Across the Iron Curtain

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Hello everyone. We have had a really cool week and are now in Leipzig. All has gone well and camping is getting a lot easier as the sun has decided to make an appearance.

It was a bit of a wrench last Sunday to leave the luxuries of Fritzlar and the hospitality of our hosts, we were only there a couple of nights but it really recharged us. And aso Gabriele and Rolf did us the service of introducing us to a weird type of mushroom called pfifferlinge which they are all mad about here.

It took a couple of days to get to Göttingen, our next stop. It is an old university town but nowadays a fairly modern looking place. Whilst there, a momentous occasion occured. We had looked around the town a bit and were in the process of cycling out of town to search for a campsite, or a convenient wood, when the heavens opened and we saw signs for youth hostel and... you can guess the rest. So literally one thousand miles into the trip we took the step of seeking refuge indoors (and was it a good decision).

Göttingen was interesting once you scratched the surface. We went up a church tower which had a staircase apparently designed by M.C. Escher. Simon described it as "better than any adventure playground" and climbing up the little wooden ladders was probably the most dangerous thing that we have done this trip. Especially since a helpful workman had left the cord of his power tools like a tripwire across the hatch of the ladder. We also went to the town museum. We were the only visitors there, to about seven staff, but there were lots of interesting bits of the town´s past, like cannonballs you could pick up. The bit about the Jewish residents was really sad, Göttingen had a long-standing community of about five hundred who were wiped out during the war. It was odd to read the accounts of neighbours denouncing them, the synagogue being destroyed, and a Christian minister of Jewish descent being arrested mid-sermon.

We then went north to the nearby Harz mountains, where the people are very fond of steam trains, witches and 18% gradient hills into their towns, maybe to keep out invading steam trains and witches. They are higher than the mountains in Snowdonia but are densely forested and less spikey. The highest peak, Brocken, at 1142m, felt like a small shopping centre, only slightly busier, when about 200 people got of the train at the summit station to look around. There is a steam train which goes to the top, but there is also a service road for the hotels at the top which we cycled up. It was actually a lot easier than we expected, though the bumpy road meant that the descent was much more painful than it could have been.

After crossing the Harz, it looks like we are now in the former East Germany. Everything suddenly looks a bit more run down than in Göttingen, for example. From there it has taken us a couple of days to get to Leipzig, where we are still camping since the weather has got a lot better since we were in the Harz. We came across the oddest camping spot of the trip so far when we tried to look for the campsite in a town nearby called Halle. On arrival, we found it to be occupied by a load of bikers (not of our type) gearing up for some kind of heavy metal party. They found it amusing that we wanted to camp there but let us do so anyway, but warned about the live music which "might go on till 12 or 1". It stopped around 4 (and started again at exactly 8:11) but we didn´t mind as were camping for free. It was quite odd though as there were only about 30 people there, not really what anyone would call a festival.

We are going to spend a couple of days here seeing loads of Bach-related stuff, and preparing for our next country- the Czech Republic. We should be getting to Prague about this time next week. Stay in touch!

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