Europe @ 2.4 km/h (15 page)

HAMBURG, BREMEN and the NETHERLANDS

Time spent: 28 days

Distance covered: 1929 km

Distance pushed: 231.2 km

Average speed: 2.554 km/h

Journey distance to date: 12,186 km

Soon after my Dutch sister-in-law arrived in Australia, I recall going for a spin down the Mornington peninsula one Sunday afternoon, my brother at the wheel. Els, looking out of the window at bucolic scenes reminiscent of those in her own land, asked nervously, ‘Where does it end?’ I think we had clocked up as many kilometres on that outing as she would normally have covered on annual holidays back home.

The Dutch are acutely aware of the ‘littleness’ of their land. As they are wont to say, ‘God created the Dutch, and the Dutch created Holland’. This is no blasphemy:
polders
built after the disastrous floods of 1953 extended the man-made segment of the Netherlands into the North Sea.

A personal statistic also illustrates the point. Whereas on this journey across the vast spaces of Russia and Scandinavia I had travelled 32 times as far on public transport as I had pushed my chair, the corresponding ratio in the Netherlands was just 6 km by public transport for every kilometre covered by my modest muscle power.

Not simply land-starved but the most densely packed of peoples, the Dutch have come close to perfecting the art of living together (even though they may have reached the limits of tolerance). They have achieved this not by retreating into private, high-walled worlds like their distant cousins the Afrikaners but by a sometimes confronting openness. One of the most striking sights for a visitor is the clear view afforded into people’s living rooms, kitchens and, occasionally, bedrooms. There are exceptions. An old acquaintance, Hans Binnerts of Eindhoven, whom you will meet later in this chapter, waxes indignant on this point, declaring, ‘I refuse to live in a showroom’. But he’s in a decided minority. Shades and blinds are hung in perhaps 10 per cent of homes. How drapers make a living in this country is beyond my comprehension.

The family quest that took me to Bremen did not consume all my time there. One cannot overlook that city or Hamburg, which lay in my path to the Netherlands. Seeing them both whetted my appetite for more of Germany the following month.

317 km

In the breakfast room at the Hamburg Astoria — a cheap hotel in a seedy, drug-flooded and otherwise colourful quarter of the city — I chat with two Adelaide blokes (Paul and Reno) who are members of a heavy metal band, Raven Black Night. They’re in town to play at Headbangers Ballroom, the latest incarnation of the Kaiserkeller, where the Beatles honed their act back in the early Sixties. Raven Black Night have won a $10,000 grant from Canberra (which they had to apply for three times, Paul informed me with a slight trace of hurt in his voice) ‘to promote Australian music in Germany’.

I find it amusing that Paul went to bed last night rather than walk around town because ‘it looks a bit dodgy’. Perhaps I’m just not used to the concept of a wimpish death-metal artiste.

318-321 km

This morning Steen and I conduct our own city tour, taking in an hour-long cruise along the Elbe, the canals and docklands of Hamburg, which for the past 30 years has boasted of being the world’s busiest port. Only a fraction of this city, Steen reminds me, survived Operation Gomorrah, the 1943 Allied firebombing campaign. The first monument we come to — the solitary charred tower of St Nikolai Memorial Church — makes no attempt to disguise the fact. But amid the sombre dedication to the ‘Victims of War and Persecution 1933-45’ we find the acerbic observation that this church was originally built between 1845 and 1874 ‘from plans by Sir George Gilbert Scott, London’.

Steen gives me wonderful, but belated, advice as we sip coffees opposite St Michael’s Church, where a son of J.S. Bach was music director for half a century and is buried. ‘Norwegian is very easy to speak. You just take Danish and pronounce it in Swedish.’ I must try to remember …

At the excellent Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Museum), I see the work of German expressionist Max Liebermann for the first time, as well as magnificent altarpieces dating from 1424 in a near-perfect state of preservation. And not only dyslexics will be interested to know whether you can find Dog in church. In one gallery here, I happen upon the works of more than one Dutch master who depicted dogs free to roam inside Reformation churches.

