flattered that such a richly historic and well-ordered place would want to be friends with the Shannocks.

I wasn't quite sure how to illustrate Otterndorf for this blog, so how about some rather obvious bronze otters, outside the town hall, plus a fascinating carving of Moses with a pulpit growing out of his head in the stunning local church of St Severi. And some broomsticks.

The brooms aren't immediately recognisable, perhaps. But if you look closely, they're in brick on the façades of several Otterndorf houses, patterned thus, it is said, to protect the inhabitants against "thunder, disaster, witches and evil spirits, thunderstorms and gales and other calamities."

Sue, not sure if Otterndorf is for you.

I must say that after an evening chatting with Henning and Jana (who's very unpolitically from Erfurt, in the old GDR), I'm even more enthusiastic (it's those mother genes) for twinnings such as between Sheringham and Otterndorf, and Cirencester and Itzehoe.

Across both Western and now Eastern Europe these past two-and-a-half months (just two and a bit weeks to go now), I've found almost every town I've cycled through proudly displaying signs as you enter who else they're twinned with - from the USA to Israel, France and Britain.

The only problem is that I suspect the enthusiasm out here is often greater than the enthusiasm back home.

Henning is for example very keen on a continued schools exchange between the Gymnasium (academically-focused secondary school) where he teaches English and England, but the current response from Sheringham doesn't appear to have been very helpful.

Oh dear. Mother to the rescue??


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Elbe Idyll

The only question this morning is whether this is the loveliest campsite I have stayed in, or whether it's the loveliest campsite I have stayed in.

Delightfully named Krautsand (sorry, my German friends, but we Brits do sometimes still tease you as Krauts), the site is on the southern bank of the Elbe estuary north-west of Hamburg opposite the equally delightfully named Glueckstadt - Happytown.

See pic, giving me a chance to show off my smart new shades - annoying, actually, as they were needed to replace a better pair left behind yesterday in a campsite washroom.

An arch of stars last night and the slenderest of new moons; frogs croaking, moorhens calling in the night, swallows dipping this morning over the little lake (lovely swimming)... An Elbe idyll.

I have to say I was quite happy to get to Happytown last night, and to the Elbe ferry crossing, after a, for me, spectacularly fast wind-propelled ride west from Lubeck into the late evening past no campsite after no campsite.

What was intended as a 50-miler day turned into a 95-miler, arriving here in Krautsand only just before dark at half past eight. But well worth the enjoyable slog.

Lubeck was charming - see pic of the former Hanseatic city's dreaming spires and its dumpy, trademark city gate. The beauty augmented by rear view of Raven, with the day's washing hung over my panniers to dry...

But while a great day's ride, yesterday also illustrated - and fellow cyclists please note - how following tourist bike trails, however well-marked, slows you down.

Between Lubeck and Bramstedt I followed the official Monk's bike trail as it's called, crossing the base of the Schleswig-Holstein/Danish peninsula through woods, round fields, along dusty tracks and generally meandering.

I reckon it took me three times as long to cover that distance as it would have on the ordinary metalled roads - so was relieved to get back to using my 1:500,000 map (1cm=5km) and taking advantage of the wind again.

One of the things I've found as the trip has progressed is how much more fun I find it to cycle than to stop and sightsee, increasingly so in fact as I've got seriously fit and into the daily rhythm of 7-8 hours in the saddle.

A bloke thing, clearly.

So, on today a very gentle 30 miles or so to Otterndorf, twin town in Germany of Sheringham in Norfolk where I spent half my childhood and where mother Audrey and brother Pete still live.

An interesting coincidence - I realised yesterday that Otterndorf is only a few miles from Itzehoe, twin town of my present-and-future home in the UK, Cirencester, though I clocked the connection too late to go there before crossing the Elbe last night.

It's a small world.


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Distances

Blogger.Com is now behaving itself again (took 15 hours instead of the usual 15 seconds to post things yesterday, which led me rashly and briefly to predict an end to this blog...), so some more thoughts from northern East and now West Germany, as I head for Sheringham's partner town of Otterndorf.

Yes, another 100-mile day today, I have to admit, from Wittstock in the old GDR, where I splashed out last night on a Greek B&B and opulent dinner, to a campsite in Ratzeburg in the old West, near Luebeck.

