Cheese and pottery

We left a drizzly Germany for sunshine and fluffy blue clouds in Holland....only joking, it was pissing it down. Gouda was the destination, famous for its cheese and smoking pipes and its 15th century city hall.


We parked up canal side, Vanessa having kittens as her door was 1' away from the edge.

We had a coffee in the market square, it was Saturday and market day. Helpfully we missed the Tourist Information shop by minutes. In order to squeeze both Eastern and Western European maps onto the crap nav I had to delete the Western Europe points of interest; ok if you know the address of the campsite or hotel beforehand, not if you want to find something nearby. We managed to find a town map, but hotels were not marked and the camp site it was showing wasn't there when we got there. After an hour of searching and the best the locals could suggest was try the town centre, which we had, we decided to head for Delft instead and look for hotels on the way in. Having just entered the motorway we saw the Campanile Hotel as we left Gouda.

We found another Campanile hotel in Delft and settled in for the night. Delft is primarily known for its typically Dutch town centre and Delft Blue pottery. We explored in the morning.


The Oude Kerk (Old Church), nicknamed Oude Jan ("Old John"), is a Gothic church in the old city center. Its most recognizable feature is a 75-meter-high brick tower that leans about two meters from the vertical.


City Hall.

At 9.30 in the morning the place was almost deserted, but we found one cafe on the square open and settled in for coffe and toasted sandwiches. It wasn't until we had ordered that we realised it was called the Willem van Oranje, who was the great-great-grandfather of William III of Orange who ousted Charles I at the battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Deflt was a pretty place to wander around before it was time to head off.

Pfennig plucker

We headed to the town of Goslar, situated at the northwestern foot of the Lower-Saxon highlands: the Harz mountains. And so did the rain so our plastic sheet was installed.

The former Free Imperial Town of Goslar has an over-1000-year history. Probably the discovery of silver and copper ore deposits induced the Saxon and Salic emperors to establish their largest and most secure palatinate here in the 11th century. For centuries it was the favoured seat of government in northern Germany and at the same time a centre of Christianity. The spires of the 47 churches, chapels and monasteries delineated the town’s unique silhouette. It was referred to as the “Rome of the North”.


And this little chappy had a unique party trick; those are coins coming out of the cr@#k of his @r$e.

The town is also littered with statues.


Despite the rains we had a very enjoyable day wandering around the town. One for the list to come back to. We didn't fancy cooking so found a Chinese restaurant for generous helpings of bami goreng washed down with plum schnapps and a large glass of Warsteiner.

The plastic kept the worst of the rain off, except the rear compartment where Alex sleeps so he had to share with Shannon.

Onto Berlin!

First stop, Reichstag. Completed in 1894 it was the seat of parliament in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. The little tourist card I've got mentions the fire that destroyed it in 1933, but fails to mention (IIRC) that the Nazi party torched it and blamed it on the Jews which then allowed them to sweep to power. The Allies helped to raze it some more, it was reconstructed in the 1970's and then remodeled by Sir Norman Foster in 1999. The queue to enter the building, and view from the glass dome, was immense so we didn't bother.

The Brandenberg Gate was built in 1794 and is crowned with the Godess of Victory. It was marooned in no-mans-land when the Berlin Wall divided the city, but was reopened in December 1989.

After WW2 the Allies divied up Berlin. East Berlin went to the Soviets and became part of the German Democratic Republic. West Berlin was split between France, Britain and America. Checkpoint Charlie separates the American and Soviet sectors. The original was dismantled long ago, this copy was reconstructed in 2000.

At the height of the cold war the GDR were a bit miffed at all the people crossing to West Berlin to flee the socialist dream, so they built a wall in 1961. Initially just breeze blocks at the end of streets, and using building facades with blocked doors and windows to form barriers, the wall developed over the years to the graffiti'ed concrete and razorwire strip overseen by watchtowers. It stretched over 155km and contained over 200 towers, and at least 234 people lost their lives on it, the documents are a bit sketchy. At every souvenir shop you can buy your own original piece of concrete wall, each one with bright, fresh paint on it as if it was only made yesterday. Hmm.

Gendarmenmarkt is supposedly one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. One one side lies the Deutsche Dom (German Cathedral), another the Schausoielhaus (a theater) and on the third side the Franzosisiche Dom (French Cathedral) seen here.

Our route then took us to the eastern side of the Under den Linden (beneath the limetrees) looking back along to the Brandenburg Gate. There are famous theatres, libraries, museums and university building as well as the usual shops located along the mile length.

Back on the bus and Alex's choice for the afternoon, the Aquarium. It might be called the Aquarium, but it's no Sealife Centre, belonging to Berlin Zoo. The zoo is a separate ticket, but in the aquarium we also saw reptiles.

