Veni, Vidi, Velo

The First Week: Joy and Struggle in the Lower Rhine

The first leg of our journey, a three-month cycle between the great cultural capitals of East and West (Ashford and Istanbul) began last Monday.

The plan was to spend two days cycling to the ferry terminal at Harwich, spending our last hours amongst England's verdant greenery, then getting the overnight to Hoek van Holland and setting off down the mighty Rhine from its mouth in the Netherlands, through the heart of west Germany's Rhineland, arriving at Lake Constance on July the 24th. Simple enough, right?

Well, yes and no.

Classic North Kent

Brexit - days 1 and 2

Leaving the UK was the part we had not particularly planned, blithely assuming that Google's cycle route planner would guide us through gentle country lanes and byways with no issue at all. The reality was somewhat different, and after a 9 hour struggle on the first day through a seemingly endless succession of motorway flyovers, we collapsed in a Travelodge, having only made it to bloody Basildon. Sensibly, the second day saw us cycle the short hop to Colchester whereupon we got a series of stressful local trains to arrive at the ferry terminal 5 hours early, exhausted but relieved.

North Kent, put simply, is an unmitigated shithole. The Medway is a grey, putrid mess of roaring traffic. Gravesend and Tilbury are stretches of hopeless bleakness where the spirit of adventure withers and dies.

Tilbury, despite sounding nicer, was actually worse than Gravesend

We were ferried across the bleak Thames by a strange ferry captained by a wizened old gent

One stretch along the Thames path east of Tilbury was illustrative of our experience. What Google referred to as a "cycle path" turned out to be a rubbish-strewn stretch of grass and weeds on the Thames bank with no discernible route at all. To get to this "path", we had to lift the fully-loaded touring bikes over two sets of stairs and a locked gate - taking all the bags off and painstakingly re-assembling them each time. Everything was various shades of grey and brown, our only company the wheeling seagulls and rusting hulks of abandoned ships squatting in the damp sand. Dickens picked an apt setting for the arrival of Magwitch.

Day Two was nothing to write home about, save the epic wait to board the ferry and abortive conversations with a group of motorcycle tourists heading to Norway, who were impressed with our chairs (they are, in fairness, cracking little chairs).The ferry journey itself was seamless, we slumbered deeply in our little cabin throughout.

The queue

Our motorcycle tourist buddies

Days 3 - 6: A Placid Idyll (Holland and the Netherlands)

Holland was exactly as we imagined. We spent the whole stint cycling down perfectly surfaced, segregated cycle paths, cruising past Dutch pensioners who greeted us with a cheery "Hallo!". The whole country reminds me of a Lego set; blocky buildings with flowerpots in the windows, perfectly planned urban design, and cheery people going about their assigned tasks like clockwork. The Dutch seem content to take life at a slower pace, with most of them pedalling about on heavy city cruisers and the few motorists crawling along patiently in speed-limited Eurocars.

The first day saw us journey from Hoek through the centre of Rotterdam to end up in der Biesbosch, which turns out to be a national park on the Rhine delta with swamps and wetlands abound. We spent our first night wild camping in some bushes on the side of the delta, and learned some valuable lessons. One, that wild camping in Holland - where every square inch of unsettled land is cultivated in some way - was going to be a challenge, and two, that camping near standing water is a sure-fire way to get eaten to death by bugs. We spent the first night sheltering from a hell of flies in our outer tent, itching and paranoid. Savlon and Jungle Formula were to feature heavily in the days ahead.