We always had a ball on Mars

Marburg has had a university for almost 500 years and clearly takes its responsibility of education seriously and has built a planetary learning path that followed our cycle route south out of this stunning town.  The planets are spaced apart at a scale where 1m on the ground represents one million kms in space; this means that the outer planets are spaced a long way from each other but as you get nearer to the sun they come thick and fast and we sped past Earth, Venus and Mercury in seconds.

The villages we cycled through all had narrow winding lanes and wooden framed houses in deep brown and white with impossibly tidy gardens and well swept farm yards.  The farmers were busy in the fields and we met a number of tractors, who share the lanes between the fields with the hordes of cyclists out on a fine Saturday.

Marburg itself rises steeply up the hill from the river Lahn and the story is there are 400 steps up to the castle right at the top of the town.  On the way you walk up cobbled streets surrounded by colourful wooden framed houses; the town is straight out of a Grimm's Fairy Tale an is that childhood version of Germany and this isn't surprising, as the Brothers spent three years studying here in the early 19th Century.  The town survived the war without bombing, as it was designated as a hospital town and has since had enlightened town planning that has protected the buildings and local environment.

Down up pedals, down up down

The first time you cycle the wrong way down a one-way street in Germany is slightly nerve-wracking but you soon get the hang of it and are soon cycling on pavements and expecting cars to give way to you, like any other German cyclist.

Jena is a lively and bustling town, with a large university and the Carl Zeiss factory; Carl Zeiss started making high quality lenses in the mid-nineteenth century in Jena.  Jena had cyclists of every persuasion; cyclists with bags of shopping over their handlebars, cyclists towing trailers containing dozing young children, cyclists on battered heavy bikes and even cyclists in lycra.  The cycle routes leave the town to the north, south, east and west and we had intended to follow the river Saale route north or south.  However, Jena was one of the towns affected by the recent floods and although it was now hot and sunny, the river cycle paths were still reported to be muddy and so we decided to cycle to Weimar and back, a round trip of 48km of up and down.

Weimar proved to be an excellent choice; it was such a pleasant and pretty town and we learnt about it's place in German culture and history and why a small town in central Germany was chosen as the base for the Weimar Republic after the first world war.  The cycle route was well signed and took us through pretty small villages, entering the Unesco World Heritage Site of Weimar through the wonderful Ilm Park and the popular attraction of Goethe's Garden House.  We never like to over-do the culture and concentrated on finding a good Eis Cafe in Weimar, as it was just the weather to enjoy icecream.

In our last post we mentioned Mini Camping in Karlovy Vary as being small and perfectly formed and this was closely followed by another gem of a camp site in Jena; again small but clearly designed by a camper and a peaceful haven with everything we needed.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

Spa towns in continental Europe always have an atmosphere of indulgence and repose and none more so than Karlovy Vary in Bohemia in the Czech Republic.  Previously a German speaking town and called Carlsbad under the Austro-Hungarian rule, this small town packed so many fanciful and elaborate buildings in to one town, it took our breath away.

Walking through the spa, you pass 13 water fountains, each with a plaque giving the temperature of the ever flowing water, usually 50-60⁰C.  At the souvenir stalls you can buy small pottery cups to fill, allowing you to take the waters from each of the mineral rich springs.  After drinking 13 cups of this warm, only slightly sulphurous water, the rich Germans and Russians can pay for massage, colonic irrigation, permanent makeup or any number of other therapies and treatments.  The new rejuvenated you can then buy some overpriced designer clothing and eat expensive salad in a fancy restaurant.

For the tourists, this is all lots of fun and provides ample opportunities for people watching; that man in the dark suit and mobile phone looks straight out of a Russian thriller, the woman sitting reading an ebook in the steamy room with the geyser looks like she has come to Karlovy Vary to forget an unhappy love affair and which country were the couple in the matching shell suits from?

The appropriately named Mini Camping in Karlovy Vary is a small and perfectly formed camp site, the like of which you rarely find.  We had a pitch next to the fish pond and were fittingly lulled to sleep by the sound of the adjacent fountain. 

Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band

We have already driven over 2,000 miles on this trip and will probably pass 3,000 before we get home to Greater Manchester.  In those miles we have travelled on roads in six different countries outside the UK.  These countries are all in Europe but the differences in their infrastructure has been very marked.

Both Germany and Austria appear to be building new roads and repairing old ones like there is no recession and of course it may be no coincidence that in these countries the economy has remained more stable.  In Slovakia too, although many of the village roads were in a poor state, new sparkling motorways were being built so that lorries can hurtle across the country to Ukraine and Russia.

