Rivers, Ebbs and Flows

Staring out across the river, the bright early morning sunshine was almost blinding us as we searched the horizon for the Elbe vehicle ferry at Wischhafen. We had spent the previous night less than 1km away, camping beside twenty campervans making use of a free Wohnmobilstellplatz. We weren’t really supposed to be there but we were tired after a 100km bike ride in searing heat and just needed to stop. Now we were waiting to cross one of the biggest rivers in Europe, the Elbe. It’s source is in the Czech republic and its catchment covers most of east Germany including the River Spree that runs through Berlin. Here, near to its entry into the North Sea, it is 2km wide and takes over 30 mins to cross. The ferry is a giant version of the Corran ferry near Fort William and takes all sizes of vehicle and people. Travelling with us today was a tanker lorry, a tractor with a trailer full of freshly cut grass destined for a silage clamp, holiday makers in their mobile home, commuters and a party of tiny kids from a local Kindergarten out on an end of term trip. The ferries run every 20 mins from 0430hrs through to 2300hrs. The next crossing is 25 miles upstream at Hamburg so the options are limited.

Waiting for the Elbe Ferry

In the last two weeks we have crossed most of the main rivers draining north in western Europe either by bridge or ferry. We started with the Waal/Rhine in Nijmegen, then crossed the Ems on a little one car and twenty bike ferry between Ditzum and Petkum, south of Emden. A small bridge took us over the Jade and onto the Weser (of Pied Piper fame) where we took a larger vehicle ferry to just south of Bremerhaven. After another day’s riding we were ready for the Elbe.

Sunshine on the Weser ferry

Not surprisingly, with such large catchments, these rivers are very muddy and rich in nutrients. Lovely, lovely, lovely say all the wading birds that live on the giant estuary mud flats and around the Wadden Sea. We have both waited fifty one years to see an Avocet and were extremely excited to see our first one down on the estuary grassland as we left the Netherlands. Three hours later, having seen about 40 more, we were losing interest. In German, the Avocet is called a Säbelschnäbler, the sabre sifter. It is very apt as this very distinctive white and black bird has a long, black, upturned bill much like a sabre in shape that it uses to sift through mud to find aquatic insects to eat. If you’ve not seen one, its worth a look at a ‘google’ image.

By chance, cycling from the Weser to the Elbe, we came across a different way of crossing a river. At Osten, a small village just outside Henmoor, westnorthwest of Bremerhaven, there is, what is purported to be, the world’s first transporter bridge.

The Osten Transporter Bridge

It was built at the same time as the Eiffel tower and predates the one across the Tees by a couple of years. The roadway here is suspended from solid ironwork and was the only way to cross the River Oste at this point from 1909 until 1974, when the nearby road bridge was constructed. Now it provides a tourist attraction and a way for cyclists to cross the river on the Monks Way from Bremen to Fehmarn, an island in the Ostsee. Osten also has an amazing village church. Built in the 18th century in the baroque style, its interior is light, cool and spectacularly ornate.

Osten parish church

Equipment failures has been a bit of a theme for the last couple of weeks. At the Groningen campsite, I thought I could hear rain pattering on to our tent. Jerry looked out…. no, no rain falling. The pattering continued. We tuned in our ears for where the sound was coming from. My Thermarest???? Yes, after 20 years of camping, mostly in remote places in the Scottish Highlands, my self inflating sleeping mat was delaminating. By tea time it had developed a large blister. There was nothing for it, I needed to buy a new one. Luckily for us there was a great outdoor shop in Groningen called Bever, who helped us out with a 15% discount.

My dying Thermarest

Next to go, was my bike rack. Nothing dramatic, we had stopped for afternoonses just after crossing the Weser and I looked down at my rack and wondered if the right hand strut had always had a 90 degree angle in it? Then Jerry noticed the lefthand strut had completely snapped. Amazingly, the carrier was still managing to support my two panniers and the tent poles. We cycled gingerly along to a nearby campsite and planned a trip to Bremerhaven the following day. Again, we were lucky enough to find a superb bike shop on the northern side of the city, Der Radgeber, where they had a Tubus steel carrier. The shop owner even helped us fit it after we had taken the old one off. We are now treating all our equipment very gently, as these replacements have taken a knock on our budget.

My broken rear bike rack

Other than these big expenses, we are not not doing too badly with the budget. We have been helped out enormously by friends in Britain and Belgium putting us up for free. We do our best to stay on cheaper campsites where there is a reduced rate for ‘trekkers’, we have ‘stealth’ camped a few times and we have stayed with four Warmshowers hosts, one in Britain and three on the continent. They have all welcomed us warmly, helped us with washing clothes, fed us, entertained us with stories from their lives, and given us invaluable information on their country and cycle routes. We have thoroughly enjoyed their company and are very grateful for their support of our adventure.

Breakfast with Birgit and Jürgen, Warmshower hosts

Now we are in Denmark and heading north to Frederikshavn. We are going to take the ferry from there to Oslo to see if we can still make it to the Lofoten Islands this summer. I post a photo most days on Facebook to give an update on where we are, if you would like to see this send me a friend invite.

Two months in and still smiling

Netherlands

Sorry for the small number of pictures. I’m having technology problems.

Time is a strange thing when you are cycle touring. So much happens in one day that often we get to the evening and find ourselves surprised that something happened only that same morning. Take the other day, for instance, we set off from our Warm shower hosts thatched house nestled amongst fields of barley and hay at around 9am.

Warmshower hosts Marijanne and Jan's home

The cycling was easy going and we were following the knooppunt cycle system. Here, instead of cycle routes, the Dutch number all the cycle path intersections with numbers. This means you can make up your own route by cycling from number to number, or knooppunt to knooppunt.

