I don’t know what to say. After all these years, I have finally arrived at home, and The Longest Way has reached its conclusion. The Caboose is in the car port. We’re no strangers to love, she and I, but our walking days are behind us.

the stranger

The thing is, I don’t know what to say. I could tell you that The Cut turns out to be a trip in and of itself. You know the rules and so do I: one hot summer afternoon seven years earlier I am in Northwest China, making the commitment to not touch my hair or my beard until the moment when I will reach my home. A full commitment is what I’m thinking of.

I’m glad my brother Ruben is there when it finally happens. What have I done? I ask him as we arrive at the location and see the crew with their lights and smoke and their cameras and microphones. “It’s only appropriate for the gravity of the situation,” Ruben says with an ironic smile. You wouldn’t get this from any other guy.

After it’s all done we go to have burgers, fries, and coke. One time I look up and see my own reflection in a window. Only it’s not me. The person staring back at me is a confused stranger.

the black cat

I am writing all of this because I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling. Gotta make you understand. But how? Maybe it’s better if I just tell you about some of the things that I’ve been doing lately.

There’s that moment when I take the very last self portrait of The Longest Way. I do it in front of a map of the Silk Roads. There is a thin black line that I have drawn on the map. I love that line.

Sometimes I go for little walks around Bad Nenndorf. We’ve known each other for so long, the town and I, and so little has ever changed. There is a Christmas market, so I go there to stand around in the cold and have some lumumba.

I make a kohlrabi dish that the bowtie-wearing owner of the guesthouse in Bodenwerder has told me about. I feel strongly about kohlrabi.

One day I notice that I have lost most hearing in my left ear. So I go to the emergency room. The doctor tells me that it’s sensorineural hearing loss and asks me if I’ve been experiencing any stress lately. It’s one of those situations where your heart’s been aching but you’re too shy to say it. I look at my reflection, at the confused person who isn’t such a stranger anymore, and I think: inside, we both know what’s been going on. The doctor gives me some cortisone and I recover my hearing.

I visit my grandparents and play Rummikub with my grandma. I like the moment of sitting down and noisily shuffling the playing pieces on the table. It’s as comforting as it is simple: we both know the game and we’re gonna play it. I drink lumumba and my grandma wins the game.

I spend Christmas at my sister’s place. She gives me a gift, a tiny porcelain plate from Japan with a black cat painted on it. The cat looks so fragile and trusting and stupid that I have to fight back tears.

the pastel dream

And then there is the pastel dream. Or rather, it isn’t so much a dream as it is a memory.

Ever so often, before my mind’s eye, I find myself in a certain afternoon in the spring of 2018 when I was walking through East Iran. I am on a country road, and I can feel the Caboose’s handlebars in my hands, I can hear the gravel scrunching under my soles, I can see the earthen walls on both sides of the road, and I can smell the orchards. It is neither hot nor cold, it is perfect. The world feels like a pastel-colored painting, everything is so soft and timeless. Actually, it’s as if time has never existed.

And if you ask me how I’m feeling don’t tell me you’re too blind to see.

pictures

being home after The Longest Way:

The post home appeared first on The Longest Way.

One day of rest. One day to hang out with my brother Ruben. I took a long, hot shower. Put on some clean clothes. Had some food. Took some more pictures. Sat around. Talked. Observed myself. I was home now. Home, home. Home.

And so the day came and the day went. And eventually I slept.

the meaning

I went to bed with my beard and my hair for the last time. Ever since that day in Northwest China more than seven years earlier I had not cut them, not even once, not even a bit. To me, my hair symbolized the journey. The tips were from China and Kazakhstan. Georgia and Turkey were somewhere in the middle. The roots were Germany and France. The journey of The Longest Way was in my beard and my hair. And the journey was done.

So they had to go.

the video

There are a few things about the original The Longest Way video that I think I would like to have done differently. I like the video. But it has a rather long intro that’s just white text on a black background. Like Star Wars where the text doesn’t move. The ending is a bit long as well. And I took my self portraits without thinking about the lighting very much. The stabilization I applied to them was a bit sloppy. Etc. etc.

But the one thing that gets me every time is the hairdresser sequence at the 3:22 mark. It was a very emotional moment for me at the time. And yet in the video it’s just a few seconds, then it’s over: I have gone from the full beard and hair look back to my clean cut self.

