The divide lives on

July 2, 2023

ARTENBURG- The woman from Bremen was insistent. "Stay on the west side," she urged with no sign of joking.

A lot of West Germans are like that. They have more experience than foreigners like us, of course, and back in the day they no doubt crossed into the East with the same curiosity that Easterners drove into the West. So they saw reality as it was.

Nevertheless, there is something of the Here Be Monfters that early geographers wrote on maps when they weren't sure what lay beyond distant oceans.

"Will we notice the difference?", we asked the woman.

She looked at us with a polite hint that we had asked a stupid question.

"You certainly will," she said firmly.

Hamburg - who could speak ill of a city with a cycling bar?

Churchill often gets, and certainly enthusiastically accepted, credit for coining the term "Iron Curtain." He didn't. It had been known for at least 25 years before he told an American audience that it had risen, or more logically fallen, "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic."

In reality, it had fallen from the northern tip of Finland and it continued down past Romania and on round the southern border of Bulgaria. And there it ran out into the Black Sea.

We could have started in northern Finland, therefore. And we could have ridden as far as Bulgaria, where people nod up and down to mean No and sideways to say Yes. But this is a world of limits and possibilities and starting in Hamburg suited us fine.

Hamburg isn't on the Iron Curtain, though. For that, you have to ride a bike path out through the port and industrial areas - a bike path buffeted by wind, as it happens - along the Elbe.

The path beside the Elbe leads cyclists out of the city through the port area and into the woods

The wind was firmly behind us and the day looked set fine. We rode through woods and took a ferry and listened to blackbirds. But difficulties hurt most when you're tired and so we resented being turned away from the first two campgrounds because they took only mobile homes. The extra distance to a village harbour festival with its associated camping area didn't hurt our legs so much as our feelings.

An oompah band was playing when when we got here, and a choir in leather shorts was singing and no doubt slapping its thighs. But they'd finished by the time we'd set up and so, just as unfairly, had the sausage rolls and beer.

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