The former East-West German border, once one of the most fortified and dangerous pieces of real estate anywhere on the planet, is now (see pic with Raven) just a nature reserve. You can scarcely see now there was ever anything other than heathland and grass.

As East German author Stefan Heym put it to me in an interview on that watershed election night in March 1990, when East Germans voted overwhelmingly for immediate unification, the GDR will end up just a footnote in history. How true.

Thinking big cycling distances, the stretch I've just done in two days, by the way, is very close to what Jutta and I did on our creaky old tandem in just one day in 1979, travelling along the only one of the old transit routes between West Berlin and West Germany along which, as not an autobahn, people then were allowed to cycle.

Not many did. The rule was you had to leave after sun-up and arrive at the other end by sundown. 240 kilometres/160 miles, in one go. We managed it, and I wrote a FOOC for the BBC.

But if my bum hurts this time (and yes, plasters have been applied in strategic places this week), t'is as nothing to the sheer agony of the last few dozen kilometres 30 years ago.

Raven and I were helped today by a very lively following wind, whipping also the hundreds of wind turbines along the route which illustrate how Eastern Germany, along with Spain, is now a world leader in alternative energy production.

I love them. They're huge - the generators on the top of the pylons are the size of gigantic sea-freight containers, 2-3 times the height of a man - and they're elegant. I cannot seriously understand why so many in the UK - hopelessly behind on this, as in so much else ecological including encouraging long-distance cycling - are against them.

Another interesting observation today, as I barrelled along for a good eight hours in the saddle (now 2400 miles on the clock since leaving home at Easter), was about architecture.

This part of Germany was building imposing and lasting red-brick churches and town fortifications long before anywhere in England, and this one village church in the picture is but one example.

Such a contrast to the awefulness of slab-concrete GDR-era industrial buildings and blocks of flats, which to their credit the locals have now at least tried to make look a little more attractive. As in picture above.

And final final thought for today. Largely fabulous cycle tracks alongside the main roads, but the downside is that officious German drivers, usually women for some reason, blast you with their horns if they think you're cycling on their carriageway when you should be on the cycle path.

Sometimes the cycle path isn't there, sometimes it's cobblestones. Sometimes I just prefer to be on the road, or haven't noticed there's a track.

But Germans - however much I love them - are indeed cliched sticklers for the rules. I 'm afraid to say I returned their hooting today with some pretty rude gestures...


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Berlin, Brandenburg and Hildebrand(t)s

(Blogger's mobile site is working again, so this won't after all be my last!)



So, you can see I really have been in Berlin.

I've walked through it before, though not with Raven of course, but it's still the oddest feeling for this old Cold Warrior to be able to cycle through the Brandenburg Gate and know that the Wall, GDR, the Soviet Union and Communism are all history.

And to see the GDR's very unlovely old Palace of the Republic, seat of the former GDR Parliament and from where I covered the last East German unification elections in March 1990, finally being pulled down is also good.

It was a grim, in many ways evil system. But the friendships that were forged and maintained then last a lifetime. The solidarity, as we used to say, of those who have to queue for everything. Die Solidarität der Schlangestehenden.

Along with Thomas and Anne now in West Berlin, it's been so rewarding to reconnect with other cathedral choir friends in the East. Thank you all for the warmest welcomes.

Herbert (formerly choir master) and his brother Jõrg Hildebrandt are pictured above at Joerg's family headquarters on a lakeside east of Berlin.

Trragically, both brothers lost their wives after the fall of communism. Inge and Herbert had also just built themselves a lovely new wooden home outside Berlin, and Jörg's formidable partner Regine had created a hugely successful career as one of the new united Germany's most popular and outspoken Social Democrat politicians.

Shared memories of personal journeys shaped by the GDR, and last night was spent very enjoyably in Chorin, in Brandenburg north-east of of the now united capital, with another set of Hildebrands, only without the T at the end, Trulla and Kurt.

Trulla was also a choir friend, and her daughter Susanna, as I've mentioned before, our absolutely most successful au pair ever, back in Barnet in 1991-92.

Like the T-Hildedbrandts, and indeed like Jutta and myself, Trulla and family were on the receiving end of intense Stasi secret police interest during the GDR days, in their case to the extent even of being on lists for preventative arrest and detention in a state of emergency being planned for the autumn of 1989.