Why didn’t I give this transformative moment a bit more space in the video?

I don’t know.

the plan

This time I wanted to do it differently. The hairdresser sequence didn’t have to be part of the new time-lapse video I was planning to make, not necessarily.

Instead, I wanted to get the whole process on film. And because this was very likely going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I decided to go all out.

pictures

getting a haircut after seven years:

The post the cut appeared first on The Longest Way.

I wake up in my last camping spot on The Longest Way. It is located at an intersection in the middle of the forest called Kreuzbuche (beech of the cross). There used to be a few big beech trees there, but they all died a long time ago. There also used to be a rare dwarf beech, one of the most beautiful types of trees that I know, but it got destroyed during a bout of Father’s Day vandalism some years earlier..

present tense

Luckily, I have the forest to myself at this time. I can hear a bird calling from somewhere in the trees, and I can see a thin curtain of rain outside of the hut where I have pitched the tent.

I do my exercises just like I have always been doing them since the time when I was down with a herniated disc in Budapest. I eat two bananas, and I drink a little bit of the tea that I have left over from the day before. I still have a chocolate croissant for the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf. Good.

Home is just a few hours of walking away. I find it hard to believe, and yet here we are.

mudlings

I follow the gravel road through the forest for a while. One time I run into a group of little kids. They might be four or five years old, there is mud all over their bodies and their little faces, and some of them have twigs and leaves in their hair. I am convinced that I have never seen a more adorable sight in my life. They are a forest kindergarten, and their teacher looks at me with wide eyes.

“Are you Christoph Rehage?” she asks me.

I mumble something between a yes and an excuse. I cannot talk. I have to go.

the tower

Then, just like that, I begin to recognize the trees and the shape of the ground, and I know exactly where I am. There is a tower close by. It’s called Belvedere Tower, and it was built in the middle of the 19th century as a viewing platform overlooking the trees. The trees have since grown much higher than the tower, and there isn’t really much to see at the top anymore. But that doesn’t matter to someone who just wants to be in the trees.

I have been up there countless times, sometimes feeling happy, sometimes feeling sad. There is a video that I posted to my Youtube channel 10 years earlier that I filmed on the top of the tower. It shows nothing but the trees in the wind.

And now I’m back. Walking. With the Caboose.

tears

I climb the stairs up the tower. Round and round they go, up and up until I am between the treetops. Bad Nenndorf is somewhere behind them. The place that I used to call home in China is in the opposite direction, somewhere behind the curvature of the Earth. I look down at the Caboose. She is down there between the trees, and she looks very small and vulnerable like that.

Hey Boosy, I say.

Then I start crying.

bread

The rest of the way is quiet. I walk the same ways that I have walked before so many times, and it somehow feels like I have already arrived.

I don’t take the direct way home. Instead I walk through the cemetery, and then I go to a bakery and buy a loaf of Gersterbrot, the bread that we eat in this region. I put it on the Caboose, and I walk up the street, through the pedestrian zone and through the spa park, and then down to the last traffic light that I will ever cross on The Longest Way.

I know this particular traffic light by heart. I can anticipate the amount of time it takes for it to jump to green after you’ve pressed the button. How many times have I crossed here with our family dog Puki, and how many times was our family cat Nase following us?

witches

The street down to my home isn’t long. My father is waiting, and my sister is there, too. I pass the church where I once got a laughing fit during a Christmas service. I pass the feminist graffito that appeared out of nowhere a few years earlier and has never been removed.

I’m glad it’s still there.

And then, just like that, seemingly in an instant, as if the whole day hadn’t happened, as if the years on the road were mere glitches in a video, as if I had never walked through the deserts and the mountains and along the seas, as if I didn’t have the beard and the hair and the scars to prove it, as if I hadn’t cried and laughed and screamed my heart out, as if I hadn’t seen the blackness of the Black Sea and the lights of the galaxy, as if I hadn’t left my soul somewhere behind me in the forest, as if none of these things were even remotely real, as if I had just gone out to buy a loaf of bread – I was home.

pictures

the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf

The post the last day appeared first on The Longest Way.

I woke up in a warm room with my stuff laid out to dry on the floor. Packed up. Had some food. And then I loaded up the Caboose. Just like so many times before.

