The Rhine

THE RHINE

Saturday 24th June.
At Eberfingen on the border between Southern Black Forest Germany and Switzerland, I head south. This doesnt take me immediately into Switzerland though as the borderline wanders an ant-line between rivers, watersheds and probably historically contested villages. After an unavoidable steep climb between Erzingen and Stetten, then I am able to enjoy the payoff; an invigorating rush down through now cold sweaty humid forest down to Herdern which sits on the edge of the Rhein, which again brings me back to the border. I cross at the Kraftwerk Rheinsfelden, a hydro-electric dam. Back on a big river again! But this time there’s no mistaking this waters origin: a beautiful peppermint green denotes its glacial birthplace. The green comes from algae that get released from within the ice as it melts.
And now I am in switzerland, another seamless formality-free borderless event. It occurs to me that as I will be passing this way again next week, I might as well stash some stuff I don’t need and hide it in a bush somewhere. About ten feet away from a prominent direction signpost, about three kilos of junk gets put in a black bag and stuffed under a tangle of ivy and covered in leaves. There you go- invisible. Splendid.
Switzerland seems even more immaculate than Germany.
Zurich is only 25kms away and on my way at Neiderglatt whilst stopping off at ‘Volg’ for bread and yoghurt shopping I have a lovely dose of super-friendly chat with the two women running the shop. One of them clearly fancies me. I’m not about to do anything about that, but I come away from the shop feeling a huge boost in my confidence. it’s been a very long time since I last had a flirty encounter. Not my type though. Thanks anyway!
I follow the nearby River Glatt (which I now realise I could have done right from the powerstation on the Rhein, but then I probably wouldnt have met the two friendly women). The Glatt takes me past Zurich Airport where an old man, clearly slightly nuts, is standing at a chainlink fence waving his outstretched arms and making loud cuckoo noises. I am not making this up.
Passing swiftly along and the river takes me right into Zurich where I meet Brian, a slightly shaggy-haired chap, also on a bike…clearly spotting a kindred spirit, he comes and says hello. We stop and chat for a good hour. He’s from Galway and has been wandering round Europe trying to find his real father. Brian was adopted but by doing DNA testing he is tracing his roots. His father is probably Armenian though he spent some time in Italy as the Armenian and Italian DNA signatures are almost the same.
It strikes me as a fascinating route to travel; meeting a lot of people and never quite knowing where the detective hunt is going to lead.
Brian was very good to recommend the good places for free meals, hand-outs from local churches and squats, various good blags you can pull and such-like. Ten years ago I would have been up for all of that, but now… I’ve moved on. I used to be very much someone that relied on hand-outs but I won’t do it any more.
I cycle about a kilometre before I find another riverside cyclepath to follow, along the River Sihl. A few kilometres out of the city I wash and camp.

Sunday 25th June.
Seeing as how I seem to be pre-occupied with imagining crazy bikes and skinny tents, it had completely escaped my attention that cycling through Switzerland would involve mountains. Very very very big ones. Not that I have a problem with this of course. In theory anyway.
The following day starts with the night’s rain re-inventing itself as embyonic wisps of cloud mist rising up from the trees as the morning sun sets about trying to bake everything dry again.
My front tyre is bald as coot. An odd English expression that doesnt make a whole lot of sense, as english frequently doesnt, even to its native speakers. ‘Bald as Kojak’s arse’ would be better. If you don’t know who Kojak is then youre too young. Go away and come back when youre older.
Anyway. My front tyre. Bald. So bald, the internal orangey layer is starting to show. So I exchange it with the less bald one that I’ve been carrying since the middle of Uzbekistan.
5kms of riverside forest trail and I reach the sloping village of Sihlbrugg. it’s all change from here. With a willfully southery heading I start to climb…as I reach the top of a long stretch of reasonable rural life, what do I see? The Alps. And thats where I seem to be heading. Oh yeah the Alps. Id forgotten about those.
The payoff is of course the stunning scenery. Real life triangular wooden farmhouses decorated with bountious blooms and twiddly woodwork, studding vast swathes of sweeping meadows backed by mixed forest. Some farmhouses are in the most ridiculously inaccessible places. Many cows idling about, large bells clanking loudly as they do so. I bet cows wish that they could take the blasted things off.
Bypassing Lake Zug via a high ridge I instead skirt around Lake Lauerzersee. From here on in everywhere is just stunning to look at. Through the day I will have ended up taking a probably rather boring amount of V-neck scenery holiday snaps. The vastness of it all is absolutely breathtaking though.
The latter end of my day takes me round the edge of Lake Lucerne. it’s nice too. Sorry I’ve run out of superlatives.
I’m in tourist country, and tourist country doesnt seem to really do supermarkets. Instead (as it is Sunday) my only options are the many cafes and restaurants where a fart in tin mug will set you back some double-digit amount. So. it’s bread and mayonnaise all day for me then.

