Bikes, Ferry and Many, Many Trains
We’re finally underway on our European bike tour after around five weeks in the UK. Having based our trip around cycling, it’s been more than a month of family and friends. After walking the kids to school on Tuesday (10 June) morning, having a last coffee at ‘our’ local cafe (they already know our orders…), we packed our bags, loaded our bikes, got obligatory photos and set off from James and Tamara’s front door. The route from north London to Liverpool Street Train Station in central London - c. 15km - was surprisingly pleasant with cycle lanes, cycle paths and minor streets pretty much the whole way. There was the one jarringly steep hill (the clue was in the name - Upland Road) which reminded us what cycling with a laden bike is all about.
The train journey from Liverpool Street to Harwich was equally straightforward, apart from the brief flurry of activity and stress transferring bikes from one platform to another at Maningtree, via lifts and stairs in two separate shifts within the 5-minute train transfer period. Arriving at the portentously-named Harwich International Station 10 hours before our ferry sailing time, we biked into Old Harwich town. It turned out to be a sweet little port town, boasting a heyday a couple of hundred years in the past. I certainly didn’t know that Samuel Pepys was the local MP in the late 1600s, nor that the Mayflower and its captain both hailed from the town. Also, most of the Kindertranport trains arrived at Harwich in the 1930s. With sights seen and with still more time to kill, we sat on the seafront, went to a hotel for a beer, had an early meal of pizza + beer on the pier and headed back to the ferry terminal. Once we’d boarded and secured the bikes on the car deck, we dropped bags in our inside cabin, had a quick recce and the settled in for the night. So far so good.
We were woken at an ungodly 5:30AM UK time on 11 June to a broadcast of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” before getting our departure instructions. After an early morning coffee, we disembarked along with a swarm of cyclists (including a tandem Thorn bike, complete with Rohloff hub). Once we’d had a minor reorientation by a policewoman (you need to use the cycle lane, not the road…), we set off on our Komoot route to Rotterdam. It was a glorious ride along a super-smooth cycle path, along the River Rhine, ticking along at about 20km/h, the only sound being the hum of the tyres, ‘overtaking’ container vessels going upriver. Getting into the heart of Rotterdam to the train station was simple. Using it for the first time in anger, I’m completely sold on the Komoot route planning app - it’s made navigating incredibly straightforward compared to past experiences of having to guess directions coming into unfamiliar places. Once you’ve got the route set out (using its algorithms to select bike-friendly options) and saved, you can just follow the app’s path to the destination, using its map showing on handlebar-mounted smartphone.
After a late breakfast of coffee and sandwiches produced in the Netherland’s schlooowest cafe, we went into the train station’s travel centre to confirm our tickets for our multiple train legs to Copenhagen. While I’d been able to book ourselves onto the trains, the app I’d used didn’t have the facility to book the bikes. Despite a subsequent email request to Deutsche Bahn for assistance, nothing was forthcoming. As it turned out, the assistant at the travel centre was uber-helpful (and, of course, spoke impeccable English). Although she was initially doubtful of getting the bookings resolved on the day of travel, we were all pleasantly surprised to get them booked in. That is, all except the last, long, overnight leg from Hamburg and Copenhagen, where, as it turns out, bikes are not permitted. She worked out we could get as far as the German/Danish border, suggesting we could see what we could work out beyond, once we got to Hamburg.
We were able to get underway earlier than we’d originally planned and, three trains down (with multiple lift journeys to get between platforms at different stations), we’d got as far as Osnabruck. With a long ‘layover’, we were able to go to the travel centre and managed to get tickets for us and our bikes for the entire route - phew! We celebrated with a an early evening meal of very tasty donar kebab + beers, enjoyed at an outside table in late afternoon sun. Then more mooching around outside the train station in evening sun, with a wide variety of human life. We noticed with some alarm that the departures board was showing our train to Hamburg as being delayed, making our already tight transfer look increasingly unlikely. Cue more discussions at the travel centre, and more alterations to our itinerary. As it turned out, we got a train an hour earlier than our planned one - although it was about 45 minutes late itself. The platform board showed three trains departing for Hamburg - the first was scheduled to leave at 19:37, the last at 21:23 - their actual departure times were all late and all within 26 minutes from first to last. It’s not just buses that arrive all at once. Talking to some locals on the trains, we found out that almost all trains are expected to be late and they just take a rather phlegmatic attitude to it - not what I was expecting from Germans!
Anyway, we pitched up at the border town of Flensburg at around 3:00AM - about an hour late, but given the next train wasn’t until 6:05AM and we’d need to spend the intervening hours at the station, a late arrival on a warm, comfortable train was no bad thing in the circumstances. The early hours at the train station on 12 June won’t feature in our trip highlights reel, although we no did use up some time once it was sufficiently light ( c. 4:20AM) biking down to the town’s harbour. Although we couldn’t find any all-night cafes and it was surprisingly cold (down jacket and fleece gloves were worn), the harbour looked lovely in the dawn light.