I knew that this was going to be the last full walking day on The Longest Way.

how the universe works

The first thing I did was go to a bicycle repair shop. Ever since getting a flat tire a few days earlier I hadn’t fixed it, which meant that the spare wheel had become useless, as it was now flat.

I believe that if I don’t fix it now, something will go wrong up there in the forest, I explained to the owner of the bike shop.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s how the universe works.”

sweat

An hour later I was in the Deister. The initial climb turned out to be brutal. It was windy and sleeting, which meant that I was wearing my poncho. But the inclines were a lot steeper than I had expected, which meant that I was sweating like a pig under the plastic.

When I arrived at a wooden hut at the top of the initial climb, I took off the poncho, the windbreaker, the fleece, and ultimately even my shirt. Everything was wet.

I had some spare clothes in the Caboose. I put on a new shirt and a warm longsleeve. Sat in the hut having some food and some tea. And then I got back into my fleece and my windbreaker. They were still wet, but what could you do.

Luckily the sleet hat stopped at this point, so I didn’t need to wear the poncho anymore.

the forest whispers

Walking became easier after this. There was a path through the forest called Kammweg (ridge way). It was mostly a gravel road, so even with the snow and the sleet and the general wetness it never turned into a mud fest.

There was dense fog, however. It would come and go, fogging up and then clearing into thin air again after an instant. One time, as I was looking through a clearing in the trees, I understood that this wasn’t fog. It was just cloud after cloud surging against the ridge of the Deister, enveloping the forest for a while, then floating on.

I had all kinds of emotions at this point, and I liked the clouds very much.

the sign

Then darkness fell. I put on my head torch. Usually I would wear two: one on my forehead, one on the back of the Caboose as a safety measure. I didn’t put on the second one this time. I was alone in the forest. It was dark and there was nobody around. The world became smaller and smaller until the only thing that was left of it was the cone of light from my head torch.

I would see my red shoes, the pair that I had bought in Fulda, under me. I would see the road, and I would hear it, the gravel scrunching under my shoes. I would see trees, most of them naked. They  would appear out of nowhere and then disappear into the night again just a moment later.

I had feared this forest once, during a cold winter night at the turn of the millennium.

But not anymore.

pictures

the walk from Springe to Kreuzbuche:

The post take me appeared first on The Longest Way.

I had stayed in a guesthouse on the riverbanks. It belonged to a local fishing club, and the room was cold, but it was good enough.

no pied pipers?

Hameln was where the story of the Pied Pieper had taken place. I decided to take a detour through the center of the city, not because I was hoping to get to see anything about the Pied Piper, but because I wanted to have a warm meal.

There was a thai restaurant. I ordered a serving of pad thai, and it turned out to be unexpectedly awesome.

And then, as I was sitting there, I thought of something that surely nobody had ever thought of before: Hitler was the Pied Piper. Whenever he had come to the Bückeberg near Hameln, he had led the people away with his rhetorics, his promises, and the propaganda surrounding his persona.

the way

I knew it was going to be one of my last walking days on The Longest Way. There was only the city of Springe up ahead, and then there was the Deister. And then, after that, after that familiar forest, I would be home.

I didn’t feel it, though. The sky was grey, and there was a cold wind in the air. I walked most of the way on a bike lane next to a busy road, so it wasn’t exactly meditative. I saw the same things that I had seen so many times before: drivers tailgating each other, pedestrians walking their dogs, some traditional houses, some prefab buildings, a bunch of trash that someone had carelessly dumped into a forest, a nice sunset where the clouds ripped open for a moment, revealing a day that could have been.

One time I sat down and ate some bread with lentil spread and a bell pepper. I drank tea from my thermos, and I had some cocoa-flavored oat milk.

It was a typical walking day.

24km

And then I saw the sign. It hung from a traffic light at an intersection, and it stated something obvious in a matter-of-fact way: BAD NENNDORF it said. BAD NENNDORF 24KM.

I could not believe it. This was the first time on The Longest Way, the first time ever since I had left my place in Beijing on November 9th 2007, that I had seen a street sign with the name of my home town on it.

I stood there, staring at the sign. I took a photo of it and stared at it some more. BAD NENNDORF 24KM. Then I continued walking.

It was only after a while that I realized that I had forgotten to take a self portrait with the sign that meant so much to me.

pictures

the walk from Hameln to Springe:

The post street sign with a name appeared first on The Longest Way.