Monday 26th June.
Setting off from Amsteg in the morning, my trajectory is set for upwards, upwards, and only upwards. Which is exhausting. I’m also not used to the higher altutide either. Nothing to do with only eating bread and mayo then.
I am aiming for Oberalppass some 45kms away and which features two sets of hairpin bends. Oh joy.
At one point myself, four Germans and two Polish chaps, all of us on bikes find ourselves utterly confused by the combination of rubbish signage and queer loops of road, railway and tunnels in all directions. We all decide to head up the hairpin bending road. Five minutes later we get stopped by three cops who tell us we can’t use the road. Which is a bit odd, as the bike route seemed to indicate that we could use the road. Instead we must either use the footpath trail (crazily angled scrambling across gravelly forest tracks.. no thanks; that would be pretty much impossible with my bike) or we can use a shuttle bus or get train.
Secretly I am very pleased. I didnt really want to spend the rest of the day cycling in a near vertical direction anyway.
On our about turn, I immediately lose the others; what with they riding on skinny naked road bikes and me trussed up like a working donkey.
I head for the nearby train station and buy my ticket. 14 euros to go 2 stops. Welcome to Switzerland. I am supposed to buy a ticket for the bike too but it seems to be the same price again. I must be using the ticket machine wrong.
The others are nowhere to be seem. They must have gone for the shuttle bus.
When it’s time for my train to go the very nice young chap tells that yes I am supposed to pay 14 euros to take my bike on the train. When we get talking, and he realises that I’ve supposed to pay 28 euros to go up the hill only because a policeman told me that I had to, he lets me take my bike for free. Yaay!
Up, up, up, the train goes off the flat and becomes somewhat funicular with a central toothed track helping us go heavenwards and preventing us from slipping back down the hill in a squealy mess. it’s a lovely ride, made all the more satisfying for not having ridden there by bike.
I really really did want to cycle the whole way, but the nasty policeman wouldnt let me. Thats my excuse anyway.
At Oberalppass Station theres the omnipresent restaurant option and a tourist information building with nobody in it. I want to go to where the Rhein actually begins but as I am increasingly finding, the Swiss don’t seem to have quite got the hang of relaying useful information in a simple intelligent way. This is definitely one feature that separates the Swiss from the Germans.
Youd have thought with being a tri-lingual nation that seems to exist largely for banking, skiing and cuckoo clocks they’d be good at directing people. No I don’t know where cuckoo clocks fits into that notion either.
By asking other tourists I find the right path. Pushing my bike up a mountain has limited appeal so I remove my money and passport and lock the thing up.
Every person I stop and ask, the Rheinquelle (the source of the Rhein) always seems to be an hours walk. No matter where I meet them.
For some silly reason I was expecting a grockle-sized amble to some nicely packaged tourist spot, easy to get to and all that.
Instead though, being considerably older than tourism, the rhein has other ideas.
I walk, and walk, and clamber, and scramble over jutting pointy unhelpful rocks alleging to be a footpath. Every time I look backwards the Alps loom mightier and mightier, the crazy skyline delves further and further back revealing more and more of incredible Switzerland.
I reach a lake, Lake Tomo. it’s very lovely but this isn’t it. A waterfall drops into it, and this is where I must follow.
I’m tired. I have no food and no protective clothing. If I had an ounce of sense, I would call this good enough and head on back down my bike.
My gps says the actual source is only 800 metres away. So, taking it steady I climb the last part towards a ridge with a large patch of snow with first pourings of Rheinwater gushing out from under its edge. I pass three beavers on the way. Never imagined them to be mountain dwellers. Well there is the lake. How on earth did they get here?! Maybe theyre otters?
Taking a few photos, I turn and head back down. Knowing I am tired and what I did to my legs in Czech I remind myself to go steady.
The clouds are turning blacker, but better to get soaking wet than twist my ankle or worse.
There are two other people on the mountain too. Some way off, but I feel better for their being here. I know they have seen me; I feel safer.
Halfway down I pass them, a French-speaking father and son taking photos of flowers. I carry on past them, aware that it could start raining at any moment.
I just about get to my bike before it really starts raining mountain rain. I’m very lucky. It could have done that when I was way up at the top. I didnt even take a waterproof coat with me. Not smart.
I get my tent up in the first available spot I find. I am currently discovering that my tent is not totally brilliant at keeping water out from the underside. Bolleaux.