Living in Greater Manchester in 2013, we thought we had got used to potholed roads, but Hungarian roads have given us a new perspective.  The motorways we used in Hungary were good and not heavily used but many of the roads in towns and the countryside were so potholed and broken up that the bouncing of the van forced our CD player to give up and it refused to play any more music until we were back on terra firma; we soon learnt that the only way to deal with some of these roads was to weave around the potholes, stick to the middle of the road, which would sometimes be less eroded or drive on the wrong side of the road, if that surface was better.

In the Czech Republic the town and country roads were either not too bad or we had now decided that pot holes were normal.  However, the motorways were built out of concrete slabs and we bumped our way rhythmically across the country back in to Germany ... where we could mention the cobbled streets in the old DDR.

Getting older, looking back, still the fact is nothing changed at all

I visited Levoca in Slovakia 21 years ago, with a very young Matthew and Mark and loved the faded grandeur of the town square.  On that visit we arrived by bus from the Tatras and met a waitress in a cafe who spoke English and was vegetarian and helped us find a suitable lunch.  Renovating Levoca after the years of neglect since the 17^th Century was going to be a long process but I knew I would be back to see the progress.

This time we got to the town by walking along the valley from the campsite 2km away.  The campsite is terraced on a steep grassy hillside and as readers may have heard there has been heavy rainfall in central Europe that has caused floods along the Danube and so the field was muddy in places.  In adversity, campers help each other and on our last site in Hungary, we became comrades with couples from the Netherlands and France, as we sought pitches that were solid enough for a van on the otherwise empty camp site.

In Levoca, there were already two caravans from the Netherlands and a German camper in a VW and they all wanted to help us find the best pitch.  Together, we identified a suitable route through the site to a pleasant pitch only to find our 35m of electric cable would not reach a vacant connection.  After a considerable amount of discussion in various languages, I was dispatched to ask the Slovakian camp site owner, who spoke a little German, if he had a longer cable, although I didn’t know the word for cable in either Slovakian or German.

The beautifully decorated Renaissance houses in the square of Levoca are now mostly restored to their former glory, although there is still scaffolding on one of the churches in the centre and improvements to the road surface being made.  The town walls are still splendid, the cage of shame for local wrong doers is still there and there are more cafes than there were in 1992.

Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did

A couple of days after our eventful walk in the Matra hills, we set off again for a walk, a little east of the Matra, in the Bukk hills of Hungary, this time to see a sight known as the Beehive Stones.  These stones are chunks of tufa rock; this is easy rock to work and in many countries is associated with ancient sites, for example the Etruscan routes we saw in Sarnano last year.  In Hungary there are over 100 Beehive stones, most of which are in the Bukk hills; they have gained their name because some archaeologists think the niches carved in to the rocks were used for ancient beekeeping but other people have different hypotheses.

We parked in the small, lively village of Szomolya, strung out along one main street, as seemed to be so common in Hungary; elderly women in headscarves were buying bread, parents were waiting by the school gates for their children, around eight men were putting up a covered stage in front of the church for the weekend village festival and gardens were being tended.  The walk up to the stones was well signed from the war memorial and we set off up hill, passing wine cellars, also cut out of the local rock and vineyards until we were above the woodland and then dropped down to the hillside where there is a collection of at least half a dozen large stones, all with at least one oblong niche carved on the side.

Some visitors clearly supported the proposition that the niches were for ceremonial use and had left tea lights on the shelves, obviously to the God of Ikea.  We didn’t come up with our own theory for their original use but we did find it difficult to make sense of how they would have been used for beehives.

If there's something strange in your neighbourhood

At about 22.00 on our first night in Hungary, we were sitting quietly inside the van reading when there was a thump on the bonnet, a scrabbling noise and then silence.  Slightly startled we got up but couldn’t spot the cause of the noise and reasoned that we were on a camp site abounding with wildlife.  We had seen cats, both Green and Great Spotted Woodpecker, a baby owl sat tight on the perimeter fence through the hours of daylight and the usual other birds.   In our eight years of motorhoming, this was the first time an animal had tried to jump on the van but there had to be a first time.

The next night we camped in Visegrad, the site had some trees, dark gloomy facilities and a five minute wait for hot water.  It was on the edge of the town surrounded by houses.  Creatures of habit, we were again sat quietly reading at around 22.00 and again there was the same thump and scrabbling on the bonnet of the van.  The next morning there were footprints; cat or squirrel we couldn’t tell.  Anthony suggested we had a stowaway.

Our third night in Hungary was at a newly refurbished camp site in the Matra hills.  The facilities were modern and clean and the pitches were newly laid out.  The site had some trees around the pitches but we hadn’t seen any cats or squirrels, only birds and yet we once again had a nocturnal visitor leaping on the front of the van.

The next day, Anthony got te torch out and searched in all the corners under the bonnet, to satisfy himself that no one was hitching a ride across Hungary and we’ve heard nothing since.