It was my plan to walk the last bit of the way home to Bad Nenndorf via the Deister, a range of forested hills. This was important to me for two reasons: 1) I wanted to arrive home alone and undisturbed. 2) I had spent a lot of time walking through the Deister in my days.

different ways home

There were two ways from Bodenwerder to the Deister Gate near Springe: either east via Salzhemmendorf and Coppenbrügge, or west via Hameln.

“The western way is more interesting,” Mr. Hahn had told me, “you will pass the Bückeberg, the place where Hitler held his Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival.” He had a few books on the subject.

the Weser bike path

So I decided to follow the Weser on its way northwest to Hameln. Sometimes there was a bike lane and sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes I was in the forest and sometimes in the fields. It took a long time somehow, and when it started getting dark, I had only gotten as far as the Grohnde nuclear power plant.

It reminded me of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant I had passed on my way through Austria. Zwentendorf had never gone into service, and Grohnde had been shut down as well. Somehow the German-speaking world had said no to nuclear power, which seemed absurd in terms of energy-security but reasonable when it came to storing the waste that those nuclear power plants produced.

the dark hill

When I arrived on top of the Bückeberg it was already dark. There didn’t seem to be much to see to begin with, but now, in the darkness, it seemed as though I had arrived late to the party. Or rather: I had arrived when the party was already over.

I looked at the information panels and at the large, flat field that the nazis had used for one of their main propaganda events of the 1930s: the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festivals, a sort of popular antipode to the Nürnberg Reich Party Congresses.

It was a bit hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of people had come here every year from 1933 until 1937. Nazi-hippies, if you will. Now there was only black silence and, in the weak light of my head torch, the artificial ridge on which Hitler used to walk up and down to take his propagandistic “bath in the crowds”.

pictures

the walk from Bodenwerder to Hameln:

The post late to the party appeared first on The Longest Way.

The night before I had somehow made it back down from the monastery, in spite of the icy roads. There was a café at the foot of the hill. The door was unlocked and no one was inside.

meh

I sat in the café having my tea until a lady appeared and told me that they had no place for me there. She didn’t say it in an unfriendly way, in fact she took me to a neighboring house that she described as a “commune”. Maybe they had a place for me to sleep?

But when we got there, all we saw were two grey-haired heads in the windows who told us no in a way that sounded more like “meh”.

Bodenwerder

So this morning I woke up in a guesthouse in Bodenwerder. It was the place that Wolfgang from Amelungsborn had told me about, the one with the interesting owner.

He had been right.

cats and burning wood

The guesthouse had been run by the same family since the 1950s. It was old and full of books, and there was always some classical music playing from the kitchen. It had a room with a wood-burning oven at its center, and there were a lot of interesting pictures on the walls (one by Konrad Schmidt that I really liked). And it had Smoki the cat, who was always laying around here or there.

The owner, Mr. Hahn, was a gentleman who always wore suits. And I mean always wore suits. With a bowtie. He was very interesting to talk to, and it turned out he was also an excellent cook.

I decided to stay one more day. This was going to be my last resting day on The Longest Way, and I wanted to spend it here, petting Smoki the cat, talking to Mr. Hahn, looking at books and maps. Home was just a few days of walking away.

pictures

a day of rest in Bodenwerder:

The post one more resting day appeared first on The Longest Way.

There was no one at Amelungsborn Abbey. The night before I had called a number and a voice on the phone had told me how to get to the key to the pilgrims’ apartment from a lockbox. The apartment was nice, and there were all kinds of informational materials in the kitchen. One of them spoke of another monastery about a day’s march from here.

It was the German Orthodox Monastery of Buchhagen, and apparently it offered lodging to pilgrims.

the beautiful light

Before I started walking a gentleman appeared from somewhere. His name was Wolfgang, and he, too, had seen the NDR news piece about me. He told me to try finding a place to sleep at the monastery, and if that didn’t work, go to a certain guesthouse in Bodenwerder, the next town.

“The owner is a friend,” he said, “and a very interesting guy.”

