Krauts-Rock! Week Vier

What an amazing, mental week we've just had in Germany. I'm not sure if any words, or pictures, will do our last week justice but its been awesome and exhausting all at the same time, brilliant fun and what we came away for. We started off doing a u-turn and heading back into the Black Forest and for Titisee. Ended up spending a couple of nights in a place in the Forest, next to a lake. Day one saw great weather and we got the chance for some decent cycling with a climb up to 1100 meters, not bad for a couple used to the flat, albeit challenging, Peckham High Street. Day 2 and we headed off into Frieburg on one of those cool double decker trains and it was bloody free!! They give visitors free access to public transport in the Black Forest. Can you imagine? "Welcome to London, we hope you enjoy your stay and by the way, all the buses, tubes, trains etc are free". Frieburg was a great city to head to for a day, not least because it offered ample opportunity for a bit of the old 'zwei hunde' action, which Hooper duly endulged in.

Now I love Germany, always have done, but we discovered something about it as we prepared to depart Titisee that chilled us to the bone... it snows, quite heavily, in May, and it caught us completely by surprise. This is called 'Eisheilige'; a random three day period of freezing weather that comes at some point during May. We found out the name for this down a big hole from a lovely young guy called James who despite living in Germany most/all of his life spoke with a perfect RAF flying squad accent. We left the snowy hills of Titisee and had a quick stop off to look at the source of the Danube, or Donau, and continued on to a Stellplatz for a night in Mossingen. Nice stop, nothing calamitous happened, which was good for a change.

A new day, and we'd heard about some caves that were on our route towards Munich and we chose 'Nebelhole'. Awesome place to visit if you have even a passing interest in geology, and if you don't, you can always laugh at the phallic shaped stalagmites. We'd gone to a huge stunning old cathedral in Frieburg, which had that 'huge stunning cathedral' atmosphere and the caves had the same look and feel, but were way more impressive. One made by man over probably 100 years, no easy feat, and had huge organ tubes that hung like bats, but the other carved and shaped naturally over millions of years. At a 'mere' 450 meters long and some 30 or so meters down from the woodland surface Nebelhole is probably no more than a hairline crack compared to other caves but it was quite surreal not having been in something like that before. We ended the cave day at Friedburg (not far from Munich) on our way for a fun day out at Dachau Concentration Camp. A free stop in Friedburg at a Stellplatz which saw more hills and another lake - they do hills and lakes really well down here. Sun, beers, water skiers going around the lake not pulled by boat but by some impressive pulley thing and water dripping rapidly into a cupboard from our kitchen taps; Vanhassle number 2. We've learnt 3 things are important when doing a trip like ours to help maintain acceptable levels of personal hygiene, a healthy relationship and, ultimately, van harmony; heating, taps that expel water and that said expelled water should be at least warm, if not hot. We left with none of these. So we awoke to a conundrum. Do we take the opportunity to sort out the taps, hot water and shower whilst in the home of VW or do we head to Dachau? We decided to get the shower fixed rather than go to Dachau which, if you think about it, has a certain irony! Trying to sort stuff out like this when you speak the language is hard enough but we had a hectic day getting this all sorted diving in/through/around Munich with Gav-the-Satnav freaking out at roadworks or new roads. If you've ever seen Clockwork with John Cleese it wasn't far off that. First place we came to, lovely German fella, all calm and helpful said he could fix it all, but not until 2nd week of June. Nah we'll leave that, so he sent us off to other side of Munich to someone who could do it all, no problem. Got there, VW place. Didn't do that kind of work and laughed at us, a lot. In between laughing they did print us off a load of information and addresses of places that specialised in this type of work. Priority eine was the boiler so headed straight to the manufacturer's service centre not too far away, they'll sort this out in no time. Got there, really impressive place, home of our boiler and it was the special service centre, amazing, sorted. Except that it was closed, between April and October. What business closes for 6 months? Off we go to the next place on the list, Intercamp. Took ages to find and was only a few miles away. Our bus is quite demanding to drive so we were both a bit overheated by this point but we eventually found it. Even without speaking a word of German we both recognised a 'we have moved' sign pinned to the closed door of the now empty premises as we pulled up to it. Lots of Hooper expletives and Helen's calmness and we set off for Intercamp's new place. We pulled into odd van nirvana when we got there, really cool place and loads of bizarre and rare vehicles, proper place to be. We met Herrn who looked like a 70's kid's TV presenter. Big hair, bright t-shirt and dungarees. He asked us to show him the problem with the boiler - which is that it doesn't stay on long enough to heat anything, been doing this for months and months. We pulled into the garage, Herrn got in, we switched on the boiler, it came on then... it stayed on, for ages. Herrn said he was a Zen master and that he'd just had to think it better, didn't charge us anything, we bought some stuff and off we went, headed for South Bavaria. It was around this time, perhaps before as events get jumbled up when you don't have a routine, that we saw what could only be described as a wall of solid shadow that were the Alps in the distance, looking both unconquerable or go-aroundable in our van.

After a false start that was the full campsite we were headed to we pulled into the first one we saw, next to Chiemsee Lake, good choice. Another stunning lake and we were surrounded by the now much closer snow capped peaks of the Alps, which looked much higher than before. We had a great few days here. Beautiful cycling along mainly tarmac tracks off road, saw a full on Bavarian wedding - we thought it was fancy dress but they all wear that get-up down here, all the time! Highlight of this particular stop, aside from the awesome scenery, was going to an outdoor public viewing of the Munich-Chelsea game, in Bavaria, by a lake, surrounded by the Alps, full on German food - not as bad as people think, especially if you like meat - men in Lederhosen and styled tache's and to cap the whole thing off, an Umpa Lumpa band, awesome. Not often you want a German football team to win but we met some great people there and they were gutted at the end. We were less gutted, more pissed. Schnaps and big beers, lethal. One particular old lady we met, with her kindly husband, sat next to us for part of the game. Lovely she was, we communicated through smiles, thumbs upsis, a bit of very broken English, having a great time with her we were. Until she tapped me on the arm and said 'So, tell me. How many black boys are there in this English team!? So gobsmacked I was I actually started counting the black Chelsea players for her, in German. Huge hangovers the next day, we chilled out in some lovely sunshine and planned our next move.....we're off to conquer the Alps!! NB - Apologies for the huge bank of text, we can't work out paragraphs on blogger so if anyone knows how to do them, I.E Matty G, can you let us know. Also, as soon as we settled at Chiemsee Lake we switched the boiler on. Needless to say as Herrn was not in the van, it didn't work..