Two Go to Eastern Germany and Poland

by Jerry McCarthy

It was a cloudy Saturday in late September when we set out for our brief drive to Stansted Airport for the start of our two-week adventure driving around Poland and Germany. During the course of those two weeks, we would take in Berlin, Ralswiek in Rügen, Greifswald, Leba, Szczecin and Berlin again. As we were taking an early-ish flight from Stansted, we had decided to stay overnight at Stansted's Hilton Hotel, taking a package which included up to 15 nights of parking. 

Up early next morning to go the terminal, and take our "short flight" to Berlin. (Why are they always described by the cabin staff as "short flights"? Even flying to Helsinki is counted as a "short flight", and that seems plenty long enough to me!)

 We'd planned to spend the night in Berlin, which would allow us to take in a brief bit of sightseeing and, in particular, to go to the Museum Insel to see the Pergamon Altar.

I remember going there several years ago, and at that time, it was a scary adventure involving the taking of a U-Bahn train to a special station, which at the time was full of uniforms and machine guns, going through passport control, and getting a visa, and then walking some distance to the museum. Now, everything has changed, and we could take a U-Bahn or S-Bahn to any station we liked in the former East Berlin, this time to a station within a few minutes’ walk.

We enjoyed a fine afternoon in the museum, took in its features, and then made our way back to our hotel, stopping off on Ku'damm for dinner. As a rule, on arrival at any new city, we always try to get whatever travel card is available, usually for unlimited use on buses, local trains, and subway systems - even if we don't expect to make more than a couple of trips, those couple of trips often mysteriously expand into half-a-dozen, and the cost of the card is easily recovered by not buying multiple single-ride tickets.

Up early next morning for breakfast, and then back to the airport to collect our rental car, which involved extra paperwork to cover ourselves for driving in Poland, including reading and signing warning notices telling us that the danger of theft of motor vehicles was very high in Poland.

This was followed by a bit of nervous driving (strange car, steering wheel in "wrong" place, strange roads, intersections the "wrong" way round). We went back to our hotel to collect our luggage, and set off on the first day of driving north to the island of Rügen, to our Schloßhotel in the town of Ralswiek. Our route, which I had determined using Via Michelin (www.viamichelin.com) turned out to be somewhat hard work. It started on a fine motorway northwards out of Berlin, but suddenly deteriorated into a two-lane road with a variety of quite low speed limits. And then, a dreaded Umleitung (diversion) took us through quite picturesque villages, but we were not all prepared for the appalling state of the roads, including really rough stretches of cobbles(!), which kept speeds down to around 10/15 mph.

Eventually our route again took us onto a really new looking motorway, on which we seemed to be pretty much the only vehicle. This took us to Stralsund and thence to the crossing point to Rügen Island and onwards to Ralswiek to arrive at our Schloßhotel in time for a brief rest and dinner. The dinner itself was something of an adventure, in that the restaurant itself seemed somewhat overheated, so we decided to sit outside. But when we finished our meal, we found that the door back into the restaurant and thence back into the hotel was actually locked on the inside. Fortunately, another hotel guest saw our plight, and let us in! As an aside, my dessert at the meal included a product not found in my dictionary, called Sanddorn - however, I was assured it would be sehr lecker, and fortunately it was (quite delicious).

 We were staying for three nights at this fine hotel, which used to be a privately owned castle, but became state-owned as a consequence of the formation of the DDR and then more recently became an hotel with reunification. Our time there was spent walking in the town (a village really) of Ralswiek, and in the nearby forests and, one day, an all-day driving trip to Kap Arkona. This is held to be the Northern-most point of Germany and is somewhat protected, in that visitors are not allowed to drive there, but must park in the nearby town of Puttgarden, and then walk a few kilometers, or alternatively, ride one of those "road-trains" which seem so popular in Germany and neighbouring countries. At this point we encountered, growing wild, more of this Sanddorn mentioned above - in fact, it seemed to be quite the local thing with Sanddorn candies, Sanddorn jam, and so on, readily for sale. Subsequent research reveals that it is also known as Sea Buckthorn or Hippophae rhamnoides.

Other lunches and dinners took place around the area, and we learned one thing that caused us to be grateful that we had brought plenty of Euro cash. Apparently, your standard Visa and Amex cards are largely unknown - only the "EC Karte" works in most restaurants.

We next made a short journey to the town of Greifswald where I was due to take part in a three-day conference at the University. The first two days were entirely taken up with lectures, and the content of those two days probably won't interest many people here; members of The United Kingdom Slide Rule Circle can read my write-up in the magazine of that organisation!

One amusing aside though was that my wife ordered a "Pepperoni Pizza" in an Italian restaurant, but when it came it had no evidence whatsoever of Pepperoni - just a lot of peppers! We guessed that the waitress had misheard our order, but when the bill came it definitely showed that the pizza was "Pepperoni". It wasn't until the next day that we learned from a local that that is exactly what a "pepperoni" pizza was supposed to be - "In Deutschland ist pepperoni kein Würst!"