I left Amelungsborn and walked towards a forest. At first I was worried that there might be a lot of mud on the forest roads with all the thawing snow, but it turned out to be okay. It was quite beautiful actually. After walking for about an hour I was alone with the trees and the light of the winter day.

fortified again

When it started getting dark I left the forest path to walk to the town of Kirchbrak and see their fortified church. It was from the 13th century, and even though its fortifications were much smaller, it still reminded me of some of the fortified churches I had seen in Transylvania. I wondered what had happened in this region in the 13th century for people to build their churches this way.

icy darkness

The German Orthodox Monastery lay on top of a hill, and when I reached the foot of the hill, I noticed that the roads were getting icy. I was a bit worried about the way back down as I was pulling the Caboose up to the monastery.

After a while I arrived at a gate. I left the Caboose there and opened the gate. There was a footpath made from boulders. It was slippery and steep. I went up anyway, just to see what was behind it. Darkness was behind it. I saw a few buildings, all of them completely black. Maybe the monks weren’t home? Or maybe they had already gone to bed? I looked at my watch: it was seven in the evening.

pictures

the walk from Amelungsborn to Bodenwerder:

The post dark ice appeared first on The Longest Way.

I remember telling you about the meaning of December 6th a long time ago as I was walking through China. In Germany, it was the day of Saint Nicholas. Kids were supposed to clean their shoes and put them outside so Saint Nick, the patron saint of children, could drop chocolates, fruits, and candies in them.

When I opened my door in the morning I noticed my shoes, the red trail runners I had bought in Fulda. There was a little chocolate Santa in one of them.

[face-holding-back-tears-emoji]

Feldmann’s friends

I sat down for breakfast with the family and shared with them why I had made Holzminden a destination on The Longest Way. It was because I wanted to visit the grave of one of my favorite writers: Michael Holzach.

He had done a year-long, penniless walking tour of Germany in 1980 and written a book about it: Deutschland Umsonst (Germany For Free). I loved that book. After his death in an accident a few years later, Holzach had found his final resting place in Internat Solling, the boarding school he had attended as a youth.

That’s where I wanted to go today and pay my respects.

A moment later I had a book written by Holzach in front of me. It was about his dog Feldmann who had accompanied him on his walk through Germany, and it was illustrated by his girlfriend Freda Heyden.

There was even a little Caboose in the book.

[crying-emoji]

TV and the grave

When I arrived at the boarding school I had just gone through a tire change with the Caboose. Luckily I had bought that wrench a while earlier.

Also, there was a TV crew waiting for me. They were from Sat.1, a privately owned German TV channel, and they ended up filming a short segment of me walking around and talking about this and that in front of the wintery backdrop of the boarding school. It was fun, the only caveat being that they somehow made me appear more adventurous than I really was.

I went to Holzach’s grave by myself. It was a simple slab of stone on the ground. Hey Michael, I said, ich bin da. Then I placed a little stone on his grave as I had learned to do a while earlier, and then I said goodbye.

the darkness

After a bit of walking a local paper called Täglicher Anzeiger Holzminden asked me for an interview in their office. They had tea and cookies, and their place was warm.

When I finally got going it was dark outside, and there was that gruelling sleet again. I had about 18km to go until I would get to Amelungsborn Abbey, where they had promised me a room. So I put on my poncho and stepped out into the blackness.

pictures

the walk from Holzminden to Amelungsborn:

The post Michael Holzach appeared first on The Longest Way.

Again there had been a monastery, and again they had told me that there was no place for me there. No room at the inn, so to speak. And so I woke up in yet another hotel.

fraud

What does that mean: “And so”? Couldn’t I have put up my tent somewhere instead of paying for a warm place? Yes, I could have. The truth is I didn’t feel like I had it in me anymore. There were many reasons not to camp: laws and regulations, the fear of catching a cold before my hairdresser appointment, the necessity of my exercises, the fragility of my medication, etc. etc.

But all of that was just smoke and mirrors.

The truth was that I wanted my things to unfreeze and get dry at the end of a long day. I didn’t want any adventure anymore. I just wanted to get home.

flamingo

As I was walking down a muddy country lane, with the snow thawing under my shoes, I felt somewhat conflicted. There were real outdoor people out there. Danger lovers, exploration enthusiasts, makers of fire. And then there was I, a dude who had gone for a walk. A person on what could be called an extended stroll, a prolonged breeze, a promenade that had gotten out of hand.

The Longest Way.

And then, while I was still pondering these questions, I suddenly found myself standing still. I had arrived at a lake. A lake with some snow and a lot of naked trees around it. And in the middle of the lake, there were a few bright objects floating around. They were inflatable flamingos, and they seemed to be there for no reason at all.

