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A pleasant September weekend activity in Adelaide each year is the ‘Bay to Birdwood’ vintage and classic car run. Hundreds of eye-poppingly (is there such a word? – there is now!) restored cars travel in a 70 km long procession from Glenelg on the coast to Birdwood in the Adelaide Hills, home of the classy National Motor Museum. One year it’s the turn of veteran and vintage cars, the next, classic cars from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It’s the largest, most long-standing motoring event for veteran, vintage and early classic vehicles held anywhere in the world.
The 2011 run was for classic cars, and even for non petrol heads like us, it was a great day. The polish and finish on the cars have to be seen to be believed, and with many of the owners dressed in clothing of the relevant period, it was like stepping back into our teenage years (thankfully minus the pimples this time). Swarms of people admired the cars while the period bands played in the central arena. Even Elvis Presley put in an appearance - we hadn’t seen him since Vegas in 2007 and he’s still in pretty good shape with his voice in fine mettle.
Winner of the 2011 award for the best presented car was Peter and Lynda Ninnis of Swan Hill with their magnificent 1958 Ford Skyliner. You can see some more pictures of the cars that made this year’s run here.
Come early September it was time to return to China for my next classes, this time a week in each of Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. With no wider travel planned this visit, the month passed quickly and I was in Shanghai in what seemed no time at all for the final class, this one in the modern suburb of Songjiang on the city’s outskirts.
On our day off we visited Qibao Ancient Town, originally established a thousand years ago in the Song Dynasty, and now absorbed within the Shanghai metropolitan sprawl about 20 km south-west of the city centre. These days Qibao is a tourist haunt with the usual myriad of trinket, tea, clothing and food snack stalls. We later strolled through the nearby Long Hua Buddhist temple complex, its location marked by an equally impressive tall pagoda opposite the entrance.
But it wasn’t a pleasant day for walking in the heat and humidity, and after returning to the hotel we waited until after dark before venturing out onto the streets again for a return visit to the excellent cafe strip with great Chinese food at prices that would please the most tight-fisted Finance Director, a 30 minute walk away past a lakeside plaza on which hundreds of people were doing their nightly “ballroom” dancing.
We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel Airport a week ago to discover that our Air France flight to Paris was cancelled due to a computer malfunction. We joined the long, glacial queue to get a replacement flight and got to the service desk five hours later! By this time all direct flights to Paris were full, but thankfully two tickets on Lufthansa via Dusseldorf were found for us. In the event we arrived in Paris a few minutes before midnight, much later than planned, but at least on the same day.
We had a fairly lazy week in Paris but made good use of the subway, and our feet, to wander around the city centre and along the banks of the Seine to see the sights and feel the atmosphere. As I did nine years ago, then with our kids in tow, I climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe for the great view down Champs Elysees and across to the Eiffel Tower.
We spent Saturday in hilly Montmartre in north Paris. After a look through the imposing Sacre Coeur Basilica we walked up and down the cafe-lined streets, nipping in and out of patisseries to check the offerings. We finally settled on the crunchy bread rolls, hams and tarts from Le Grenier a Pain, and along with a bottle of French wine and a paper bag of Provence apricots from Le Verger Saint Denis (“A Votre Service Depuis 1947”) near our hotel on Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, we had the makings of a divine picnic lunch / siesta combo. Not much work was done that afternoon.
We saw two very different concerts in Paris. The first was a violin recital in 13th century Sainte-Chapelle built by Louis IX, a beautiful building with walls almost entirely of stained glass. The second was a Cyndi Lauper concert at Olympia Theatre on Boulevard des Capucines. We wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to a Cyndi Lauper concert but we were intrigued to read that Charlie Musselwhite was in her band, and that she had recently won Billboard’s Blues Album of the Year Award for 2010. It seems that zany Cyndi has made one of the more surprising personal reinventions. The concert was great, the crowd was wild for Cyndi, and as always, Charlie’s harmonica was smokin’.
