Time to hibernate

View from our balcony

Imagine you drive on a sunny road with a beautiful view. In front of you a tunnel is approaching. While you wonder what will happen, the jaw of the tunnel opens wide. Suddenly you are in the dark, losing orientation just following the white lines of the tracks on the ground hoping to see the light at the end of the tunnel rather sooner than later.

When we arrived in Germany the sunny warmth of the last months turned into cold and wet weather. Chilly nights and rainy days announced the end of summer. Eventually the dog refused to leave the RV, and our mood was going south.

Birds too need a rolling home.

Camp sites in Germany do not meet the standards that we experienced in Norway or Sweden. Apparently camping in these countries is a preferred lifestyle to explore nature. In Germany camping often is only a low-budget alternative for people who have no garden. This doesn't help to lift our mood.

Wifi Internet connections are rare. If provided, signals often can only be received close to the reception, with us sitting outside in the cold or rain. Even then prices for accessing the web can be incredibly high. This halted all blogging activities for the last weeks.

Time to plan for a break. After having complained enough about the weather and Germany, we decide to settle down for the winter season. We arrived in Munich just in time for the famous Oktoberfest. We opted for a holiday apartment in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the edge of the wonderful Alps, far enough from the Oktoberfest to avoid all the drunken people. Luckily we can park Ronda in front of the apartment house. So, we can enjoy a settled life without abandoning our faithful vehicle.

Depressing weather near my parents' home.

Shortly after we have arrived the rainy summer turns into a Golden October similar to the Indian Summer that is typical for this region. Being so close to impressive mountains I cannot resist having relaxing mountain hikes and spending a quiet time in nature. Time to set down the impressions of the last months and plan for the future.

Our original plan was to spend the winter in Spain living in Ronda to avoid the cold season here. Enjoying nature in Germany and the relaxed lifestyle in the vacation area of Garmisch made us change our mind to set up our home base here, and start new adventures from here. We have started searching for an apartment and hope to find one soon, so JY can plant her bulbs before the first frost arrives.

Same mountain, this time revealing the dragon's breath.

Today we booked our tickets to KL. Next will be to look for a winter home for Ronda and get her hibernated. Then we can head off to Asia.

Thanks to all readers who followed us on our exciting trip through Scandinavia. I hope you enjoyed the stories. I will interrupt this blog until we reach the end of the tunnel and face again the warm spring sun, ready to head off for new adventures.

Kreuzeck mountain overlooking Garmisch-Partenkirchen. A perfect place to contemplate.

Hanging out in the sun

From the coast we drive south inland. I was reading about it being an area for naturists. No industry or cities close by. Hardly any farming because the landscape is dominated by forests, lakes and swamps. In Malay the term ‘ulu’ would describe our destination the best, meaning ‘coming from the backwaters’.

In the tree tunnel.

I am bit worried that the infrastructure is not up to date: roads might be small or in bad condition, sign boards saying ‘you have reached the end of the internet’ might appear, or hill-billies brandishing pitch-forks or rifles against foreigners. But we are daring and want to explore Germany’s unknown regions.

My heart starts beating faster when we leave the autobahn that was recently built with money from the European Union. Surprisingly the road gets narrower and has only two instead of 4 lanes, but it is smooth and we can ride at full speed at 80kph. Left and right of the road, old trees with massive trunks line up as road markers. Sometimes a tree every 50-100m. Sometimes as close as every 20m. Tolkien comes to my mind when Treebeard and his fellow trees join the fight. The road gets so narrow that the branches of the trees touch each other and we are driving through a tunnel of trees. After each curve I am expecting a huge tree standing in the middle of the road blocking our way.

I get alarmed when traffic signs appear warning truck drivers that low-hanging branches could crush into their truck. It is late in the afternoon, the sky is grey and we have not many options to find other camp sites. So we continue carefully, hoping there are no oncoming trucks or buses. A sign post for a nearby UNESCO World Heritage Site for Old Trees tries to lure us into a narrow side road but we have hardly any longing for more forests and trees.

Usually we try to arrive at the camp of the night no later than 3pm. It is 6pm when a sign post to the destination village directs us off the main road onto a local road. Only 10km more to go. We are relieved to arrive soon when the RV starts shaking and vibrating. Obviously the local road was not part of the European renovation project and its surface made of cobble stones was already used by Napoleon´s soldiers. It will take us more than half an hour for the 10km unless we want to wreck our plates and cups, and Ronda’s hip joints.

