Bike Tour in the Wendland

Friends from New York, Anna and Ian, came and visited me in Berlin a few weeks ago.

This provided several benefits, namely 1) it was lovely to hang out with them, 2) it's always fun discovering my city through visitors' eyes and 3) we went on a terrific four-day bike tour!

The Wendland is a region of farms, woods and river landscapes about halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Throughout the Cold War, it was a little pocket of West Germany tucked in amid three sides of East Germany. This small map gives you a bit of a sense: the dot is, roughly, the Wendland, at that point where the state of Lower Saxony (former West) meets three states of the former East.

For West Germans, it was a far-flung corner that seemed removed form everything – and thus a reasonable place to stick a nuclear storage facility. For West Berliners, it was the closest place they could get to actual nature, since the Berlin Wall kept them trapped within their part of the city, not allowed to access the East German countryside that surrounded them.

Since much of the Wendland was essentially the border and the no man's land along it, it accidentally ended up as a good preserve for wildlife and, as we discovered, the Elbe River is a major migratory stopping point for Siberia geese heading toward North Africa or the Iberian Peninsula.

Now that Germany is reunited, of course, the Wendland is no longer a far-flung corner but in fact right in the middle of things and a strong protest movement has sprung up around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben. Artists and alternative-minded folks who have moved to the area to be part of that movement lend the region a very different culture from your usual rural landscape - and best of all, the farmers and artists seem to get along well, united in their opposition to the nuclear waste transports that come in by train more or less once a year. (The next one, in fact, is this weekend. For a few images of past protests, look here, here, here and here.)

It's a fascinating place on all fronts - nature, history and culture - and I've attempted to capture a tiny bit of it in a pictures. Click on this image to go to the photo album:

Wendland Bike Tour