When the curtain fell, it fell not just on the concert, but on our trip too, for this was our last night in Paris and the last night of our trip generally before heading for home. We stopped en route in Singapore for a day to visit Lee Tuan’s relatives, and had dinner outside by the beach in warm, balmy air overlooking the harbour twinkling with the lights from more large freight ships than you could imagine could be anchored in the one harbour at the same time. Singapore food is the best – we had the mixed satays with peanut sauce, grilled stingray, Singapore noodles, Hainan chicken with rice, and fresh whole coconuts. After saying our goodbyes we headed for the airport, flying out at midnight and arriving in Adelaide at 8am, happy to be home after four months away but less so at crossing paths with Winter.
From the Harz we had a trouble-free run in to Berlin although we did delay ourselves nearly an hour due to an unfortunate unintended ausfahrt early on, resulting in a not unenjoyable drive through rolling German farmland while finding our way back onto the autobahn. After one final challenge, Berlin traffic on a Friday afternoon, we found the city-centre Avis agency and dropped off the mini Merc we’d picked up in Dresden. It’s always a relief to return a hire car unscathed after driving through unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the road. From there we caught a tram to our hotel on Frankfurter Allee in the grungy suburb of Friedrichshain where graffiti seems still to be socially acceptable.
On Saturday we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, surrounded at the time by tents set up for the Gay Pride Day celebrations, and on past the Reichstag, the enormous German parliament building that’s been through a lot in its time. Not surprisingly, many of Berlin’s tourist attractions are related to its World War II and subsequent Cold War histories. We walked over the cleared block once the location of the Nazi Gestapo and SS Headquarters, and spent a long time in the excellent, though exhausting and unsettling, Topographie des Terrors Museum, now located on the site. Suitably outraged at what we’d seen and read there, we went straight around the corner to Hitler’s bunker, but apparently he heard we were on the way and shot himself. We ended our day with a wander through the strange, excellent Holocaust Memorial, a grid of 2,700 differently shaped dark concrete columns set on two hectares of sloping ground.
Berlin became a divided city in 1961 after the communist-controlled east saw the need to erect a wall to prevent its own citizens from fleeing to the west, nearly three million of whom had already voted with their feet. The wall finally came down in November 1989 – it doesn’t seem that long ago does it? Only a few small sections remain as historical monuments – the longest is the so-called East Side Gallery that was adorned with paintings in the months after the Wall was breached. We walked the 1.3 km length of the Gallery on Sunday after wandering through a flea market set up on a disused graffiti-covered industrial site near the Spree River. A few kilometres on is well-known “Checkpoint Charlie”, one of the crossing points in the days of divided Berlin, and scene of a tense Cold War standoff between Soviet and US army tanks in October 1961.
We ended our time in Berlin on Tuesday night at Friedrichstadt Palast where we saw the sold-out blockbuster show Yma that wouldn’t have been out of place in Las Vegas. It ran hot and cold but there were some excellent segments, all performed on an amazingly versatile stage.
Four hours on the autobahn north of Bamberg brought us to the Hartz Mountains in Lower Saxony, in the heart of Germany. The mountains cover an area 90 km long and 30 km wide and straddle what was previously the border between East and West Germany. Mining for copper, silver and lead began here more than a thousand years ago with one of the principal mining centres being the twin town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. But this is just one of many small towns in the Harz region now cocooned within spruce forests and inter-connected by winding forest roads. Two of the towns, Goslar and Quedlinburg, have been World Heritage listed due to their magnificent historical old town centres, their ancient “half-timbered” houses, and their nationally significant castles and palaces dating from the era when current day Germany was a collection of separate principalities ruled by Kings and Princes.
We based ourselves in the old-fashioned resort town of Bad Grund and spent a few days touring around the Harz. We had a particular interest in Zellerfeld and returned there several times. In the late 1840s the local mining industry fell on hard economic times; its underground mines had reached such depths that the costs of production were high and uncompetitive, at a time when world oversupply had depressed metal prices. Zellerfeld was then within the Kingdom of Hanover and the Hanoverian authorities encouraged and assisted mining families to leave the Harz and emigrate overseas, particularly to South Australia. One of those families was Heinrich and Friederike Spohr and their seven children. It was obviously a huge, emotionally wrenching time in their lives – they knew when they set out that they would never see Zellerfeld or the Harz again, and their welfare in the new world was far from assured. But it was certainly good for me that they did make the voyage, for had they not, I would never have been born. Heinrich and Friederike were my great-great grandparents. Along with 260 other emigrants, the family set sail from Hamburg on 5 October 1854 on the sailing ship Johann Cesar and arrived at Port Adelaide 84 days later on 1 January 1855.