They were flaming pink, and they looked like they didn’t give a fuck about anything.

Corvey

I crossed the Weser at the small town of Beverungen and entered the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Princely Abbey of Corvey was up ahead. I was excited because it had the oldest Carolingian westwork in existance, and because it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But there was also a more personal reason: the first time that my home town Bad Nenndorf had ever been mentioned in history was in the year 936 – in the documents of the Benedictine Abbey of Corvey. They called Bad Nenndorf Nyanthorpe back then.

Alas, when I arrived in Corvey the sky was already getting dark. I hung out for a while, took some pictures of the facade, and I plucked a leaf from a bush because I wanted a keepsake from this place. Then I marched on.

dinner

When I got close to the town of Holzminden I called a private guesthouse to inquire about a room. It was run by a German-Bolivian family.

“What are you doing out there?” they said when I arrived, “it’s so cold!”

We sat down at their table, they gave me a bowl of pasta, and we talked for a few hours. I, the perambulator who liked to have it warm, was with friends now.

pictures

the walk from Würgassen to Holzminden:

The post Nyanthorpian perambulator appeared first on The Longest Way.

There was a monastery in Bursfelde, but it had no place for me to sleep. It was late when I arrived, and the night was dark and cold. Luckily I found a hotel.

When I got up in the morning, I noticed that they had one of my favorite books on display in the corridor: “Mein Leben” by Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

The only celebrity I had ever written a letter to.

the snow and the ice

When I stepped out onto the road I noticed two things: 1) there was a bit of ice in some places, and 2) I had reached the river Weser. This was the last river I was going to walk along on The Longest Way. The last one. I felt a bit… nostalgic.

At first I walked on the road for a while because there was less snow and ice on it, and because there was almost no traffic. Then the bike lane and the road got separated, and I chose the bike lane. It led along the river, and it reminded me of the different sections of the EuroVelo I had been on for such a long time.

the downhill

There was a steep downhill after this. It was so steep in fact that there was a sign before it ordering cyclists to dismount. There was ice and snow on it. The Caboose didn’t have any brakes. I went down step by step, slamming the rods under the handlebars into the road surface whenever we started to slip. It took us a while to get down.

the dance

And then, at about four in the afternoon, I stopped walking. I set the Caboose down and unfolded my camping chair. We were in the snow between the river and the road, but luckily there was a guardrail protecting us from traffic.

I set up the camera to film myself dancing. I had never anticipated that there would be 18 dances on The Longest Way (20 if you’re pedantic). And especially when I was doing the 17000km dance as the unicorn, I was sure it was going to be my last.

And yet here we were.

I screamed some words into the camera while the cars and the trucks were thundering by. Then I cut the rug.

pictures

the walk from Bursfelde to Würgassen:

The post 1-8-0-0-0 appeared first on The Longest Way.

We all left on Sunday morning. My friends went by car, I went by Caboose. It had snowed during the night, and just as I was leaving it started snowing again.

leaving Göttingen

A while later we were all together again, sitting in a fast food restaurant on the way out of Göttingen. It had taken my friends just a few minutes by car. For me, in my poncho and my gaiters, pulling the Caboose through the snow, it had taken over an hour. My feet were wet, and I was hungry and cold.

And then we said goodbye for good. I was out on the road by myself again. First I followed a bike lane for a while, and when it vanished, I ditched the main road and walked through the villages. There was another decommissioned railway line that had been turned into a path through the fields, so I decided to take that one.

Walking was quite fun with all the snow everywhere, only sometimes it got a bit difficult when the Caboose and I had to navigate around some fallen trees that had collapsed on the path.

recognized

I wasn’t prepared for the way to get any more difficult than this, but of course it did. At one point, when the snow went up to my shins and I could hardly move the Caboose at all, I decided to just stand there and wait until someone walked by whom I could ask about the way.

After a while a lady with a dog appeared.

“You are the guy from TV, aren’t you?” she said, and then she told me that the way ahead would get a bit better further on.

And it really did. I was in a forest enjoying the road conditions when an old man with yet another dog walked past me, pointed at the Caboose, and said: “Do I know you from TV?”

unrecognized

A bit later another random stranger started talking to me. I had just finished walking a stretch of road with no sidewalk, no bike lane, and no shoulder to walk on, feeling relieved to have made it to a village, with my head torch on my forehead and clouds of steam hovering around me.