337 km

I see Nadezhda, the hotel receptionist from Archangelsk who gave me her guardian angel icon to watch over my travels, has sent a charming reply to my latest email, in which she says I’m lucky to be able to travel and meet so many nice people — amen to that — before adding, ‘What is your next destiny?’

344 km

At Bremen youth hostel, overlooking the River Spree, I meet a history teacher about to take his secondary-school charges to Beck’s Brewery for the day. Unfortunately, they lacked time to visit the World Heritage Listed city hall (Rathaus), a 600-year-old wooden structure — but the school is to be congratulated on designing a curriculum that will appeal to students far more.

358-359 km

Back to Hamburg to experience Friday night on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s famous sex strip. To get there I had to slalom between some of the 20,000 Harley Davidsons parked in St Pauli district for a ‘convention’. I settled down to dinner at a pavement café when a street fight exploded on the other side of the square. That didn’t put me off my meal — although the waiter’s attempt to add €5 to the advertised cost did — but half an hour later, as I wandered down a side street, seeing a busty blonde give a customer a blow job inside a caravan with the door wide open did interfere somewhat with my digestion.

Still, you’ve got to laugh. A music artist who plays in a bar just off the Reeperbahn bills himself as Jake the Rapper. (Really, you’d think Jake’s agent would know how to spell Reeper even if
he
didn’t.)

Outside German railway stations it may be hard to avoid being accosted by ageing skinhead beggars with pit bull terriers to support. But inside — by delightful contrast with Sweden and Denmark — service staff have repeatedly shown they need no more than ten minutes’ notice of my wish to travel and they will have a ramp at the ready. They even radio ahead to ensure one is waiting at my next destiny.

366 km

Events today go partway to demolishing the myth of German efficiency, which Germans themselves boast of. In the cosmic scale of things, I was due to incur a loss after yesterday’s moment of elation on finding that — three days after I had left my sportsbag and suitcase in the left-luggage locker at Hamburg Central Station — my missing passport had indeed slipped inside the case, averting a laborious and costly trip to The Hague for a replacement (not to mention saving my irreplaceable visa stamp from Hell).

Today, five minutes out of Hamburg en route back to Bremen, I rummage in the hood of my rucksack and find key No. 1429 to the left-luggage lockers. Fifteen minutes earlier, unable to find it when necessary, I had forked out €21 as a penalty. Now placing my hope on logic — normally a safe bet in Germany — and buoyed by the statement of the conductor, Oliver (‘I think you will get your money back’), it came as a crushing blow when Hamburg’s left-luggage office refused to let Bremen’s give me the €21 back in return for the key. My argument, that Die Bahn was a national rail network, cut no ice with Herr Timpe at the Bremen service desk, who eventually lost his temper, screaming at me ‘Empty!’ (which was puzzling, but it turned out he meant ‘Enough!’) after delivering the official ruling that €21 was actually the cost of turning the master key in the lock.
Ordnung muss sein
.

367-372 km

Further disappointment awaited me in Amsterdam, where the internal staircase warren at Bob’s Youth Hostel, at which I had booked, made it impracticable to stay there. Travelling on a budget for several months, I had vowed not to pay more than €40 for a bed, but a major European capital thronged by tourists on a Saturday night in summer made this seem a personal commitment to the impossible.

‘High season’ is a comic phrase in a city wreathed in cannabis smoke but after six hours of searching I was ready to act on the suggestion of a sympathetic receptionist at Bob’s that I head for the outskirts of town. He suggested I take the 357 night bus to Gaasperplas where right opposite the station I would find a hotel, one of a French chain, that might not be too expensive. At nearly 1.30 am I wheeled into the hotel, only to learn that price was no consideration: it was fully booked. Mercifully, the receptionist allowed me to slink into an armchair in front of the soundless TV, until dawn if necessary. About 4 am he tapped me on the shoulder. One of the guests had left early and, since the room was already paid for, I could sleep there — if I didn’t mind an unmade bed.

Next day the hotel manager took compassion on the weary traveller, and as my itinerary allowed nearly two weeks for Amsterdam we struck a deal I could afford. It dawned on me that I couldn’t have done better had I known what I was doing. Gaasperplas is 22 minutes from Centraal by high-speed suburban train; day and week passes are economical; and it adjoins extensive parkland with attractive lakes so the stresses of the city are balanced by a rustic … well, I’m not a real-estate salesman but you get the picture.