We spent a couple of hours inspecting the excellent Zellerfeld mining museum (“Oberharzer Bergwerksmuseum”), and on our last day in the Harz, chanced upon the Thursday night famers’ market underway in Zellerfeld as we passed through on our way back to Bad Grand after spending the day in Quedlinburg. We stopped for awhile to mingle with the friendly Zellerfeld crowd and to try the roast pork and herb rolls, beer and apple strudel while listening to the enthusiastic nostalgia band performing in front of the museum.
Saturday morning in Dresden we picked up a Merc A160 and hit the Autobahn. There were no speed limits but even this was too slow for many of the drivers who drove like there was no tomorrow, which for one or two of them I suspect there won’t be. We were happy to let ourselves become “stuck” behind the slower vehicles in the inner lanes and move along at a more sedate 120. Early on it seemed like there were many towns in Germany named ‘Ausfahrt’, but then we realized that must be German for ‘Exit’. The road surface and signage were excellent, leading to a pleasant atmosphere inside the car, and we never once found ourselves Ausfahrting when we shouldn’t have.
We left the Autobahn after about three hours and motored into the perfect little medieval town of Bamberg in Bavaria, about 300 km south-west of Dresden. The town centre is World Heritage listed, and deservedly so we thought. The imposing ecclesiastical buildings and old palace are all in good repair, despite being centuries old. The Cathedral of St Peter and St George dates from 1012 AD and contains the tomb of Clemens II, the Pope in Rome in 1046/47. Although not German, he loved Bamberg and wanted to be buried here.
The streets of Bamberg are beautiful too, with neat characterful terrace houses decorated with window boxes full of colourful early summer flowers. We spent the afternoon wandering around the town centre, looking around and in the buildings, before getting lost on the way back to our hotel with the result that our walk back was a few kilometres longer than it should have been. But in the winding, elegant streets of Bamberg that didn’t matter.
Leaving Prague wasn’t as straightforward as we expected. We’d bought train tickets to Dresden, Germany, a few days before but when we arrived at the Prague railway station on Thursday morning we discovered a train strike had been called and all trains for the day were cancelled! This wasn’t what we wanted to hear – it was warm and humid and we were lugging backpacks. We spent the morning looking for alternatives and finally at the international bus station secured the last two tickets on a bus from Budapest scheduled to stop in Prague at 5pm on its way to Berlin via Dresden. That gave us time for one last wander through Prague’s fantastic old town centre before returning to the bus station and ultimately getting into Dresden at 9.30pm, by which time we were both more than ready for a shower and lie down.
The famous baroque centre of Dresden was controversially destroyed by Allied bombing in the final months of World War II, but extensive rebuilding in the decades since has restored much of the city centre to its former magnificence. We started our day in Dresden with a walk through the 1728 fortress Zwinger, then past the Semperoper (Opera House) to the Schloss, a huge palace now containing museums. We inspected only one of the latter; Grunes Gewolbe (the Green Vault) filled with one of the world’s finest collections of jewel-encrusted objects including the world’s largest green diamond. Outside we walked along the impressive Furstenzug, a 102 metre long tiled mural depicting a royal procession, before inspecting the interior of the Church of Our Lady, one of Germany’s greatest protestant churches. Out the front there’s a large statue of Martin Luther.
There was quite a crowd of tourists in Dresden and we joined many of them for lunch along the cafe-lined streets running along the Elbe River that cuts Dresden in two, the old town centre to the south, the new town to the north.
All the hype is justified – Prague is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. Our five days here rushed by as we went back and forth across the Vltava River to see the sights and experience some of what Prague has to offer. We saw the usual tourist attractions like the enormous Castle complex that towers over the city, the fantastic old town square, and block after block of ornate, well-preserved buildings. And there’s no shortage of things to do after dark too. We saw a hot blues band in the grungy Pop Museum, the classy Prague Big Band at the Reduta Jazz Club, the show Black Box at the Image black light Theatre, and a classical music concert at the Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. Perhaps the best of the museums was the Convent of St Agnes dating from the 13th century, now housing the Czech National Gallery’s fabulous collection of Bohemian and Central European medieval art from the 13th to mid-16th centuries.