“What are you doing?” a guy asked me. He had just appeared out of nowhere with a rather serious look on his face.

I told him I was a tourist.

“What do you mean, tourist?” he proceeded to ask.

I told him I was traveled by walking.

“Aha,” he said, not sounding very convinced.

Then he got out a bag with some food and a bottle of lemonade.

“Here, I bought this for you,” he said, “when I saw you walking alone on that road I felt sorry for you.”

His name was Benny.

stars

I walked for a few more hours that day. Or rather: that night. At some point the stars came out, and I felt mezmerized as I was walking down a dark country lane, the snow crunching under my shoes, my breath evaporating rhythmically in little puffs in front of me, and the universe once again becoming spatial in the night sky.

pictures

the walk from Göttingen to Bursfelde:

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We spent three days in Göttingen. Dario was there. Bower was there. Pummi was there. I was there. The Caboose was in the parking garage.

what we drank

We mostly drank gin and tonic or rum and coke. I had bought a few bottles of vodka for SlowerPulse testing purposes, so we tested them, too. Ukrainian Spirit (from Ukraine, duh) wasn’t very good, Crown vodka premium from Bulgarian was okay, Stauffenberg vodka from Germany was a mixed bag, and te was weirdly excellent. But I will write some more detailed reviews of these vodka brands later.

When we went out we had Sambuca shots and various cocktails. We also tried a drink called Tiefseetaucher that involved the infamous Stroh 80, a 160 proof rum. It was epically disgusting.

Of course we also had a few mugs of lumumba at the Christmas market.

what we ate

First I made a large pot of chili. I tried to give it some flavor by adding a bunch of piri piri. It was chili alright.

Then Bower made a large pot of chili, adding rum and chocolate, a bunch of herbs and a spoonful of his infamous naga powder. It was tear-inducingly phenomenal.

what we did

We didn’t really do very much. Sat around in the apartment. Talked a lot of shit. Went out a few times. I felt a bit stressed about the end of The Longest Way looming on the horizon, so I wasn’t as relaxed as I wished I could be.

Oh, and one time we went and played foosball.

pictures

drinking in Göttingen:

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When I woke up I was in the guest room of Miriam’s house. I had found her and her family through Warmshowers, a hospitality network for bicycle tourists. Yes, something like Couchsurfing.

I was actually going to write “Couchsurfing clone” here at first but when I looked it up it turned out that Warmshowers is actually much older and non-profit, and it doesn’t seem to have been experiencing the catastrophic difficulties that Couchsurfing has been dealing with over the last half decade or so.

vaccination struggles

I was sitting at Miriam’s breakfast table when it occurred to me that I was suddenly faced with a difficult situation myself. I wanted to get to Göttingen and spend the weekend there with my childhood friends, having lumumba at Christmas market. And before diving into the crowds I wanted to get another Covid booster shot and a flu vaccine.

But the only doctor’s office I could find that would do it was in the city, and they were closing at noon.

“Why don’t you just take our car?” Miriam asked me.

I could hardly believe my ears. This family had known me for less than 24 hours, and here they were offering to let me borrow their car to drive to the city.

Long story short: I hadn’t driven a car in years, it was an unfamiliar vehicle, and the there was snow everywhere. So I drove extra slowly and extra carefully, much to the annoyance of the other drivers on the road.

the cold road to Göttingen

After the vaccination I packed up my stuff and got going. There was still snow all around, but it seemed to become less and less dense as I was getting closer to the city.

We had booked a serviced apartment in the north part of Göttingen. The dudes were set to arrive the next day. I was happy that I had one evening to rest, shower, eat, and take care of a few things like picture archiving and blog writing.

pictures

the walk from Reinhausen to Göttingen:

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It felt like a gift. After all of the beautiful whiteness in China, in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan, in Turkey, and in Bulgaria, and after that one magical April day in Iran, I was suddenly blessed with fresh snow on The Longest Way here in Germany.

The problem was that I had an appointment to get to.

priorities

The day started out alright. Most of the sidewalks within Heilbad Heiligenstadt had been properly plowed, and walking was easy at first. But as soon as I left the city limits all of this stopped, and a hierarchy became apparent: the highways had been cleared perfectly, the roads had been cleared adequately, and the sidewalks and bike lanes hadn’t been touched at all.

