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#SO much of the local wildlife. we’re gonna keep filling it back in. hopefully they back off. but in my experience
globalsource-blog · 7 years
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Welcome to Global Source! Rotterdam ---> Berlin part 1
First things first, welcome to my new blog! Please excuse the lack of bells and whistles (I haven’t yet got the hang of Tumblr) - I promise to make up for it with content that’ll blow your socks into next week. The premise is that this will serve as a platform for writing and photos from yours truly, as well as sharing some other stuff that I think is cool. Let me set out my stall nice and clearly: I like travel, the great outdoors, food, music, and languages – not to the exclusion of anything else, but if an inquisitive hostage-taker put a gun to my head and told me to spit out some interests, those are probably what would come out first. If you’re looking for “inspirational” (read: wet and pretentious) quotes in overdone typeface or monochrome photographs of people looking wistfully out of windows, then this blog is not for you, but I’m sure you’ll have a great time on the rest of Tumblr. Here I will post: travel diaries, veggie and vegan recipes, photography (my own and by others) and maybe the odd poem / artwork / whatever I feel like because IT’S MY BLOG AND I AM IN CHARGE.
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That’s me in a speedboat. Let’s imagine we’re all getting into the speedboat together; now imagine that this blog is the speedboat, and it’s gonna take us to brilliant places we’ve never seen, and we’re all gonna have a wicked fun time.  
With that said and done, let’s jump straight in to the first post of what will hopefully be a long and glorious parade of internet masterworks, each winning several of the highest possible awards for blog posts about tofu curry and roadside bike repairs. As some readers will already know, earlier this month myself and two good friends set out on what was perhaps not the ride of a lifetime, but certainly the biggest ride of all our lives so far. The plan was to cycle from Hook of Holland (about 30km west of Rotterdam) to Berlin. This post is part one of three that I will write about the trip in the next few days. If you look up the journey right now, then Google Maps will probably tell you it’s about 760km. This is what Donald Trump’s press team would call ‘alternative facts’. Unless one were to spend the entire journey watching themselves as a blue dot on their phone screen, micromanaging every turning and checking for the latest traffic updates, travelling right across two countries over eight days of cycling along the exact route chosen by Google is not feasible, even assuming you could keep your phone charged and that Google did not try to send you down non-existent bike paths through 50km-wide swamps (yes, this really happened – details later).
So then, we knew we had a long way to go, and that due to several factors (mostly but not limited to our lack of a map) it would probably be even longer than that. We also knew that wild camping (we had two tents with us which we stayed in every night) is illegal in Germany, and that we were passing straight through several national parks and wildlife reserves filled with deer and wild boar as well as (presumably) some heavily-armed German hunters who would know the land and move invisibly with silent and efficient footsteps through the forest twilight looking for animals (or lawbreaking English campers) to ambush. However, knowledge is power, and as well as knowing what we were up against, we knew that Berlin sits pretty much due east of Nordhorn (we had printed out enough Google Maps to get us to this town on the Dutch/German border), that cheap and wonderful supermarkets with similar names were everywhere, and that in a fix you can use a railcard to do most things a knife can do (although this does not work in reverse; this blog does not endorse using knives for discounted train tickets). With the sweaty and sensible Stan Sands and the always-up-for-it Arthur Delamare by my side, I feared nothing.
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While originally the plan had been to cycle from Amsterdam to Berlin, this had to change due to the ferries from Hull to Amsterdam being made out of solid silver and powered by burning bank notes (the only possible explanation for the cost of tickets, besides perhaps that Amsterdam is already so saturated with bicycles that it now tries to deter further encroachment by pricing the cyclists away to the south). However, given that Stan has already been to Amsterdam so many times he accidentally came second in their most recent mayoral elections, a slight change of plans and route was no big deal. In fact, to begin with this trip was not even intended to be for charity; we ended up raising around £900 for Médecins Sans Frontières, but at the outset our only motive for cycling through the Netherlands and most of Germany was good times on the road (and having an excuse to eat many, many, many pastries). Raising money for MSF didn’t change this dynamic in the slightest, but it was a nice motivator to think that every kilometre we ticked off had helped do some small amount of good in the world. 
Having travelled down to Harwich (apparently it’s near Ipswich) on the train from Manchester on Friday the 31st of March, punctuated with a short and sunny cycle through London to switch trains, we took the overnight Stena Line after getting a final shop done at the local Morrison’s. Lots of couscous, chopped tomatoes, soy sauce and some other essentials, and we were ready to eat like kings every night off the little Trangia camp stove that would be our pack-up kitchen for the next eight days. We topped the food bag up with all the salt, pepper and sugar packets we could carry back to our cabin following a thorough exploration of the ship, a big sturdy girl whose name I forget but straight and smooth she took us to the start line. The Dutch sky was grey and unsettled as we disembarked, as though it somehow knew that here, arriving bleary-eyed on April Fool’s day, were three grade-A fools about to blaze a trail of burnt rubber and missed turnings right across the country to the German border, leaving no baked goods uneaten along the way. As we set out into the drizzle towards Rotterdam with about €6.20 in change between us (there’d been no euros at two post offices in Manchester) we put money worries firmly to the side and settled into a vigorous wake-up stretch that brought us into the city nicely refreshed and warm despite the rain. At the central train station we changed our sterling into euros, had a good look at our soggy print-out map, and set out into the great Dutch unknown, heading east with smiling faces and wobbling less with each rotation of the pedals.
Our first day’s cycle started to shape up nicely as we went through and out of Rotterdam. The sun started to peek through the clouds as we navigated the city’s many bike lanes, through beautiful streets of town houses and past plenty of green spaces. Calm and proficient cyclists were everywhere, and the respect shown to them and us by drivers was unheard of in comparison to UK roads. Leaving the city we came through beautiful neighbourhoods whose houses all faced directly onto the grassy banks of the small canals on either side of the road. After a stretch of increasingly green countryside, we came to the town of Gouda, and made sandwiches with the famous local cheese, eating lunch on a man-made beach next to a canal (turns out there’s a lot of them in Holland). After lunch we pushed on towards Utrecht, a city whose architecture impressed us all and where I saw more bikes locked up in one place than I’ve ever seen in my life, including the megacities of China. 
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However, despite its modern skyline and eco-friendly commuter culture, Utrecht hides a terrible secret. In its western suburbs, by another beautiful tree-lined canal faced by stylish apartments, lives a creature that knows no fear and has a taste for human shins… Her name… Miss Oink. Yes, on the very first day on the road, before we even crossed the border into wild boar country, in little old Holland, Stan was chomped on the leg by a tame pig on a lead, for having the cheek not to hand over his apple. Being taken for a walk, looking for all the world like an ugly pink dog, Miss Oink got an apple core from me and a grape from Arthur, leaving Stan to choose between his apple and his trousers. Like Eve in the garden of Eden, he chose the fruit, and his joggers have the holes to prove it.  
We left Utrecht with not much further to go to our chosen camping spot. Already over 100km along the way, by the time we got to the small woodland park called Kleine Switzerland we were ready for a good meal and bed. A couple of beers each and a few pans full of spicy couscous stew next to our two brand-new matching Vango tents was exactly what the doctor ordered ; after some stove-side chat we all settled down into a well-earned night’s rest looking forward to the days ahead.
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////////////////////// End of part 1 //////////////////
Will they make it to the border? What terrible monsters await them in the forests of Germany? Will Stan fall in love and elope with a tall and beautiful Dutch girl? Find out in the next post, online in the next few days.
P.S. If you enjoyed this post but still haven’t donated, our JustGiving page is still live:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/standelakersey
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