The final two train legs felt increasingly ‘jet-lagged’ and we were very happy to get off the train at Ringsted, after eight separate train journeys (10 if you count the two in England). A takeaway is that, despite its world-renowned cycling culture and infrastructure (and it really is amazing), it’s ironic that it’s so awkward to get bikes on trains in the Netherlands (and to a slightly lesser extent in Germany). Train stations feature ginormous bike parks, yet taking a bike on a train is restricted to certain trains and, even then, is restricted to a limited number of bikes per train. Even the practicality of physically lifting a bike onto many trains is ungainly and unsafe, requiring lifting up several steep steps (i.e. especially difficult with laden bikes) before getting them safely secured in the carriage so they don’t fall over while the train’s moving. Getting the bikes off trains and down the steps is even more fraught. I’ve no idea why the train entrances are made so awkward for bikes. Ironically, trains in the UK are better for bikes.
First stop in Ringsted was a cafe. The price of the coffees certainly woke me up (100.70 krona = c. $25.80 for a large flat white and a double espresso). Thankfully, the breakfast food wasn’t commensurately expensive. Once feeling slightly more awake and human, we biked c. 45km to the house of our friends, Kim and Anne.
There’s a very sweet backstory to all of this… While on our big trip in 2007, I’d booked a room in a Youth Hostel in Copenhagen. On arrival, we were told that, although having booked and paid for a three-bedded room, we couldn’t stay when there only two people. No amount of increasingly less polite discussion would make the reception desk staff (nor manager) budge. We ended up cycling off in a rage to a nearby ‘campsite’ (comprising a grassy area and a water tap), where we sat for a while trying to calm down before putting our tent up. Over the horizon came a couple on bikes who asked us what we were doing. After explaining, they had a quick conversation in Danish and then told us we were coming home to stay with them. Eighteen years later, we’ve become good friends with Kim and Anne - we’ve now visited them three times, they’ve visited us in Christchurch and we’ve also meet in Edinburgh.
On the following day after a much-needed long sleep, Kim and Anne showed us some of the highlights of the local area, of which they are justifiably proud. First stop was the Stevns Klint - a World Heritage site of which I was completely ignorant. Turns out this is a 15km-long limestone sea cliff that has been used for mining of limestone and underlying flint and chalk for centuries. More significantly, though, it is recognised as the premier site in the world to see the layer of clay containing high concentrations of iridium, originating from the meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs around 65.5 million years ago. We went through an information with superb audio-visual displays - well worth a visit. Next stop was a sea cliff-top walk from a lighthouse to a partly ruined church which had lost its chancel in 1928 to cliff erosion. Ice creams followed. The day was topped off with a buffet meal at a packed local restaurant where a well known Danish band, Caper Clowns, played a semi-acoustic set. All and all, a great day.
Saturday 14 June started with a first breakfast of yoghurt and muesli (not muesli and yoghurt) at home, then a drive to a nearby little fishing port/marina at Rødvig for a second breakfast at a cafe. Then, we spent most of the day on the area’s main town of Koge. It was a lively market day and we strolled around market stalls before wandering some of the old town’s streets seeing, amongst other things, the oldest dated house in the entire country - built in 1527. All the old houses were painted in the pastel palette colours typical of Scandinavian countries. Then we strolled around the modern part of town. Somehow the Danes seem to be able to mix old with new without detracting from either.
We left Kim and Anne on Sunday 15 June. It had been a few days of chat, laughs, sightseeing around a lovely part of the world and much hygge.
The above few paragraphs all sound pretty effusive about Denmark - and there’s a reason. The more I see of the country, the more I love it. If I had to live somewhere else apart from New Zealand, I’d pick Denmark. Everything works, function is just as important as form, nothing’s flashy and there’s an aura of understated pride in things - people care for each other, the environment and things. Just as an example, Kim and Anne showed us a shelter in a local village comprising a three-sided wooden shed with two sleeping platforms (with curtain screens at the open end). They’ve been installed to provide free accommodation for passing touring cyclists, complete with a stock of bike tools on hand. It was set in a little reserve next to a pond, with two picnic tables (one under the shelter) and a fire pit with a stack of logs ready for a fireside evening. I was well impressed.
We cycled to Koge and caught a train into Copenhagen where we did a quick bike tour to the old harbour area of Nyhavn and on to the Little Mermaid statue (well, you have to don’t you?). It was all very crowded with tourists even this early in the season, so we didn’t linger, heading back to the train station for our final stop of Malmo in Sweden. Part of the reason for this final train trip was that I’d always been keen to cross the 8km Oresund bridge with 4km tunnel (no cycling allowed) since it opened on 2000, so it was fun to finally experience it. Arriving in Malmo, we had a picnic lunch in the Slottradgarden before heading off to the cabin accommodation in the back garden of a suburban house that Julie had booked the previous evening. It turned it to be perfect for our needs and a gentle start to our first proper night on the road. After 12 train journeys to get here, we’re ready to go!
Fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to write all this. I relished every word. What an epic journey on all those trains and ferry. Denmark sounds wonderful. Keep posting. Pedal on...
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