Tuesday 27th June.
It’s been a very long time since I was last in a mountain region that did weather other than baking sunshine…
My tent is seeping in water from underneath. It had started to rain; suddenly and rather heavily. I had put up my tent in the first flat place I found. Which also happened to be a pond-in-waiting. What to do? Aha! I know! I strip naked, dash out into the Swiss Alipine-sized torrent, unfix the poncho from my bike where it had been camoflaging and keeping any rain out of the bikes essentially oily bits.
Three corners come undone. The last one wont. In my haste I have pulled the last corner tight and it refuses to come undone. I could carefully wiggle it about for ten minutes to free it but I’m stark bollock naked on a very wet and windy high altitude mountain and it’s bloody dark and I can’t see what I’m doing properly. I pull the poncho so hard it tears the corner off. Whatever. Slinking back, I ease the sodden poncho under my sodden tent and its sodden groundsheet. Great. Except the poncho by its very nature has a large hole built in for putting your head through… so under the collective sodden layers goes my ‘waterproof’ (it isn’t) coat.
It’s the best I can do.
It sort of does the job but the floor of my tent is wet. Disconcertingly, I can feel water running underneath the tent itself. This is survival mode rather than comfort. At times like this, having a level head helps. I play through how it will all pan out; I will have a sleepless night, I will finally doze off just as it’s getting light. Finally I sort of wake up. If it’s stopped raining and the sun is shining warmly I will put everything to out into the sun to dry. If the sun is not shining I shall wring out and pack my wet and curdled gear and head down the mountain. If it is still raining I shall pack my wet and curdled gear, head for the probably hideously expensive cafe 300 metres away and nurse my sanity over coffee and something hot to eat.
The tent doesnt seem to be floating in water particularly and the night is spent tolerably semi-awake.
In the morning the rain has stopped. Opting therefore for Plan B, I set off. The best bit about my shambolic night is that it probably doesnt matter how knackered I feel. Logically, as I am near the top of the mountain, everything else must therefore be down. And in Switzerland, down means spectacularly down.
Right from the word go I am at the top of a series of 8 hairpin bends. Good start. The nights rain is already clouding back up out of the ground. At one point I can’t see a thing but no matter. The bonus is that the weather’s so rubbish all the tourists seem to have stayed in.
Over the course of the day I eventually cover 92kms. Pretty good for a zombie cyclist. I think I must have actually pushed the pedals about 15 to 20kms, and only half of those were actually any noticeable effort.
As ever the scenery is mind-boggling. There are another couple of places where construction engineers have clearly had the time of their lives figuring out how to get concrete to span from one crazy impossible place to another. Great swirls of road, train track and tunnel wend every which way. This is probably one of the reasons why everything is so expensive in Switzerland. To pay for that concrete.
In the villages I would occasionally spot one or two old boys with gigantic beards and dungarees. I imagine life here in the past must have been pretty tough. Not that having a big beard and dungarees is necessarily an indication of hardship.
On the road during the day there are many motorbikes, lots of them Harleys. There must be more Harley Davidsons per head in Switzerland than anywhere else in the world. Same goes for Porsches and swanky Alfa-Romeos. Makes me wonder how much money I could earn stacking shelves in a supermarket. Bread is 2.50-3.80 euros a loaf. Lots I would hope.
As I pass down the valley past skiing resorts and little wooden villages, the taste of Italy rubs shoulders with the Swiss German. There are signs written either entirely in Italian or a bodge of Italian, German and even French all mixed together in the same sentance. In many villages, where the buildings are not wooden log cabin style barns, many buildings are decorated beautifully with frescoes of local scenes, lovely delicate patterning around windows and the corners where walls meet. Very pretty.
At Campagna, the Anteriur Rhein which I have been following joins with the Rheins other branch the Hinterrhein river. Both great gushing milky bodies of ice cold water both about 50 metres wide already.
I struggle with the notion that really I should follow the course of the Hinterrhein too if I am really going to be able to profess truthfully to have cycled the entire course of the Rhein. it’s a tough one.
In normal circumstances I would never want to cycle back in the direction I had just come from. And also this would be 50 kms uphill. And I aint doing uphill right now. The only conceivable way I am going to get up to Hinterrhein (a village) is to hitch-hike with the bike. And even then, knowing how my head functions, there would still be another 10kms away from the road to reach the rivers source. And the fact that the map only shows a footpath for the first 3kms of that tells me that it’s probably very difficult terrain.
I’m tired. It would be dangerous. I, truthfully, can’t be arsed. But I won’t have cycled all of the Rhein!!! No, but I will have cycled all of its longest branch. And walked to its very source, a patch of never-fading snow on a mountain ridge. I will have cycled an unbroken route on two wheels all the way from Georgia to the North Sea. I really really need to give myself a break sometimes…