The Turn, Die Wende as the Germans call the collapse of communism, of course got there first, and the Hildenbrands have found in their files in great and unpleasant detail what the Stasi was planning for them.

The friendships were strong, but politically, we mustn't forget what a profoundly nasty system it was.

And a final thought about what this journey has been about for me, as I ride westward today, sun-blasted and now more than 3000 miles away from my Easter start, through the beautiful, rolling, wooded and pastured Brandenburg landscape.

I'll write more later, but Sue hit the nail on the head when we spoke on Skype at the weekend.

It's a kind of soul retrieval, reclaiming and claiming parts of Self and Identity left behind at critical, exhilarating, euphoric and sometimes traumatic points across Europe over the last 30 years.

France, Bavaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Berlin... All major way-stations, looking back, on a journey of the soul, and all now, perhaps at last, being integrated into a coherent, even sense-making narrative which can be carried forward into the last third of this pilgrim's life.

So, onwards and homewards!


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Sailing in Berlin

Thomas and Anne Rost, as promised, aboard their new sailing boat on the Havel today, close in fact to where we used to live in Berlin back in 1979-81.

A lovely day sailing and mooring and swimming and lunching in very warm early summer sunshine.

Thomas and Anne were allowed, legally and after years of waiting, to emigrate from East Germany just two years before the Wall was opened in 1989, at a time when no-one could imagine the GDR coming to an end so abruptly and so soon.

With their two kids Alena and Tobias, they've made a very good life in West Berlin, and it's so lovely to meet again 10 years after I last visited them, and more than 30 years after we first met back in East Berlin. Picking up where we left off, and again bringing home the power of friendship and affection.

I'm looking forward to cycling on tomorrow north from Berlin to Chorin, to visit Trulla and Kurt Hildebrand, parents of our absolutely most succesful au pair ever Susi who was with us in Barnet in 1991-92. But if there's one city outside the UK where I could most easily live, it would be Berlin.

Civilised, modern, friendly, the very best of Germany. Of which, as you now know, I am very fond!

I warned you....

So, this is the photo I didn't dare post. Proof of the piebald impact of cycling westward only. Nicely suntanned knees and calves, and forearms, but the rest as delicate as a baby's bottom.

It's been lovely to take a short break in Berlin this weekend with old friends Herbert and Jörg Hildebrandt formerly from the East Berlin Cathedral Choir where Jutta and I used to sing 1977-81, and then a day in West Berlin (though indeed, no Wall) with Thomas and Anne Rost, also met 30 years ago through the same choir.

Berlin is such a lovely and civilised city. Quarter of a million cyclists descended today on the city from the surrounding countryside for a traffic-free day cycling on the autobahns, all official - but Thomas and Anne and I took to the water in their new sailing boat, picture shortly to be posted.

One thought I meant to mention a couple of days ago, concerning again how kind people can be.

Back in Poland, I was - I thought - yelled at by a Mercedes driver just before Czestochowa who had to break sharply coming the other way not to be bit by a large logging lorry in the slow process of overtaking me on a narrow road.

I thought the driver was blaming me for his misfortune, and made an appropriately rude gesture in his direction.

Imagine my surprise several hours later in Czestochowa itself when, suddenly, there's that same driver standing by the roadside by his car clearly wanting to talk to me.

I stop, and with my fragemented Polish quickly undestand that he wants to apologise for being misunderstood. He'd been alarmed, he said, that I was in danger, and had mis-expressed himself with his facial gestures. And was desperate to say sorry.

Apology accepted, and we must have shaken hands three times in a minute in frantic gestures of regret and forgiveness.

People are kind. I asked for some water at a house where the husband was hobbling around the garden on crutches. While his wife (of course) filled the bottles, we got talking, and it turned out he'd just had an operation for a badly-inflamed Achilles heel.

Ah ha, I thought and said. My own fate, narrowly avoided, early on this cycling odyssey. And even worse potentially than I had feared. Two weeks later, he told me, and the doctor said his whole foot would have had to come off. As it was, he was expecting not to walk properly again for several months.

Whew - lucky escape for me, as I explained how I had decided to rest over in Budapest to let my own heel heal. As it were. And then, his wife appeared, with my bottles. Full not with the usual tap water, but with ice-cool, sparkling mineral water.

People are sometimes amazing - a trip to reassure this one cyclist of the goodness of human nature.