Day 10: Köln to Duisburg

The Köln hotel was not much to write home about although it did have a giant electrically operated bottle of Nutella™ which made Dr T quite happy. Every home should have (a) a kettle, (b) a rice cooker and (c) an electrically operated Nutella™ dispenser.

This is what you want to see when you’re facing a long cycle.

Very strangely for a downmarket hotel (but with a cathedral “view”) they also had a robot waiter/waitress.

It didn’t seem to do very much except trundle around waiting for people to put stuff on the trays at the side. This seemed, to me at least, one of the least impressive uses of robotics and AI. For what it’s worth, this fake internal monologue of the Tesla robot made me laugh and laugh.

Köln continued its down-at-heel vibe as I retrieved the bikes. I nervously scuttled through underpasses rich in feces, urine and the sad broken people who had slept there. It wasn’t nice although my good friend Rosa did point out last night that one of the reasons that Köln is an ugly concrete town is because some of the readers of this blog have fathers or grandfathers who spent a great deal of effort and high explosive reducing the entire city to a moonscape of rubble. When you have to rebuild in a hurry and without much money, you get somewhere like Köln. Complaining about it is rather like complaining that Coventry is a bit ugly.

However, I still think sticking a concrete bunker camera shop on the side of the cathedral is a bit much.

Rather later than we had hoped we set off along the river. The doughnut-of-shit around Köln is extensive and varied. There are the traditional chemical works.

Lots and lots of this stuff.

Those of you with an in depth knowledge of the European car industry will already have twigged that we were going to be passing through the Ford Cologne Body and Assembly plant. It’s quite a change from castles and cutesy villages but quite interesting. Despite converting to producing EVs recently, the workforce at the factory has halved in the past decade. One does wonder how long the German industrial miracle can keep running.

It isn’t enough to have millions of cars with your name on: you need a street too?

Like so often on this trip, we negotiated railway marshalling yards, lorry parks, factories producing mysterious concrete mouldings and then we would turn a corner and we were in the countryside.

I took this video to prove that we weren’t always passing through gravel, chemical and car factories.

See! Not all industrial wastelands.

There was a lot of this between Köln and Düsseldorf. The weather was great, the cycle paths wound their way past fields and horse studs. The Bayer chemical works could have been on another planet rather than just 10km behind us.

We rolled down to the Rhine for what I believe is going to be our last crossing of the Rhine on this trip. There was a highly efficient ferry which just shuttled between both banks not waiting for people to fill up the ship.

This was a speedy ferry

On the journey into Düsseldorf, I thought about the economics of the ferry. It was about 50m to the other side and they charged €10 for a car and €3 for a bike. It took 2 minutes to get to the other side and 3 minutes to load and unload. Even with a couple of cars and 10 bikes, they’re making €50 every five minutes and there isn’t much fuel involved in drifting over the river. It’s probably not a bad business.

The villages outside Düsseldorf are firmly in the gentile suburbia zone. Nice two-story houses with neat gardens and a couple of BMW’s parked outside. The cycle paths were filled with couples and their children out cycling about doing…stuff.

Outside on of the towns we saw one of these odd tree things which you see in so many German towns.

What the hell is this?

I turned once again to my lovely German friend Rosa. This is her explanation

It’s a Vereinsbaum - a tree / wooden structure that displays the logos of all the different voluntary organisations or clubs of a particular town. Germans LOVE club activities and tend to be members of five or more different ‘Vereine’ - running, cycling, hiking, football, etc clubs. On that particular picture there are also a number of signs of carnival clubs (the ones with the clowns) 🤡, a particular feature of the Rhine region 🥳 (I have it on good authority though that people tend to be members of various Vereine, but mostly meet up to drink beer 🍻 and socialise… much like certain ‘book clubs’ 😄).

And so now you know. Thanks Rosa!

There was a little bit of cycling flagging going on so we stopped at the first place in Düsseldorf that had coffee, coke and food. It was a golf club which appeared to have hosted some major German championship but, stuck on a meander of the Rhine in the middle of Düsseldorf, I doubt Donald Trump is queuing up to buy it.

Düsseldorf was buzzing and busy. We took a photograph of the inevitable big tower (Rheinturm) which serendipitously had the Goodyear blimp floating by.

If only it had been a Zeppelin!

We noticed more and more cyclists joining our route. All of them wearing red shirts with Düsseldorf 95 on the back of them. Before long there were thousands of us all riding along the Rhine in a huge red-shirted convoy on the way to the Düsseldorf 1895 match that afternoon.  The crowd was good humoured and possibly had a more equal gender balance than one might see in an equivalent UK football crowd.

In a scene which could only happen in Germany, we watched a ferry boat load up with fitness fanatics who then proceeded to do a spin class on the boat as they floated down the Rhine.

Surreal is an overused word but in this case…very appropriate.

As we stopped at a junction with the other hundred or so people on their way to the football match, a bloke keeled over on his bike in front of us. Clutching his left shoulder, he lay there in the middle of the junction having a heart attack and probably suffering from some significant head trauma as he hit the ground. Unfortunately, we’re both the wrong sort of doctors and don’t speak German so there wasn’t really much we could do. People were phoning 112 and I guess that was the best he was going to get.