Thursday 29th June.
Whilst rectifying the slow puncture in my front wheel (I suspect a skwonky valve) I encounter Peter, a Belgian cyclist looking like Batman in his rain cape, on a two week mad dash in a rough circle from home to Milano and back again. Except his town-oriented bike hasnt got low enough gears to go up hills. After spending the day cycling with hI’m I suspect that low-enough gears is not the problem but sufficient time and patience. Our man is setting himself up to cover more than 160kms a day, every day. Well you can if you want. Thats not my idea of fun.
Peter is keen to get out of Switzerland as soon as possible, preferably today. He can’t bear how much money it’s costing him. Hes spending between 15 to 35 euros every night just on campsite fees. Yoiks. He seems annoyed that I choose to ‘wild camp’ (as people irritatingly call it) almost every night. I suggest that he tries it if he is resenting spending so much money. He wont. Hes convinced that he will be robbed or worse. Normally I would view this as the common petty paranoia that seems to run so many peoples lives. Except that Peter is a customs officer. So it’s not surprising he is so doubtful when he spends his work life looking at the world in terms of criminality and deciept all day long. Nonetheless, this doesnt deter from the fact that he is actually wrong.
Peter skips through tiny Liechtenstein with me, all twenty kilometres of it, and is with me to bear witness to me breaking my Moldovan record by passing from Liechtenstein through Austria and back into Switzerland in one minute and 35 seconds. Yes!! If I had run through full tilt and not from a standing start, I am sure I could have knocked it down to one minute and 20.
From there we are soon on Lake Constance and heading west in very different surroundings. The mountains are far in the distance but the random wind and rain is still with us.
Apart from that, me and my laden donkey of a bike are way too slow for Peter, and I suspect that our friendship is already on the wane. He seems to have some difficulty dealing with the fact that my diet consists largely of bread and mayonnaise. Well yes in Switzerland it does. it’s too bloody expensive to eat properly (4 pound 50 pence for a large bag of crisps? 1 pound 50 for a finger-sized sausage? Bonkers). What Peter doesnt see is me eating dandelion leaves every day.
Anyway Peter shuttles off back to Belgium in a geographical blur a.s.a.p while I continue to take it slower. As soon as he departs I stop for the afternoon and realise that I have done roughly 70kms every day since I left Andy’s place in Czech with no break. That’s twenty days ago. And I was still knackered when I left his place.
At the the picturesque town of Stein am Rhein on the German side of the river I stop for an entire afternoon and watch the ducks and then an old Bob Hope movie (My Favorite Brunette). Stein am Rhein is covered in very old frescoes depicting hunting scenes, wining and dancing and couples snogging. And all the usual religious stuff too. Very nice.
From here the border between Switzerland and Germany wavers all over the river from side to side. Theres almost nothing to indicate when I have crossed the border. I must have done so at least three or four times from Constance/Konstanz heading west. Both being German speaking and the buildings looking the same, I literally never know which country I am in, barring the very occasional Swiss flag (or the stupidly inflated prices in the Spar supermarket).
With no borders and the nationality changing from one town to the next, I really can’t see any point in there being any shops at all in this part of Switzerland. Clearly if you are Swiss here you are just going to pop down the road to Germany where everything is at least 25 per cent cheaper.

