Wanderung 32

Drifting down the Donau; Edging up the Elbe

March - April 2017


 

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April 10: Bleckede to Hitzacker

Morning sun greeted us and we had a wonderful and filling breakfast in the large, beautiful, downstairs dining area of our B&B. We slowly packed our bikes, trying not to forget anything, which is a real problem at our age! Once ready, I engaged Komoot on my iPad, and we retraced our way into Bleckede to take the ferry over the Elbe to the other side. Our bicycling guide had warned us about taking the unimproved path through the mountains on the Bleckede side of the Elbe, so we had decided to switch to the other side for the day.

The wind had picked up over night, so we endured a howling headwind riding back to the ferry, but once we crossed the Elbe the wind became a tailwind that made our pedaling almost effortless for the rest of the day, which was very pleasant. On the other shore we found a big sign which reminded us that 30 years back this area used to be Communist East Germany. Being a German sign, of course, it stipulated the exact date and moment of reunification, which was November 26, 1989, at 1:15 in the afternoon!

The scenery was quite nice because we had the typical small German farmsteads, sometimes with resident storks, and the occasional "small village with church" on the inland side of the flood control dike we were riding upon. Toward the Elbe side of the dike, however, the flood plain had been turned into a wetlands conservation area and was completely undeveloped, which was quite a contrast.

The reason it had been so easy to turn the flood plain into a conservation area was that after WWII, the fortified border of West Germany with East Germany ran smack down the Elbe here, and thus the flood plain was a "no-mans land". As such, it was relatively untouched by both the East Germany and West Germany militaries and therefore kind of ran wild. So converting it to a conservation area after the reunification of Germany in 1989 did not require any relocation of people or destruction of property. In fact, we read that the grain farmers on either side of the conservation area are payed a total of 1 million Euros per year to leave grain crops unharvested over the winter so that migrating birds will have something to eat!

But there was one totally unexpected relic of the Iron Curtain era along our bike ride. We had noticed several of the old East German watch towers along our route, and at one point they had preserved not only the old watch tower, but a 100-yard section of the old border wall, too, complete with barbed wire on top. Please note that the fence with the barbed wire was on the INSIDE of the watchtower facing East Germany, NOT on the fence facing West Germany! So absolutely clearly it was their own people that the border guards were forcing to stay in the "Worker's Paradise", with the ultimate threat of death. It was a depressing but deeply moving reminder of the lengths a dictatorship will go to in order to imprison its own people.

But after that we again had clear sailing past the farms, fields, and some really wooly sheep to the ferry crossing over to Hitzacker where we had reserved a room for the night. Unfortunately, we saw no sign of a ferry! But we asked 2 ladies standing on the pier and they said it was in fact coming. I had seen it across the river, but had assumed it was just someone's old power boat. It turned out to be a people and bicycles ONLY ferry, with just enough room on the gangplank for 1 person or 1 bicycle at a time, and a total capacity of maybe 10 people and 6-8 bicycles. The awkward thing about the trip is that he wanted an exact fare in cash, and was not even willing to make change a 10-Euro bill! He said, "Well, what if all my passengers wanted me to make change for their fares? I'd have to carry an extra change purse for that!" Wow, with that attitude it was lucky that he had a monopoly on the river crossing for 15 kilometers up and down the Elbe! Shades of commercial operations in the old Worker's Paradise!

The two local ladies who were riding across the river with us finally took pity on our plight and changed our 10 Euro bill into Euro coins from which we could give our ferryman the exact fare. And his mini-ferry did successfully get us safely across the river, whereupon we pushed our bikes down the gangplanck and headed into town. Hitzacker turned out to be a really pretty city with the old town section concentrated on an island in the middle of the Jeetzel River. After having lunch, we walked around town and saw a lot of very pretty half-timber houses, some with the bricks painted in rather nice colors. We also saw intricately carved and painted wooden doors.


 

We puttered around until after 2 pm and then signed in at Hotel Zur Linde for the night, being very happy that our bikes were locked up in a nearby garage, safe and dry. Zur Linde is an old half-timber hotel with nicely renovated rooms featuring a really nice sitting area.

Needing something for our evening snack, we walked a block down to the Lidl store and bought some groceries, but when we went to check out the lights went out do to a power failure. They couldn't check us out, and everything in the area had lost power, so we just walked back to our hotel until the power came back on about 30 minutes later, and then went back to Lidl to finally check out. I was getting tired by this time, and was certainly glad that Lidl was that close to the hotel! On the way to Lidl we passed one of those curious sculptures, which looked like "Don Quixote on a motorcycle attacking a tree stump!" Looking carefully at the motorcycle, it looked like maybe a Russian imitation of an old WWII BMW motorcycle design with two horizontally-opposed, air-cooled cylinders, but that's just a guess.



Copyright 2017 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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