Day 1: Smooth cycleways through Brandenburg (105 km, 330 m up)

My next stop on my Tour de Friends after Berlin was to see my friend Chrisi in Dresden. Berlin to Dresden is only 2 hours by train, but it also passes through some excellent cycleways, so I had mapped out a 3-day route. After nervously procrastinating the morning away, I eventually set off at 10 o’clock from Dillan & Donna’s apartment with all my stuff loaded back onto my bike.

The first 10-20 km getting out of Berlin was a bit of a faff, on cycle lanes (not cycleways) with heavy city traffic. Then the satellite towns surrounding Berlin involved a lot of cobblestone. One hour in and my poor bum was already sore.

Fortunately we (my bike and I, that is) soon left Berlin proper into the rest of Brandenburg state, and the cycleways blossomed out. Smooth, wide, and separated, they were everything I had hoped for in European cycle touring. Nerves were long forgotten!

After a simple packed lunch in Dahlewitz, I had to decide on my accommodation for the night. I had two options, one 50 km further than the other. That’s a huge difference for me, but the weather was a refreshing 17°C and I was feeling great, so I decided to try for one further away. The lessons of Vietnam were fresh in my mind, to not waste cooler weather! I messaged the mobile number listed as the contact via WhatsApp (luckily they used WhatsApp, since I didn’t have roaming minutes for calling/texting) and confirmed via Google Translate that they had a spot for tonight.

For the rest of the day, I cruised along gorgeous separated cycleways lined with poppies and small blue flowers, through fields of wheat, corn, potatoes, and maize. It turned out that the cycleways in this area are a superset of the Fläming-Skate, Europe's longest inline skating network! 230 km of pristine, car-free asphalt, so smooth that you swoosh along like an owl (something I love about travelling my bike is the quiet). My Dresden friend Chrisi later told me that her family come here often in the summer, as an alternative to skiing.

I should mention that there were a couple of segments where my Komoot route took me onto rural car roads. I’m sure there were alternatives on the extensive cycleway network but maybe it was skipped in favour of a more direct route. These roads were just like cycling on a rural highway in NZ - pretty unpleasant with cars going past at 100 kmph, but they generally gave me a lot of space.

Around 8pm, I sailed through a pine forest and got to my campground. I had cycled 105 km, my first ever century! Who woulda thunk it?

At Ferienanlage Goldpunkt campground, I was able to pitch my wee tent and use the amenities for 8 Euros. The place was tired but clean and functional, and the owner seemed guileless and unfussy. There was also a retired couple in a campervan and a young mother with a baby in the front pack. It’s quite hard to feel unsafe when there is a baby happily giggling nearby. I was soon showered, dinner’ed, and asleep before any thoughts of being spooked in the woods even crossed my mind.

Day 2: Short day through villages and forests (50 km, 230 m up)

Despite all intention to get on the road early, I spent a leisurely morning having breakfast, indulging in pastries from the bakery truck (like the Mr Whippy Truck, but for bread - comes to the campground every morning), and repacking all my stuff. I knew I was being very inefficient, but gave myself some patience since I could already see where I could optimise my morning packup in future.

Most of today was through forestry plantations or crop fields. I alternated betwen zooming through silent pine forests, narrow bare trunks in neat rows (they’re spindlier and more naked than our pines), then being spit out into a tiny sleepy village. The houses were all pink, yellow, cream, and interestingly, green, very pretty with well tended gardens. The streets were quite empty, save for the occasional car or truck, old lady pottering in the front yard, or the jaunty bark of a dog behind a gate.

A highlight was seeing the birds: storks, woodpeckers, magpies, crows, kites, and many others I didn’t recognise. The kites in particularly were great companions overhead. Their slim bodies really did make them look like 2D toy kites, with their wingtips splayed like fingers, expertly manoeuvring their tails to sail in wide arcs.

I listened to a lot of my audiobook throughout the day (I alternate between audiobooks, music, and silence). I was onto book 4 in the series “the Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman. The book is called “The Last Man to Die”. The series is about four pensioners at a retirement home who decide to solve murders as a hobby, and it’s usually very light reading. However (minor spoiler incoming) in this particular bit I was listening to, main character Elizabeth’s husband is deteriorating from dementia. She reflects on their life and love together, about how precious life was before. She wonders “Did we know back then, that that was heaven?”. I felt very emotional and had a little cry on the bike (a very nice place to have a cry), thinking about Fergus (who is alive and well FYI) and family and privilege and youth and aging and travel and time.

I stopped in a tiny town called Bad Liebenwerda for lunch. "Bad" means "bath", so this area would have had a mineral spring where people would come to bathe. It’s a classic setup, with a beautiful 13th century church in a cobblestoned main square ringed by cute shops. I think there is something to be said for having an iconic central building and square around which a village/suburb orients itself, a natural focal point for markets and people and events. I suppose the 21st century equivalent is a central business district; does that say something about what we’ve now come to worship? I am skeptical about whether current economic system is capable of imagining a nonprofit community building or a publicly owned asset as the beating heart of a modern city. Perhaps train stations are one example, like Britomart Train Station in Auckland.