The thousands of football fans peeled off to watch Düsseldorf play Hannover 96 in the brand new stadium on the north of the city. If you don’t want to know the result, look away now.

A disappointing day for Düsseldorf fans. More disappointing day for heart attack guy.

We headed out into the country once again. There were more horse studs including one which specialised in tiny Falabella horses.

One probably gets more of these to the hectare than proper horses.

Duisburg started a long way out. From 15km to the centre, we were in the suburbs. Cheap but functional housing impeccably maintained.

There’s an election going on in Germany. A great mystery of life is the political language of another country. For example, why do people in America put up signs in their front “yard” and why is Nigel Farage on the telly so much in the UK?

In common with many European countries, getting elected in Germany involves putting a lot of posters up with your smiling face and your name on every available lamppost. While we traversed the suburbs of Duisburg, we played the “guess the political party” game. From 50m away, just by looking at the photograph of the candidate, you had to guess one of CDU, SPD, Green or AfD. It turns out having a beard as a bloke and a bad haircut as a woman is a dead giveaway for a Green. Earnest staring into the middle distance and sensible haircuts marks you out as SPD.  Holding your hands clasped in front of you in the Merkel style is a CDU trope.  The AfD candidates have a certain steely blue eyed 35 year old firm jawed white male thing going on which one might think had strong historical resonances.   However, as I said, politics of other countries is a mystery.

Endless junctions, endless tram tracks to negotiate. It isn’t boring because it requires a lot of concentration and, counter intuitively, the time goes pretty quickly. Eventually we were on the Königstraße and we were done. The hotel is an Accor Mercure hotel and they win prizes for having a special room to keep your bike in and a friendly waitress who supplied beers while our room was being prepared. This too is a four star hotel and also near the bottom of that rating but the staff are helpful and the aircon works.

No heated towel rail though so I trekked through the streets to the local laundrette and once again paid a stupidly small amount of money to sit in a laundrette while everything got washed.

Not like the Levis advert.

Once everything was washed and dried, it was time for the big Duisburg event.

In the north of the city is the Landshaftpark. It’s hard to describe so here is a quote.

While most disused industrial sites are either seen as a dangerous eyesore and torn down, or fenced off and hidden away, calling to intrepid urban explorers, the former steel works now known as the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Duisburg, Germany, was turned into a public park that celebrates the site's brutal beauty and productive heritage.

The coal works on the site were first established in 1901 to take advantage of the fields of ore on the site. A blast furnace was built and from there a slow series of other coal and eventually iron and steel facilities were added down the decades until the site was a fully functioning plant complex. As demand for steel dipped in the later 20th century, the factory was eventually abandoned in the mid-80s leaving behind an ominous industrial hulk and immense amounts of pollution. However instead of blasting the land clean of the forsaken metal works, it was decided that the facilities would be refurbished and turned into a public park where the memory of the plant's good work could live on and be appreciated by future generations - once the pollution was cleaned up that is.

After extensive purging of the toxins that had poisoned the site and general refurbishment of the works, the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord was born. Many of the facilities were repurposed into such grand spaces such as a massive concert hall and even Europe's largest indoor dive site. However what is likely most stunning to the casual visitor is the neon light show that appears after dark painting the otherwise hard-edged, grim site into a sort of sci-fi dystopia.

Given all the factory action over the past three or four days, this was an absolute must to visit.

Firstly we had to negotiate the Duisburg public transport system.

Dr T looking happier than one would expect on a Duisburg tram.

After the tram we walked for 15 minutes to the park.

This is not Green Park.

Blast furnaces are big old things.

The Duisburg park authorities had spread a load of sand over some bit of the park and added some deckchairs and there were pop up restaurants and bars in the park.

This isn’t the beach in St Tropez either.

It was all very cool but there was no way we were going to wait for another 3 hours until the sun set to see the amazing neon display. We had a glass of wine in one of the pop up bars and then headed back into the centre of town by tram.

The dining options in Duisburg are not extensive but we managed to find a lovely traditional “Ruhrpott” place on a back street. It was full of locals — one guy, who made Gandalf look like a Gillette advert, just wandered in, sat down and the waitress brought him wine and food without being asked. It was all charming. The menu was very traditional and, since this is our last night in Germany, we went full-on German food. Schnitzel for Dr T and I had “crispy roasted pork knuckle with mashed potatoes and saurkraut”. It does not get more Germanic than that.

This was the best pork I’ve ever eaten.

We tried to have an Eis on the way back to the hotel — even though there was no realistic way that we could have fitted it in after the meal we had just had — but it appears that all the Eiscafes only take cash… I wonder why there are so many cash only Eiscafes in Germany? I wonder if tax evasion might be the answer… Sadly, no Eis for me this trip.

Today was absolutely brilliant. Shorter, full of incident, a great mix of urban and countryside cycling, high quality pork-based food in the evening.

Tomorrow we have a longer day and we will cross into country number 6. Weather looks good and as long as our bodies hold together, we’re going to make it.

Stats:

• Distance: 82km
• Contact points: Most thing settling down. Soft tissues are manageable. Hands are a bit numb. Knees holding out well. Only wrinkle is that Dr T’s neck isn’t holding up so well after all this time in the saddle.

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