391-393 km

Haarlem is 17 km from Amsterdam — far enough, by Dutch standards, to warrant an overnight stop. The bus driver drops me 200 metres from the accessible hostel (this time I checked) but the bus has gone by the time I realise that the bus ramp has deposited me on a high-kerbed traffic island — and, now the heavens burst open, it becomes a traffic island surrounded by rising water. Adrenalin kicks in and I leapfrog onto the road. A minute later I am indoors, soaking wet but safe from the wildest weather of the journey to date.

The leaning tower of St Bavo’s Great Church has long dominated the town’s skyline. From the church noticeboard I see that during World War I more than a million Flemish came to the neutral Netherlands when Belgium was overrun. Better Flemings than lemmings, I suppose.

Call me superstitious but normally I loathe wheeling over graves. Inside St Bavo’s, though, with fifteen centuries’ worth of inscribed flagstones, the practice is unavoidable. Curiously, there is also a chapel — set aside for ‘dog-hitters’ — known as
honderslagerskapel
. The dog-hitter was a 17th-century Dutch officer authorised to confiscate and smite any hound found in church. This runs counter to the clear message from those Dutch masters I saw in the Hamburger Kunsthalle that dogs were acceptable here, presumably provided they were house (of God) trained.

400 km

18 July. 1.42 am AEST. A second email from the aspiring Mayor of Gamvik graces my inbox. Keen to know how his campaign fares, my eyes dart across the screen.

‘Hi Ken. The sun is shining and everything is Well. I have just arrived home after a weekend in Sweden. Me and two of my friends did drive to a car dragshow in this town. It’s 950 km one way … It was lots of fast cars to watch, and lots of drinking. Only one thing was wrong, it was only young girls at about twenty years old at the camping. We are drinking. But is OK, it’s not home … Marius.’

You’ll have noted that the modern politician has trouble concealing his Viking origins — which is not to rule out a conquest come September’s poll.

411 km

21 July. 1.01 am European summer time.

Even before midnight the pavements of Spuistraat, in Amsterdam’s bibliophiliac heart, had vanished beneath a long queue stretching from the mouth of Waterstone’s bookshop up to Damrak before snaking round to the right and ending halfway round the block. Tonight is Harry Potter’s last bookstand — and his Dutch fans are out in force. Three metres above the road stride witches on stilts hired by the bookshop to add authenticity — and a touch of scariness — to the event. ‘Go home, muggles,’ they scowl at us. Muggles will, eventually — they always do — but not until well past the witching hour.

Twelve-year-old Julia, two streets away, sports a black cape, painted cat’s whiskers and a broomstick. ‘She’s a good witch,’ her father assures me as Julia sweeps into a nearby café. Perhaps she’s more of a partygoer than a reader. Many in the throng are older — late teens, twentysomethings — soon-to-be ex-kids just mad about Harry.

Down the road the American Book Depot, not to be outdone, has laid in 3000 copies. Selling them all tonight would be the greatest disappearing trick in the history of magic, but they are going to try.

J.K. Rowling has added a dollop of morbid excitement to the occasion by revealing that one of the characters in this series finale perishes. ‘Who should die?’ I ask the throng corralled outside Waterstone’s window. Voldemort, they chorus. How worthy, eliminating the incarnation of evil. But that would be too neat, wouldn’t it? What about Dumbledore? I suggest. The mob pounces upon my ignorance. ‘Oh my God,’ a middle-aged man gasps, as if I had suggested skewering a black cat. ‘Don’t you know? He died in No. 6.’

At the appointed minute the front door swings open, and Elian, aged eleven — at the head of the queue since early afternoon — receives his prize. He says excitedly, ‘I won’t sleep tonight. I’m going to read the
Deathly Hallows
right through until whatever time it takes — five or six o’clock tonight.’ When you’ve just read all six of its predecessors in a week, as Elian has, sleep must seem a dreadful waste of time.