| [ email | About W.H.Scholten | Travelling » Bicycle trip from the Netherlands to eastern Germany (and back) | ] |
I don't like the Netherlands, not just the land itself, though that's a big part of the reason. It is boring and ugly flat farmer's land, then a town or city, then farmer's land and so on, with a pathetic single row of trees along roads (this combined with the land being flat and that it's close to sea also means it's almost always windy, the more so the closer to the sea of course), river banks cut off for maximum use and made vertical, which all together gives a fake-nature feel. This ugliness is everywhere except in just a few areas such as Veluwe, a part of the province Brabant, and the southern province of Limburg. After returning from Ukraine, the narrow roads and buildings built close together in NL gave me a claustrophobic feel. The weather is also quite bad, a lot of rain, in any season, almost no hot days in Summer, almost no good cold snowy days in Winter.
Pictures of my trip, in the Netherlands
First through a nice nature area called "Veluwe", then to eastern NL, with the only place I think that has a trolley bus, namely near Burgers' zoo (I only saw the power lines see picture 06438.jpg, not such a bus, but there should be one :) ). NL has usually near perfect roads, though they can be bad in some small towns, and in cities smaller roads can be intentionally bad with all the speedbumps that make the roads about as bad as anything you will encounter in Ukraine.
Germany is more to my liking. Most of all in Eastern Germany, where there is more space, and there you will find nice parks, the 'volksparks' (people's parks). It felt to me there a bit similar to Ukraine... What was surprising is how little street lighting there is, and how few houses have lights on at night (outside). This is bad if you have some problems with your bicycle that you need to fix (as happened to me) but good for testing bicycle lighting which I did :) People were often curious about why I was travelling with so much stuff, whereas in NL nobody indicated any interest. When I got talking with them, about not just my trip but various topics, I liked them more than people in the Netherlands...
Pictures of my trip, in Germany, up to Leipzig
Here I show some pictures of examples of bad roads (and I saw much worse), some examples of the issues of shared bicycle and pedestrian paths. Roads are invariably much worse than in the Netherlands, the difference when crossing the border is immense. Some roads are as bad as what I've seen in Ukraine, and generally the roads in Germany within cities are not better than roads within cities in Ukraine. I cycled through Quedlinburg, which is nice, but hell to cycle trough because of the cobble stones. I worried there about the front rack as it was moving/flexing so much on those roads, and that front rack later broke on 1 side. In Eastern Germany I felt I liked it more, more room, more parks, which are a bit in the style of parks in Ukraine which I like a lot. In the end I had to return to NL due to equipment problems.
More of my experiences on this trip and of the bicycle equipment that I used can be found on THIS page which is part of my bicycle review site. Below are the main things that I noticed in Germany.
My trip ended far sooner than I wanted due to several issues, one of them the breaking off of a lowrider mount. This wasn't unexpected after I experienced the German roads, which are far worse than Dutch roads. The bags on the lowriders rattled and the lowriders were moving and twisting from that all the time. Not good since they are made from aluminium and aluminium can't handle deformation. So I feared this might happen from the start, if the roads didn't get better. I'm pretty sure Ukrainian roads (my original goal) in cities are no worse, possibly less bad than in Germany. There are bad patches on Ukrainian roads which are mainly an issue for cars at high speed, and in cities roads in Ukraine that I've seen are as least as good as in Germany.
Germany is supposed to be the richest country in Europe, but that money obviously doesn't get spent on roads... And I don't mean just bicycle paths, I mean all roads. I've ridden a lot on the main roads even when there were bicycle paths because the bicycle paths are often just awful in Germany. Not just the road surface, the transitions between it and crossing roads, it's like jumping up curbs all the time. Anyway the main roads often have damage, holes or when 'fixed', patches which are a bit higher than the main road surface and thus give bumps. Fixes are often worse than holes... (this is true everywhere, not just in Germany, and you may want to think about the consequences of riding over a hole vs. a bump and then you will realise that if the hole isn't too wide, it's better to ride over holes than over bumps from filling them up...) And then there are road surfaces with some types of stones ('kasseien' in Dutch) which simply give incredibly bumpy roads and which seem to have been laid there for esthetic purposes only. We have some in NL too, but I never experienced it this bad...