 

Written Saturday 8th July…
At Basel, a convoluted junction of three countries, the new one being French Alsace.
Theres a welcome novelty in entering France and leaving behind the Germanics for a bit. It feels like I have been in German-speaking countries for quite a while now.
Alsace is another of those places where its mixed history is evident particularly in its place names and buildings. **LIKE WHERE?
I end up flitting back onto the German side of the Rhein again; the cycle routing is more straight forward, and then back again to visit Strasbourg which indeed is a very elegant city.
Back again to Karlsruhe. I was expecting an industrial monster of a place but it was much like an average sort of a place. I take a train to Stuttgart to visit its university which I was of the understanding had an interesting willow project where some students were attempting to build a house from trees. When I got there, it wasnt; the students responsible had left the university and so had the house-tree. It had been dug up and re-planted 180kms south near Konstanz. Bugger.
Almost a complete waste of time, except that Stuttgart is a very interesting city splodged in around hilly forest.
Back at Karlsruhe, the Rhein wiggles great loops northwards. My route is made even more wigglesome by the combination of having to negoiate a higher number of industrialised areas, the route dog-legging its way past harbours, gravel works, power plants and mysterious great corrugated hangars with puffing chimneys.
To make things wigglier still, it seems that even on what should be the straight runs, the riverside country routes between towns, it seems to be National Re-build The Cycle Route Month. All of which adds up to making getting anywhere from day to day is now taking me at least twice as long and having to ride 100kms to make a crow-flying 50kms. Maybe not quite as bad as that, but it feels like it.
Previously i’d been able to follow simple routing and cycle much longer distances without needing to either figure out often cryptic signage or have to guess because its evaporated and ive gone the wrong way. This also means im emptying my phone battery a lot quicker too.
I find a camp site at Oppenheim where I can charge up my map-enabling lumps. And the camping is free! Hooray!
A duo are playing most of the night to campers sitting out on the bar’s patio. Lots of covers of songs by The Police mostly. Excellent.
I go and wash in the river and afterwards a couple come to my tent and give me a pot of potato salad. Thats very nice of them. A simple act… but it reminds me that it doesnt take much to give someone a boost (not that I need one right now particularly).

