Hamburg

En route to Hamburg, at the tiny town of Friesack, our train broke down.

The train was too high for the low platform in this small station, so about a thousand people had to be helped down off the train to stand in the rain and wait for a replacement.

Then the crowd made their way up and down an overbridge to the replacement train (hauling their luggage, of course) and boarded it with the help of the constantly calm and helpful train staff. Astoundingly, throughout the whole process everyone was calm, smiling and helping each other - or maybe they’re used to their two-hour journey taking four and a half.

Anyway, Hamburg.

We wanted to look at the Speicherstadt, the WorldHeritage warehouse district where, between 1893 and 1927 timber-pile-founded warehouses were built to line the canals, and a cruise seemed like a good way to do it.

Imagine our pleasant surprise, then, when we ended up on a cruise of the container port on the other side of the river. For those interested in gross tonnages and container-movements-per-hour it would have been great; for normal members of the human race, not so much. Anyway, it was our fault for getting on the wrong boat.

We visited the viewing platform of the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg’s handsome opera house, for some great pictures of the city, before finally enjoying Speicherstadt from solid ground.

That evening, for something different, we visited Miniatur Wunderland.

Well, we’ve never seen anything like it. Stretching over two floors and a part of another building, the world’s biggest train set absolutely defies description.

Not so much the size of the project, it was the attention to detail that was astounding. From the traffic jams around the airport to the naked couple in a sunflower field that a teenage boy was eager to point out to us, it was just downright clever.

Deservedly popular, and open nineteen hours a day, it was also crowded but not packed. It was always possible to make a little way along and find a spot in the front row.

Away from the docks, Binnenalster (The “Inner Lake”j, with a water jet in its centre and still more boat rides on offer, is nearby to the Rathaus Markt, with the town hall itself looking imposing on one side. It seemed quite affluent; there weren’t many exclusive designer brands missing from the nearby streets.

We also went to the Alter Elbetunnel, a car (well, originally horse and cart) and pedestrian tunnel completed in 1911 and running under the Elbe to the shipyards and docks to the south. Accessed by giant lifts, it probably wasn’t the most efficient vehicle tunnel in the world, but is certainly one of the most elegant.

Our time in Germany is now almost ended, one more footprint will finish this saga.Read more