I bought a cheap lunch at a diner called Zeidlers am Markt, right in the town square. The food was very heavy and served out of steel warming trays like at a chinese takeaway, but I was very hungry and it seemed to be popular with locals.

When ordering at the counter, I got flustered with my travel German again and ended up saying “yes” in French, then Japanese (???which I don't actually speak???), then finally German. The server and the nearby elderly gentleman customer both wished me “bon appetit” which was nice of them to accommodate, but then I awkwardly responded with a jumble of "merci, uhh, danke, uhh merci thank you yes".

From here I was only 5 km from the nearest campground, while the next place was 30-40km away. My legs were definitely feeling the long day prior, so I stopped here. Zeischa Campingplatz was a much bigger operation than the previous night. There was a lake, a playground, stand-up paddle boards for hire, a community noticeboard of events, and an extensive network of semi-permanent trailers.

When I think “semi-permanent trailer park” I think Pam from Stardew Valley, that is, a little rough, perhaps down on their luck. But these campers seemed to largely be well-to-do retirees with electric mountain-bikes, enjoying a longer summer stay. I suppose trailers are just a more comfortable version of those multi-room tent set ups you see from Chistchurch families in holidaying in Golden Bay. Is trailer park gentrification a thing?

Anyway, it cost 17.5 Euro to pitch my tiny tent and to use the facilities, which I thought was exorbitant.

Day 3: Along the Elbe River on the Eurovelo 7 (65 km, 180 m up)

I woke up at 4am again due to this being sunrise time here, and also because of an incessant cuckoo-ing that started up around this time and would not stop. I was wondering which accursed trailerhome was harbouring this demonic malfunctioning cuckoo clock when I realised it was of course an actual cuckoo bird. I wish I could say this realisation made me less annoyed, but it didn’t. My sleeping mat had also sprung a slow leak. I would blow it up and try to fall back to sleep before it deflated completely, fail, then repeat. Eventually I just read my book until morning proper, then got on the road.

The day started much the same as previous with smooth cycleways, but a few km in I was sent along 5 km of an overgrown single-track. This was very narrow, bumpy, and right on the edge of a stagnant slimy stream. I was beset with insects flying into my face and brushes of long grass and foliage, which I had been avoiding due to ticks. As I rolled gingerly out of the bush at the end, I saw an elderly man with an old commuter bike, walking in with a pair of secateurs. He said something to me in German, I interpreted from the body language that he was saying he was doing something about all the overgrowth. I nodded and smiled gratefully.

Around halfway through the day, I intersected with the Elbe river, which also meant getting onto the Eurovelo 7! The Eurovelos (EVs) are a network of long distance cycle routes criss-crossing the whole continent. They had been what had first drawn me to the idea of cycle touring on this trip, so I was excited to be riding my first one! This EV7, called the “Sun Route” runs from the northernmost tip of Sweden to the southernmost tip of Italy and Malta. This little segment along the Elbe river is called the Elberadweg/"Elbe cycleway" and is a popular route for commuting and leisure among locals.

This section was more picturesque than the other cycleways I had been on so far, which had hitherto felt largely functional - a safe, efficient way to get from A to B. The pastoral sights along the Elbe felt almost composed, like a postcard - cows and goats grazing, storks poking in long grass, birds skimming the river, a church tolling in the distance. I also saw more cycle tourists here, although still not many. My cycle route so far had been pretty much deserted aside from local village commuters!

Partway along, I had to cross the river via a ferry. The ferry was electric and powered by solar on its roof! This was very exciting, and I typed out a rather complex (but closed) question in Google Translate, hoping for a yes/no answer. The ferry conductor said many things that sounded very interesting based on acoustics alone, but no discernable “ja” or “nein”. This was a bit of a recurring theme in my travels:

• I tap out a CLOSED question on Google Translate, sometimes with non-beginner vocabulary (is it solely powered by the solar, do you have space for a one-man tent for tonight, etc.), then read it out loud to a person.

• They don’t respond with yes or no, but with a very full answer to the closed question.

• I say “Sorry, I don’t speak [language]”.

• They smile and say something encouraging like “What do you mean? You’re doing great at German!” (in German) and keep continuing the conversation or explaining the concept a different way, thinking I’m just a modest or shy language learner, when I actually really don’t understand anything they’re saying.

The rest of the Elberadweg took no time at all and I was soon rolling into Dresden, right up to Chrisi’s house around 3:30pm just as the rainclouds started suggesting a bit of spatter.

This first taste European cycling infrastructure has met the high expectations! I had picked out this route not for dramatic scenery but for safe, reliable, efficient transport. The smooth flatness of the Brandenburg forest and Elbe river cycleways have provided just that. The cooler weather also helped immensely - I was able to go so much further without feeling tired compare to Vietnam.

The purpose of this ride was to get from Berlin to Dresden safely with zero emissions, and to grow my confidence with an easy test run of solo multi-day touring before my bigger one in a few weeks. For that, it was perfect and pleasant.

• Time & speed: 3 days, around 3-6 hours of actual cycling per day, average cycling speed 15 kmph, overall speed including breaks around 10 kmph.

• Distance: 217 km

• Up elevation: 740 m