Day 9: Koblenz to Köln

Filled to the very brim by five star dinner the previous evening and five star breakfast — they had an eggstation! — we were ready in the early morning to tackle what should have been a relatively easy day. Follow the Rhine from Koblenz up to Köln and enjoy the lovely scenery… An easy ask.

Before leaving our lovely hotel, we had to have our own tribute to the enduring greatness of the BMW Z8 which a huge number of middle-aged walnutty couples wearing inappropriately tight white jeans had gathered in Koblenz to celebrate.

I was obviously obsessed about this. What do they talk about? “Ah, Hans, my car produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h”. “No way Ludwig! My car also produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h. What a coincidence!”

Two cyclists, a selection of the hundreds of Z8s in the car park.

I think, like gravel factories, it’s time to move on from the Z8 owner’s club.

Because we were in an entirely different part of Koblenz than the carefully planned route started at, there was a bit of “off-piste” and “where’s south again” route finding to do. We finally joined the EV15 just where the Moselle joins the Rhine at the Deutsches Eck. I recommend clicking on the link because the Wikipedia article has better pictures than the one below and the history of the “German corner” is more interesting than you might think. 

The dude on the horse is Kaiser Wilhelm. Who else?

As we got into the rhythm, we passed endless caravan and motor home parks.

Germany is really lovely and everybody we have met has been friendly and fun. However, there are three things that definitely stick out in Germany.

• Germans seem to love a caravan or a motor home. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of caravans and motor homes in parks all along the Rhine.
• Germans definitely love an Eiscafe. Every town and village has a huge number of places selling ice-cream. Yesterday we passed a twenty four hour ice-cream vending machine for those moments when you just can’t wait until morning for your hit of frozen sugary flavoured milk.
• There’s a lot of middle-aged blokes with brilliantly large bellies. I mean absolutely huge. There is absolutely no way they would fit through the Büchmesser,

However, as I said, everybody we met has been lovely. They might have had giant bellies and been stuffing huge amounts of ice-cream into their faces in their caravans but they’ve been charming.

It’s fair to say that we’ve left the more picturesque part of Germany behind. We passed through the industrial doughnut of shit outside Koblenz and then along the Rhine there were lots and lots and lots of factories.

Some picturesque factories and…in the corner…a little tiny gravel factory!

Yes, gravel is still a big thing here. As are steel works and container yards.

It’s not a castle but I love this heavy industry stuff.

There were also indications of when the Rhine was as important for trade but less industrial.

A barge unloading crane from 150 years ago.

The route was quite wriggly since the topography on the western side of the Rhine is very steep and the road, rail and cycle paths all have to try and co-exist in a very small space. We conquered the final climb on the route before we leave Harwich. 29m at 3%.

Our planned stop was in Remagen. There were a lot of excellent bike paths along the river and some…not so much. One starts to hate those paths which have root bumps every few meters. The wrists and..”soft tissues”..take a bit of a beating on the less well cared for tracks. However, in defence of German cycling infrastructure, these paths are about a million times better than anything you would find in the UK.

Miles and miles of this.

The Rhine has become much more of a “working waterway” in this section. You see hundreds of barges plying their trade up and down the river. Mostly Dutch flagged, they carry everything from gravel (!) to containers and chemicals. We saw a Turkish flagged vessel carrying coal which seemed incongruous until I remembered the Rhine-Main-Danube canal.

This exceptional piece of civil engineering allows boats to enter the Rhine at Rotterdam, head up towards Mainz, take the Main river past Frankfurt and then go through a series of 16 locks after which they end up on the Danube and thence they can float down to the Black Sea and…Türkiye. Isn’t this just amazing? I estimate it probably would have taken about a month to get to their destination but…for the right cargo why not? Transporting things by boat is very efficient and cheap.

We finally got to Remagen which is famous for this.

There’s a matching one on the other side.

There was a fierce battle in March of 1945 in Remagen. It is, unsurprisingly, known as the Battle of Remagen. I’m not going to recount it here because a lot of the readership of this blog is coded middle-aged-male and if I say something like “12 V2 missiles were fired on the bridge in the first tactical use of the V2” there are going to be scores of middle-aged men shouting “STOP GETTING THE BATTLE OF REMAGEN WRONG” at their computers. The readership which is not middle-aged-male probably don’t care that much.

Enough to say, it’s a big deal. They have a Rhinepromenade with the pre-requisite 10 Eiscafes and somewhere for us to get coffees.

Many of the passing e-cyclists stopped to admire Dr T’s “bling bike”

We are somewhat unusual on this part of the Rhine. There are thousands of walnutty and large people — mostly German — on very heavily laden e-bikes. Double panniers on the front, double panniers on the back and wearing a rucksack. Given our very parsimonious approach to packing, it’s very difficult to imagine what they can be carrying in all that space. A dinner jacket maybe?  A full dinner service for 12 people?

The e-bikers are also annoying because they go at precisely 25kmh. It’s a little bit faster than our normal pace and therefore they effortlessly cruise past us. I have started making electrical fault noises when they pass. “Bzzzt” and “screeeek” are favourites. I’m hoping that they start doubting their effortless travel option.