There were tame carp to stroke.

Some single cell lifeforms.

We found Nemo.

And jellyfish.

Lionfish.

And this little eel, with his 2 (or more, not sure how many) friends who were hilarious. They'd pop out of the sand and rise vertically like a periscope, look at us, and then lower themselves down again for another to do the same 6' away.

We headed back to camp and decided to eat at the camp restaurant.

Camp Kladow

We arrived at our camp in the dark and erected the tent by headlights. We were at Alt Kladow of the outskirts of Berlin.

We had 2 loads of washing to do, so the next day was spent around camp getting ourselves straight again. We had a wander round, most of the camp was for permanent caravans with very little tent areas. The Germans certainly take their camping very seriously, even the birds had caravans!

In the afternoon we made our way to one of the many lakes surrounding Berlin, and the kids had a swim in Sadener See.

Our companion, the rain, was about to show so I didn't bother though in the end it blew over quite quickly.

Going underground

We headed west from Oswiecim and into the night, finally stopping at a nice hotel at nearly 9pm. Thankfully this one took visa and had a restaurant so we settled in for the night.

Next morning we headed for the town of Gluszyca and into the Sowie Mountains to visit the one of the largest underground structures of the Third Reich. On the way we meandered through beatuful wooded glades and wound up the into the hills, passing a huge dam on the way.


The subterranean complex was started in November 1943, unfortunately no documents exist as to its purpose; maybe to house secret laboratories, for industry, experimental new weapons, or maybe underground headquarters for Hitler and his staff? Whatever the purpose it was not finished, but the scale of what was constructed is impressive. Many of the slave labourers from the nearby concentration camp at Gross-Rosen gave their lives in its construction.


They drilled parallel tunnels, one over the other, then break out the floor between them, and then broaden to the required width. A reinforced concrete lining was then cast for support. The biggest halls were 12m high by 10m wide, linked by corridors 4x4m. In total there are 8.5km of galleries (halls) and 60km of narrow gauge railway line to remove spoil. The complex included sewage systems, dams and locks and it is suspected that what has been discovered is only a small part of what was constructed and planned.



This information was gleaned from a small leaflet. Our guide did not speak any English, though he talked at great length in Polish, and the kids and I got a bit bored in places while he lectured the group before moving on to the next tunnel (Vanessa had chickened out, after I'd bought the tickets!).

One of the halls had electrical switch boxes on the wall and a pair of copper covered tables with ankle and wrist manacles and a quartet of electrodes where the head would be. Eeeek!


We had wanted to stay longer in Poland, and had found a site in the mountains which was next to the town Lido, the outside swimming pool. We found this big beastie.


Unfortunately we had threaded the regulator and jettisoned the Campingaz bottle at crap camp,and this camp had no cooking facilities, so we headed towards Germany. Shame, as southern Poland was very beautiful with helpful and friendly people and we didn't want to leave so soon.

Auschwitz & Birkenau

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No photo's, no blog for the 17th. We'd left crappy camp early and driven straight to Oswiecim having decided to give Krakow a miss as we were on a bit of downer about Poland. The industrial ribbon development in the east, a legacy of Soviet occupation, made depressing traveling on crap road surfaces and village/town immediately after village/town made good progress impossible. That and bad sleep, bad camp and food poisoning. So we headed for Oswiecim as it's known in Poland, infamous elsewhere as Auschwitz.

Auschwitz and Birkenau are only 3km apart. Auschwitz was the concentration camp and was initially set up as a prison camp for German occupied Poland on the site of deserted pre-war Polish barracks and well situated on the railway network. Birkenau, however, was designed as an extermination camp.

Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Brings Freedom, is the cynical inscription above the main gate at Auschwitz. The camp orchestra, made up of inmates, would play a march – it was easier to count the prisoners on work detail in and out each day.

The orderly brick and tile 2 story buildings at Auschwitz contain the bulk of the exhibits of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. Each has its own poignancy for different people. For me it was the room of prosthetic limbs and particularly the children's false legs, for Vanessa it was the small shoes.

Birkenau is on a much bigger scale. The main watch tower straddles the railway line, and the vista from it doesn't really signify how big it all is until you've walked around the camp and back. For every 4 people that arrived only 1 made work detail, the rest were sent straight to the gas chambers. Given that there were up to 90,000 people 'living' in the camp gives some indication of the murder on an industrial scale.

Inside one of the brick built huts, the area pictures housed c.120 people, each hut over 1,000 people.

The only exhibit at Birkenau is in the washrooms, where new arrivals were stripped of their possessions, their clothes, their hair. These are some of the photographs people left behind; of family and friends in happier times, on camping trips in the mountains or on picnics.