Saturday 8th July. Actually…
At Ludwigshaven Am Rhein I manage to get thoroughly lost trying to find my way past an ariel spahetti-loop junction which succeeds in infuriating me. All I want to do is continue in a straight line and the concrete seems to be conspiring against me to go everywhere except a straight line. Grrr. Eventually I spot a pair of cyclists nonchalently making their way across the top… in a straight line… so thats the way! Usually the bikes stay on the ground unless you are crossing a river…
Twenty minutes later, another spaghetti junction, this one with much nicer vibes. Absolutely fantastic graffiti decorates a network maze of cycle tracks that curl like eddys within the loops of spiralling tarmac road. A concrete engineers design feast. Properly signposted too this time as well.
Still in Ludwig Van Longname I pass the BASF industrial complex which is about two kilometres wide and five kilometres long. Thats space enough to make a lot of tape cassettes. Or whatever else they do these days.
BASF clearly runs some sort of employee cyclist scheme, with several bike parking lots filled with hundreds and hundreds of bright red bikes. No company advertising on them, just a serial number to distinguish them from each other. Some have been hand-decorated with personalised partial paint jobs. Just for fun I park my multi-coloured bike amongst the myriad red ones and take a ‘Where’s Wally?’ photo.
Shortly after, I conscentiously allow a truck driver some space to reverse and pull away again. ‘Danke!’ he waves..
‘No problem! I’m a bus driver!’
A little frisson of LGV-PSV comeraderie passes telepathicly between us. Ooh that was nice!
Ludwig Von Longname signal more or less signals the end of routing convolutions (I hope). A long straight forward to follow bout of dyke surfing leads me to meeting a dad and his son out for a saturday bike ride. We all ride together for a bit. In two days time he and his pals are planning to ride to Amsterdam in two days. A tiny bit faster than me then.**MORE
At Mainz the route tangling finally ends and the landscape changes too. Now the rhein is at the ‘Mid-Rhein’ stage and begins its way through steep-angled hillsides that are bedecked with vineyards and have castellated manor houses and keeps perched in strategically advantagous points. Ooh im back in the spectacular. Thats nice.

Sunday 9th June.
I still have plenty of German mileage to go but I have been doing German(ic) for a couple of months now. I have become quite comfortable with the way of things. I like Germany. Its progressive and does some very sensible and lovely things that I am quite envious of. Chief of these is the frequent blocks of land with tiny wooden shacks and gardens all clustered en masse. Its like english garden allotments except they they much bigger in area and you can use your hut to do more things than merely store gardening tools. This is the future I want to see. I want to live somewhere like this. I have done since I first saw this kind of thing in Holland many years ago. Why should I be obliged to face a quarter of a million pound mortgage when I could just build a little funky shack?