We skirted Bonn on more excellent cycling infrastructure. As we were passing through the city, we witnessed a very slow speed and boring police chase on the river. A slightly ratty old boat was drifting down the Rhine and obviously this was enough to tweak the crime-antennae of the Bonn river police. It was a very slow motion police chase. This was not the classic final boat chase scene in Face Off.

Hard to get very excited about this.

Bonn is the ex-capital of the old West Germany. When reunification happened, the government rightly decided that the capital should be Berlin and so Bonn sort of ended up as the loser in the whole reunification gig. Hard to be an important governmental centre for decades and suddenly just be a vaguely boring city on the Rhine.

From about 20km outside Köln, the industry started again.

A river and a lot of chemical works.

This was also maybe not as cutely picturesque as the Rhine Gorge or the Swiss Alps but, in a geeky-small-boy way, I was fascinated with all the pipes and reformulated-gasoline-cracking-reactors.

“Let’s stop and take photos of chemical works”. “Let’s not”.

Eventually the doughnut of shit around Köln ended and we pootled along a lovely Rhineside cycle path towards the centre of town.

I understand that these buildings are a bit of “a thing” in Köln.

Actually pretty good modern architecture.

We wound our way along the river avoiding dogs, pedestrians, other cyclists and a wine festival.  Surprisingly quickly, we were at our hotel for the night.

I had booked the hotel on the basis that it had a “Cathedral View”. This was the view.

Behind the van and the concrete bunker you can see one of the most famous architectural gems in the world.

Worse was to come. The receptionist told us that there was no place to put our bikes in the hotel. I had a quite extensive Angry Eyes™ moment explaining to her how this was not really the four-star service that had been promised on booking.com. Luckily she explained that there was a bike storage garage at the station which was only a 10 minute walk away next to the railway station. After 100km in the saddle, that’s not what you want to hear.

We disconsolately walked our bikes through a concrete wasteland populated by drunk people and drug addicts. I would have asked the huge group of police officers for directions but they were too busy saving the life of a drunk guy who had been bottled by his mate and was bleeding out in front of the Köln main railway station. This was not a high-class holiday experience for Dr T. Eventually we found the bike store and for 15 EUR, we were informed that we could leave our bikes there but if they were stolen, it was not their fault.

We may never see you again.

It was long walk back to the hotel through the very unsalubrious parts of Köln…

Unsurprisingly, there’s no towel rail. In future, I’m going to write to every hotel on the trip and if they haven’t got a heated towel rail they’re on the Dr K blacklist. We decided to just ignore washing the cycle kit, we showered and headed out to see the most amazing cathedral in the world.

Rather surprisingly, the most amazing cathedral in the world sits in the middle of some complex road junctions and has unexpected excrescences stuck to the side.

Shall we stick a concrete modernist camera shop on the side of this cathedral? Sure, why not?

The story of the cathedral is quite a thing. Started in the thirteenth century, it was only completed in 1880. More than six hundred years of construction. We might think that the Elizabeth line took a while to get done but this is on a different level.

The classic shot. The largest façade of any church…anywhere. There’s a fractal thing going on here which is hard to describe.

In God’s property portfolio, this is almost certainly his 50 million EUR villa in Mallorca with sea views and an infinity pool. It is absolutely stunning. Surprisingly it managed to survive a lot of bombing in WW2. Seemingly, the spires were a great waypoint and aiming device for Allied bombers. The windows didn’t survive but they’ve been replaced by some excellent modern versions.

Kaleidoscope stained glass window.

The cathedral is, I am told, the most visited place in Germany by foreign tourists. I can get it. It is breathtaking. It’s just sad that modern Köln has grown around it like a carbuncle.

We went down to the river and ate cheap food a cheap place with lots of German tourists eating cheap food in a cheap place. We were sitting next to two giant guys who ordered pizzas and, when they arrived, they ordered butter so they could butter their pizzas. The pizzas were just the starters for the main course which was meat and pasta. It was a humbling experience watching them put all that food away. I did my wimpy best with this.

Literally every restaurant on the river serves this meal.

We were both a bit disappointed by Köln. I guess we had kind of expected something like Strasbourg but it’s not that. Great cathedral, the rest is pretty down-market. As we finished eating hordes of people were queuing to get on disco booze cruise boats where they could party the night away floating down the Rhine getting shitfaced.

The end of the day was a little challenging but the rest of the day was fine. Easy cycling even for two people who have used up most of their physical reserves. The sun shone a bit…but not too much. The scenery was good — especially if you like complex chemical works and container ports.

Tomorrow we head to Duisburg which, I understand, is ground zero of the industrial heartland of Germany. It’s going to be a shorter day and I have a cunning plan to visit an amazing site when we get there.

The Stats:

• Distance: 105km.
• Average Speed: 19.6 km.
• Contact Points: Everything seems to be holding up as well as expected. My Achilles tendon is buggered up, hands and soft tissues are suffering. Par for the course.
• Equipment and packing: I’m going to do a blog piece on the bikes and the state of our sartorial elegance later on. However, for the moment, it appears that my power meter has packed up. I’m either doing 20 watts all day or Tadej Pogačar levels of power output.

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