Long-term campers and their homes.

By the time we arrive we are thoroughly shakened. The camp site at a beautiful lake rewards us for the tough ride. We can park close to a forest and have a relaxed dinner in the cold evening air.

Singing birds and warm sun rays wake me up. Umbria and I have our early morning walk and explore the camp site. A huge area with caravans and tents. Some of them look like they haven´t been moved for ages. Nicely maintained garden areas around the caravans indicate that people live here for many summers. We walk home with our freshly baked buns when a family bicycles pass us riding towards the lake. Surprisingly all of them seem to be nude.

Cleaning windows for a better view.

The sun is getting warmer when we have coffee outside. The neighbour starts cutting his hedge. After a while we realize that he is only wearing a t-shirt and slippers. We start to investigate this topic further and have a close look at other campers. Indeed many of them lie in the nude on their deck chairs or have a chit-chat in slippers only. Another fashion is to wear a neck scarf only to protect you from cross-winds.

We look at each other and wonder what to do.  I decide to follow the old advice: when in Rome do like the Romans do.

Evening at Lake Rätz

The longest ruins in Germany

The white cliffs of Rügen are a spectacular motif.

The weather in Southern Sweden got stormy and cold. So, we decided to take the ferry to the Baltic Sea coast in the former communist part of German. We left the ferry on the island of Rügen which is famous for its white cliffs. We could see them from the ferry when we approached the island. Immediately I was reminded of my art teacher who showed us a painting of the cliffs during a lesson. But the pollution during the last 200 years has done a thorough job: the white cliffs in the painting have turned grey. The joyous impression in the painting has faded and it feels like a grey and rainy afternoon. 

Art Deco building in Binz.

Besides the cliffs, the coast is well-known for its Art Deco sea resorts founded end of the 19th century when Germany still was a monarchy. We visited only one village and got an impression how it could have been a century ago, and what commercialization has done to it in the 20 years after the communist period.

Prora building up close

Far more interesting than the resort villages is a beach location called Prora. We walk on a white sand beach about 50m wide. The clear sea without kelp or algae on the left, sand dunes on the right and the horizon to the front frame the sandy stretch. We follow a path that cuts the dunes and lead to a narrow strip of pine trees behind the sand hills. After a few steps we leave the forest and face a 5-storey building that is hidden by the thick pine trees.

We look closer and see that most windows have no glass. The outside walls look greenish grey like they have suffered from much rain and wind. We look left. We look right. We cannot see the end of the building. Later on I will find out that the length of the building is nearly 4km, and was originally intended to be 4.5km! Nobody is around and suddenly we feel awkward.

How many flats are needed in the nowhere?

Memories of our trips to Johor state in Malaysia flash into my brain. We once drove along the Johor east coast during the monsoon season when a 20-storey apartment house appeared out of nowhere. A fence was still around it with a lonesome man sitting in a guardhouse. Though the windows had glass it looked very similar to the ruins in front of us. In Malaysia often construction projects run out of money when someone absconds or not enough apartments can be sold. When the cash flow ends, workers leave the site and leave behind an abandoned building site. In Germany this is very unusual because no one will start working until all the money is secured.

Indeed Prora is different. The project was started in 1934. The German Führer wanted to offer a perfect holiday place for his followers. As the Führer always planned in superlatives Prora was meant to host over 10,000 persons not far away from the villas of the rich aristocrats. The building actually won an architectural award during a World Exhibition in the 1930s, but it was never completed because another one of The Führer´s projects (World War 2) got more resources and put an end to this project.

After the war communist Germany inherited the nearly 4km long ruin. As the location was close to the border to Western Germany it was only used for military purposes. After the reunification the building was left in a bad state and nobody could live in it. It was again abandoned, because there was no business model to amortise the investments for upgrading the ruin to modern standards.

If you have any idea how to make money with 5,000 apartments in an area with one of the highest unemployment rates and a climate that allows sun-bathing for less than 3 months per year, please feel free to apply. You might not be the first because on billboard ads remodelled flats are priced at 600,000 € each, which is the price of a similar flat in Berlin, Munich or Hamburg.

I wonder how many people are willing and able to put this amount of money on the table.