Cycling into Dusseldorf I visit Rolf, whom I had met briefly in Bulgaria; him heading the other way for the Danube Delta, and he’d suggested I visit him when I got to Dusseldorf.
Dusseldorf is home to Kraftwerk and is twinned with my home town of Reading. I am to discover a little later that Dusseldorf is also twinned with Moscow. This is weird because logically Moscow should therefore be also be twinned with Reading. Really we are all triplets but thats just weird. I suspect that the two places Moscow and Reading probably share almost nothing in common except possibly for too many dodgy dark alleys and Friday night pub fights. Never been to Moscow but I bet its got some right scuzzball areas.
Anyhow. Dusseldorf also seems to not have very much in common with Reading except for they both have major rivers running past them.
Rolf is brilliant and I have never felt so welcome or looked after. Well not for long time anyway. Being at his home is a soothing balm for a cyclist about to end a gargantuan bike ride; it helps do a little mental transitting from being a terminal outdoor grubby camper and perpetual knee-wobbler to… something else. I guess. If I really have to.
Rolf, is in his sixties and a very sociable chap. Recently retired and likes to have people from all over the world stay at his home so he can pamper them. Very good at it he is too. He is also a tour guide for the city and he shows me round pointing out its history and culture.
Most exciting is the Japanese shops and the visit to the predominately Japanese part of Dusseldorf. It was lovely to re-encounter Japanese-ness again and also very useful to note that I didnt feel any great yearnings to return there which is very useful to know. I can cross that one out from my mental meanderings then.
Rolf also has Olik staying with him, a Muscovite ex-stockmarket man who has jacked in his job to start again in Germany.
His favourite films are ‘Snatch’ and ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.’ And he has a very expensive racing bike and hair like a toilet brush.
Rolf rides with me out of Dusseldorf. Soon after I encounter Turtle And Tiger Mountain which I suspect is a reference to something Taoist but in real life is a rollercoaster thing that you can walk all over. Made for some strange wibbly photographs.
Dusseldorf is close to the Dutch border and by the end of the day I am in Holland.
I have been to Holland lots of times but now that I have been to the danube delta, I can see holland now in a different light; it is a delta country, utterly chopped up and disected by water. A vast haven for waterbirds. So enormous is the imapct of water that managing to have a human land-based population seems almost incidental somehow.
Riding across holland is an exercise in headwinds again, but this time I can sense the Atlantic in the air, something about a certain richness of oxygen. Maybe its my imagination but it feels like another of the layers that form my roots.
I didnt think I was going to get from the border to Utrecht in one day, especially with the tedious wind, but at a ferry crossing a young chap I get talking to is also heading Utrecht so I ride with him when left to my devices I would have got a train. Along the way I had called Chris and Toby who I am about to visit and found myself being nominated as tomorrows midday babysitter.
This new deadline had made for something of a challenging ride. Consequently after my arrival the combined effects of my over-working ‘what-do-I-do-next?-ness’, a day of wind, riding further than perhaps I should have, a long-term shitty sugar and fat-fuelled diet and a general ‘argh-my-bike-ride-is-ending!’ all combine to leave me feeling really not quite right for about three days.
Eventually though I am just about feeling perky and I set off again to finally finish what I had set out 10 months ago to achieve.
This time not being in a mad haring rush, I find hollands little villages and the old bits of Rotterdam in particular all rather lovely. The Dutch bless ’em, don’t really have the most exciting landscape in the world in some ways. The entire country seems to be same all over. Inevitable really for a nation so tiny, but at least what they do have is really quite dramaticly different from any other country that I have ever visited.
What the dutch do have though are the most forward-thinking town planners and are continually experimenting with and re-inventing their towns and cities in the name of having a happy and safe population.
I come from a country which for all my life I have had to endure its endemic political cynicism and utter reluctance to engage with anything new that might make more sensible for people. Currently england seems to be falling further and further into disarray.
When I get to Hoek, shall I get on the ferry for England?

Tuesday 20th July.
Hoek van Holland. End of bike ride. Lunchtime.
3400kms from Bishkek Krygysztan to Kazakhstan (+760 by mashrutka cuz of being extremely dangerously frozen). 400kms from Azerbaijan to Tibilsi Georgia. 7400kms from Tbilisi to North Sea, Western Europe. Total cycling: 11200kms. Cycling across Japan makes it 14000.
Nearly at the sea and in a confusion of re-directions I am riding on an extreeemely wide pavement. Two people coming the other way decide to carry on in the middle, taking up as much space as possible to make it awkward for me to get round them, and then whinge at me for being on the pavement as I come past. They are English.
Everywhere else I have ever been in the world; I have visited 50 countries now, and almost without exception NOBODY behaves like that. NOBODY. Currently I find being English slightly embarrassing, given the debacle that is supposed to be brexit.
Bwhuugh!
After the snidey english pair I reach my ultimate point, a lovely beach with people having a nice time and the usual beach-front paraphenalia; snack bars, fish and chips, bucket and spade and beach ball shops.
A dutch middle-aged couple are peering at my bike and have noticed the ‘Kyrgyzstan to Hoek van Holland’ sign I have scrawled on some cardboard in crayon and attached to the rear of the bike. I see them and say ‘It’s my bike!’ and we have the kind of little chat you would expect to have… it was nice to have even just one person congratulate me for having ‘done it’.

In the distance to the south, the Rijn empties one of its branches into the sea. Along its length modern wind turbines turn, dock yards filled with cranes sit waiting for the next load. Ocean-going ships fresh out of Rotterdam only 20kms inland are borne out to wherever in the world business will take them next.
Closer too, parents recline on towels watching their kids messing about in the lapping waves of the North Sea.
People walk their dogs, and dogs off leads experiment with the waves.
Standing ankle deep in the salt water. Any poignant realisations? Only that I still havent figured out how to not take myself way too seriously. Which makes me laugh.
I go and celebrate my victory with some very good fish and chips. Of course. What else should an Englishman do at the seaside?