Day 8 - Dusseldorf / Basel

Had a bit of a sleep in this morning

Wandered the city for a while, quite a bit of bird life. The part of the city that we wandered this morning is significantly nicer than the area that our hotel is located (part of the reason it was cheap).

Found a local market, bought a coffee due to the no-cup issue at the hotel. I also bought and ate a herring and onion roll. The taste brought me back to my childhood when I would eat these things fairly regularly. As I was purchasing it I accidently split my coffee over the guy's display, no issue I quickly cleared it up. The seller made it very clear that the credit card reader was charging the correct amount for the sandwich and he showed it to me again to make it clear that the transaction had gone through. I assume there have been issues or allegations of fraud previously.

Our train out of Dusseldorf was 20+ mins late. This is becoming a common issue.

On our way to Basel, Switzerland. Very exciting!

We were approaching the part of our holiday where we had to start planning the return trip. Due to the complexity of the travel routes Buckie chose to go to a ticket office - which ended up being a bit of a saga. Initially I wasn't sure if I wanted to return to London the same way, so they started booking a 1 person journey through the train system. During this process I changed my mind and said make it two. There was only 1 seat on a critical part of the train journey, so I said ok just make it 1 again. However during the booking they had "reserved" the seat somehow, and when they exited out of the system to book 2 tickets they could no longer re-enter the system to book that seat (with the seat remaining unbookable due to their previous reservation). The only option was to wait for the reservation to expire and hope no one else snagged. We left the office with part of his trip booked and the hope he would be able to book the single open seat when it became available again.

The ticket office people were very polite and lovely. There were actually far more people working in the travel office than I would expect in 2026.

Arrived at Basel and checked into the hotel. The procedure is a bit special, involving walking uphill to another hotel than the one that you are checking into. But got it sorted in the end. River front view of the Rhine from our rooms was incredible.

After checking in we went out for a bit and took a motorless boat ride (reaction ferry) across the Rhine. What is a motorless boat ride? Well there is a cable that stretched across the Rhine, with a boat attached to it by looping a rope around the cable, allowing the boat to slide along the cable depending on how it angles itself to the water current. There appears to be two elements that control this, first you switch which side of the boat the rope is attached to (left side means has the boat's left side (some would call it 'port side') faces into the flow of water, and attaching it to the right side (starboard, again, according to some) has the right side of the boat face the current.

The other element is a rudder that the boat operator (some would call him a captain) operates.

These two elements are used to provide sideways movement across the river, while the cable keeps the boat from drifting downstream. Kind of fun to think of the physics of it.

There were some other people on the boat, we took their photo for them. They then took photos of us. Too many photos. From many angles. Spamming the Take Photo button all the time. Later, I had to spend 30 minutes deleting most of them.

Once on the other side we took the tram back over the Rhine.

Went to dinner . Sausage with spetzial, was very nice. The starter, asparagus soup, was amazing ( I'd only ordered it because it was healthy sounding).

While eating dinner a bike rider had a massive stack on his bike out the front of the restaurant. The waiter didn't care, he said he thinks they all ride recklessly and deserve things like this. The bike guy must have been seriously injured because a large crowd gathered around to help him and an ambulance arrived a little while later.Read more