The final day's programme was entirely taken up with an outing to Peenemünde, around an hour to the east of Greifswald, where we were given a brief tour of the Rocketry museum, and then offered a coach tour around some of the immediate area. As I had recently had an ear infection, and felt a bit shaken up from the coach ride to Peenemünde, I declined the local coach tour, and instead spent a fascinating hour "doing" the rocketry museum in further depth and detail. If you should ever go there, note that the Rocketry museum is not well advertised, unlike the Museum of German Bedding through which it is necessary to go to enter the rocketry section!

We then moved on to a second complex, the old power station building, which houses a second museum also dedicated to the rocketry aspects, including in-depth descriptions of the functioning of the V1 and V2 rockets.

Kaffe und Küchen (coffee and cakes) in a fine old-fashioned hotel, and a return to Greifswald, completed my three-day conference, and left us again to our own devices.

Our next port of call was somewhat more adventurous, in that we were going to drive to Poland, to the city of Leba. The first hundred miles or so took us down a motorway to a point to the east of Berlin, and it might have been the easiest, fastest 100 miles that I have ever driven - beautiful new road, and hardly any other vehicles. We were somewhat lulled into a false sense of optimism, as the next two hundred miles were really hard work.
The motorway to the crossing point to Poland was notionally two lanes in each direction, but after a short distance, we were transferred to one lane on the westbound carriageway - the eastbound carriageway which we would see across the central reservation seemed to have completely degraded with cracks, and weeds growing up through those cracks. Finally, we got to the crossing point near Szczecin (Stettin) where, unusually for a crossing within the EU, there was a full-blown crossing point with passport checks, stamps in the passport, and a delay of around thirty minutes to get all the cars ahead of us through.

Eventually, however, we got into Poland with a cheerful Djekuje bardzo (“thank you very much”) without complications.

And then the real hard work began. For the first few miles, the motorway was still, recognisably, a motorway (Autostrada, perhaps surprisingly, in Polish), but then it all fell to pieces with miles of reconstruction, and then became basically a one lane each-way road for two hundred miles, with a hard shoulder onto which slower vehicles would pull, to allow overtaking. Being just the equivalent of an A road, it went through all the towns that it went through; there were no bypasses or any means of getting around the towns. Fortunately, our route through the towns was very well signposted, with the name of the next town on the route clearly posted.

One thing we really noticed was that, compared with driving in the U.K., the signs were huge – it was possible to pick them out, read them and get in the correct lanes way earlier than is possible in the U.K.

 Several hours later we got to our hotel, the Hotel Golabek (www.hotel-golabek.leb.pl/eng/index.php) which was beside a quite picturesque canal; parked on the opposite bank of the canal was a warship, which is now a museum (closed during our stay).

Our first day in Leba was spent just wandering around the town, which was, basically, closed. Although it is nominally a bustling seaside resort, we had arrived just out of "the season" and it was very quiet, with just a few families, dog-walkers and hikers on the beach. The main touristic feature of the town was a "Skansen", which term some might recognise from Sweden – basically a reconstructed historical village, which was also closed for the winter.

The next day, we had a plan to go to the nearby village of Rabke to visit the famous "walking dunes" within the Slowinski national park; this involved an hour or so's hike along a quiet road from Leba to a giant car park in Rabke, and then a ride in a "road train" to the Dunes, with no other transport being permitted. A walk along the dunes to the sea, and then back along the beach, brought us to an old German Rocket Launcher site, from which V2 rockets were launched. This is now a museum with many preserved items, and an interesting place to spend an hour or two.

From this Rocket Launcher site, we learned that it was possible to take a boat back to Rabke, so we went down a quay to await the boat, which duly showed up. Whilst awaiting its departure, we fell into conversation with the Captain, an older gentleman, who explained to us a few interesting things, such as, when he was a child, the area in which we were, was part of Germany, and he considered himself German and German his first language. His assistant (his Beifahrer) was much younger and definitely Polish.

He then offered, for ten extra Zloty (Trinkgeld), to take us all the way to Leba, to a point near our hotel. At first we accepted, but, after he had taken us to Rabke, and allowed all the other passengers to get off, I began to have some misgivings. There was two of them and two of us, and he knew that we were Western tourists, and therefore probably relatively well-off - they could just rob us, dump us in the water, and nobody would be any the wiser.

We decided to get off at Rabke with everybody else. We will never know if that was the right decision, or if we could have saved ourselves an hour's walk back!

 The next day was the beginning of our return journey to Berlin and London - we had decided to break the return journey into two days and to stay overnight in an hotel near Szczecin. It was all quite uneventful, and we returned home tired but happy!

First published in VISA issue 72 (Apr 2007)