Then there are cycle paths which drop down at each exit before a house, this is just nuts! How in the hell are you supposed to ride on such roads with any speed? Some of the things I've seen in Germany make me think bicycles are not taken seriously as a means of transport here.
Then the main roads: In Germany you may ride on roads designated 70 km/h if there is no bicycle path. But this doesn't mean it's comfortable riding there. It's not at all comparable to riding on 60km/h shared roads in NL. The reason is that a very large part of German drivers don't drive at 70 km/h or less, but I estimate 40% or more rides at 100+ km/h (yes, I did measurements to see how fast motorists were going). This makes it uneasy and extremely noisy. Lots of people seem to feel the need to show off their noisy engines and in one case I even spotted a car doing ca. 180 km/h on such a road and shortly after that a motorcycle going ca. 200 km/h (calculated by measuring the time between posts on the roads that are 50m apart).
This doesn't surprise me as I've seen very few police cars. It seems in Germany policing isn't done as much as in NL either, so there's probably little chance of speeding tickets...
The noise was another issue that was noticeable in Germany, it's just everywhere! Even in small villages, often roads going through it that are 70km/h (in NL it would have been 50km/h) and of course 70 km/h is not what many motorists ride at...
When I got back to NL I experienced again how much better the roads here are, also in the less densely populated provinces in the east, near Germany. Noticeable is how much more smooth the transitions are between road surfaces than in Germany, but also the road surfaces on main roads and bicycle paths are far better. Even brick roads were better than many of the asphalt roads with repaired patches in Germany...
While I was cycling in Germany, I was thinking about the money being put into eastern Germany. Is that still an issue and perhaps a reason why many of the roads are bad? But lots of issues are not related to money, such as the non existant guidance on roads to cycle paths, or the almost-curb jumping or the cycle paths which go down and up at each driveway of a house.
Another thing I miss in Germany compared to NL is enough signs to other cities for bicycle paths.
This also surprised me enormously: There is almost no streetlighting between vilages/cities. I suppose this makes Germany a paradise for testing bicycle lamps! But it is hard to find bicycle paths a lot of the time also because transitions from one side of the road to the next are often not indicated. Often I saw a sign 'end of bicycle path' so I rode on the main road, but then a bit later I found out there was a bike path on the other side. In Germany bike paths are often on the wrong side just as in NL, but in Germany it is even more often so than in NL, and even worse is that it happens a lot within cities which can be very confusing. Then outside cities such transitions are not indicated, whereas in NL, if a bike path continues on the other side of the main road, then stripes to guide you to that other side are painted on the road.
Even within cities/villages in Germany, there are very few street lights.
In the hilly mid part of Germany (on many hills, with ca. 37kg of bags and contents, I went at just 6-8 km/h on the 28/28 gear, and it was no fun when I found out I went the wrong way and needed to go back, these issues are no problem normally but at such low speeds it's bad if you don't have a good enough overview of where to go to best for long tours... This meant wasting at least 2 days that way.
IN hilly terrain it was also difficult to keep the batteries charged... The solar charger that I used was not that great despite quite sunny days, there are issues with charging the tablet in particular. It is hard to be fully self sufficient when using a smart phone for navigation.
With most dynamo lighting you will have problems in technical terrain such as some bicycle paths going over hills and especially unpaved bicycle paths where you can't ride fast. In such places the lightoutput of the Luxos that I used was so low sometimes I could not properly decide where I should ride. In such spots I switched to another system that gives power from an internal 18650 at low speed if the dynamo doesn't provide enough power, which was far superior.
If you have a problem with your bicycle lighting: in Germany there is almost no light to guide you from streetlighting, so I used a torch to light the bicycle path while doing so on a few occasions.
Police once enquired at night what was going on, with my bike parked beside a main road. I was resting a bit (I was doing a long night ride), and they weren't interested at all in whether my lighting was StVZO compliant (which to be honest it doesn't need to be, being a Dutchman and as my lighting is compliant with Dutch law), only that I had good light... This was just one of 3 times I saw a police car in Germany (I rode about 400km in NL, 1000km in Germany, and I saw more police cars in NL than in Germany...)
Last modified: 28 Oct 13:12 CEST 2014