Knooppunt map

Maps showing the knooppunt are displayed at various points along the route. We took a photo of the map and also wrote down the string of numbers we were following.

Today we decided to ride across the National Park Dwingelderveld, an area of heathland and lochans conserved for its wildlife and habitat interest. By elevenses it was full on drizzle and we took shelter under some trees to eat our syrup waffles. 10 mins later, Jerry discovered he had a puncture in his rear tyre. This we repaired having found a shelter by a car park

Jerry repairing his puncture

Then we found that none of our pumps would pump the tyre up again. My new one, purchased in Kent, got so far and then as much air as we pumped in just came out again and we couldn’t make Jerry’s one fit! Aargh…. What to do? We were stuck out in the forest with a completely flat back tyre.

The car park belonged to the National Astronomy Centre and being resourceful people, I used Google translate to look up some key sentences then we approached a man getting out his car. “Kan je me helpen? Mijn fietspomp is gebroken. Heb je een fietspomp?” Fantastic, he understood and said “Ja”! Then he continued talking in Dutch and I was completely lost! Luckily for us, he also spoke beautiful English and asked us to follow him to reception. A bike pump was then located. Sadly, it did not fit being for a Dutch valve not a Schrader. But then a few other employees, on their way out to lunch, got involved and invited us round to the back entrance, found a car foot pump and, feeling sorry for us in the bad weather gave us hot chocolate and coffee. How wonderful strangers can be! We also learnt much about the astrological centre and its discoveries of hydrogen in outer space.

Back on our way again, we cycled north across the flat arable landscape towards Groningen, the most northerly city in the Netherlands. The drizzle continued and we took shelter under a hedge for lunch. We eventually arrived at the city campsite at 7pm, having been hooted at and told that cycling wasn’t allowed on that road and shouted at for not giving way to the right at a junction. All helpful things in their own way!

We’ve been doing a lot more camping in the Netherlands. The joys have been waking in the early dawn to hear Nightjars churring in the woods. Soon after the woodcock wake up and join in. They sound very much like frogs croaking as they fly through the woods. We sat outside the tent one evening and watched a family of nuthatch dancing up and down the trunk and branches of a tree looking for insects in the bark. Jerry spotted a black woodpecker whilst going for his morning constitutional and most mornings we have been greeted by cuckoos. The downsides have been mosquitos and ticks. Both as nasty as each other and so far their bites have been itching for a week! Jerry has been a real star on a couple of nights, when the mosquitos have been particularly bad, cooking dinner while I hide in the tent. I come up in huge white welts from the bites, Jerry is lucky enough to get only a red mark.

Eindhoven, our first Dutch city, has been a mythical place for me since my childhood, when my dad would fly off there for work meetings. Looking for the Philips lab, an elderly gentleman asked us if we needed any help. It turned out he used to work there as a translator and had sent letters to Mullards in the UK where my dad worked. He told us how to find the places we were looking for and how to find the Philips Museum.

Outside the Philips museum

The latter was highly interesting. Philips started making lightbulbs with filaments made from cotton fibres in the 1890s at a small factory in Eindhoven. They were heavily involved in the development of radio and television, telling a money strapped post war Dutch government that if they weren’t able to develop TV they would go bust. They went onto develop portable x ray machines, radio cassette players, CD discs and MRI scanners. There was plenty of opportunity for us to recognise products from our childhood.

You can’t cycle in the Netherlands for long without coming across reminders of WW2: monuments to massacred Dutch, bullet holes in buildings, sculptures to commemorate the allies advance, and echoes of the harsh and murderous treatment of Jews and others. This was particularly poignant as we travelled towards Nijmegen and Arnhem. Nijmegen was the first Dutch city invaded by the Germans being only 6km from the border. It has a strategic bridge across the Waal (or Rhine). In 1944, the allies wanted to secure this bridge before the Germans could blow it up, at the same time as capturing the bridge across the Nederijn, a little further to the north. They succeeded in doing both but made no more progress north. The people here had to wait until the end of the war to be liberated.

Groningen is a university city in the north of the Netherlands where some of the old buildings survived the wars and have been surrounded by modern architecture. We spent a very pleasant afternoon wandering around its streets with a walking guide to the city. We discovered several groups of almshouses nestled around garden courtyards. Very picturesque. They were set up in late mediaeval times as hospitals to care for the poor, sick and for travellers. The main church tour has a 64 bell carillon that plays a tune every quarter hour. This carillon playing turns out to be a major obsession in this part of the world. Canals surround the city and are full of house boats and Dutch sailing scheeps. We found a broker selling boats from barges at €59,000 up to square riggers at poa and €600,000. There were some tempting, lovely wooden masted vessels.

So tomorrow we are off to Germany. Travelling through countries for such a short length of time and then moving on to the next one is hard going. We are just starting to getting to grips with the language, rules of the road, shopping and food, the relative cost of things when we have to start all over again. Both Belgium and the Netherlands have been great for cyclists though the Dutch cities are rather mad with cyclists flying in all directions. We have learned just to keep going and wend our through pedestrians, traffic and other cyclists. The Dutch don’t wear waterproofs, they just wait under a tree until the shower passes. Bicycle maintenance is a low priority for many, with squeaking bikes and rusty chains a common sound and sight. They cycle in high heels, carry boxes and tow wheelie suitcases along side as well as giving lifts to passengers or several kids They almost all speak English (and several other languages and have been friendly and helpful. The countryside, away from the cities and farmland, is stunning heathland and lush woodland – very different to the more familiar Holland of canals, windmills and fancy gabled townhouses.

And yes, we have seen someone wearing clogs!