Every step of my feet crushed a thick layer of snow that curled up around my shoes, accumulated on top of them and sometimes got into them. I cursed the gods of motorized traffic.

Then the sidewalks and bike lanes stopped altogether, and there was only a plowed road and thick snow on both sides of it. I shook my fist at the injustice.

northern German broadcasting

I made it to my appointment barely on time. A TV crew from NDR, a regional public broadcasting station, was waiting for me in a village called Bischhausen. They had come to film a news segment about my walk. The idea was to interview me as I was crossing state lines into my home state of Lower Saxony.

It was fun. I was a bit camera shy, but I had previously had a somewhat similar experience with a guy from a Chinese TV station, so I had a vague idea what to expect. The dudes from the TV crew were very patient and nice.

Once we had finished filming we said our goodbyes and I walked as fast as I could through the wintery landscape. I had to be fast for two reasons. Firstly, we had taken so long that it was getting dark. And secondly, we had taken so long that I needed to get warm again.

pictures

the walk from Heilbad Heiligenstadt to Reinhausen:

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I left the guesthouse after resting for a day, having an enormous amount of fried potatoes, drinking tea and talking to the owner, Sylvia. She made the place feel very comfortable, like a home away from home, and on the day of my leaving I sat and talked with her until it was almost noon.

not snow, yet

Then I reluctantly stepped out into the snow. Or rather: I stepped out into something that was like a mix of snow and rain. I had to look up the proper word for it – it was called sleet, and it was the kind of weather that I hated the most. I remember telling you about it in a post called The Worst Kind Of Rain from a few years ago in Kazakhstan.

Luckily the first bit of the way led through a forest, so the trees sheltered me a bit from the stupid water that hadn’t made up its mind if it wanted to be rain or snow. Still, I got wet and cold very quickly, even though I was wearing my poncho and my gaiters.

I didn’t feel angry about it. Just slightly tired of it.

darkness

There are no pictures of the last bit of the way to Heilbad Heiligenstadt. It was dark, and there was snow, rain, and sleet everywhere. I felt miserable. Sadly, the monastery the friars from Hülfensberg had told me about didn’t accept any guests at the time, but I made it to the Catholic community center right before closing time.

The Marcel Callo Haus was dedicated to the memory of Marcel Callo, a young French Catholic who had perished in the infamously brutal concentration camp Gusen in 1945.

“Are you a pilgrim?” asked the lady at the reception when I inquired about a room.

Not really, I said, worrying if this would ruin my chances.

“Well,” said the lady, looking at me in my poncho: “I think you are.”

Then she gave me a room.

pictures

the walk from Fürstenhagen to Heilbad Heiligenstadt:

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The Franciscans had liturgy of the hours at seven in the morning. I was invited. No pressure, though. “You just do whatever you feel like,” they had told me at dinner.

I showed up at the chapel at seven. The liturgy lasted less than a half hour, and I found it surprisingly pleasant. Quiet and quieting.

leaving the mountain

Then we had breakfast, and then I got going. There was a thin layer of snow covering everything, but luckily the surface of the road wasn’t as slippery as I had feared. I made it down the mountain and to the little town of Geismar after an hour or so.

Little did I know about the sludge that lay ahead.

People had told me about a decommissioned railway line that had been turned into a path through the hills. It led northwest towards Göttingen, which was where I needed to go. My childhood friends were planning to come there on the 30th and stay the weekend.

The path turned out to be a mud fest, though. I was wearing my poncho and my gaiters, and I huffed and I puffed as I tried to pull the Caboose through the mud. At least it was quiet. Very quiet.

dinner

There was a monastery and a Catholic community center in the town of Heilbad Heiligenstadt. The monks of Hülfensberg had told me about them, suggesting that I try finding a place to sleep at one of them.

But when it got dark I was still on the mud path. And still far from Heiligenstadt. There was a little village in the distance with a restaurant that rented out rooms. I managed to get there, and when I entered I stood there in a cloud of steam in my poncho and my gaiters just as they were about to host a birthday party.

The boss was very kind. She gave me dinner and a shot of schnaps and a room for six people for the price of one.

pictures

the walk from Hülfensberg to Fürstenhagen:

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I had decided to stay the night in a guesthouse that seemed relatively affordable. Little did I know it was an absolute fucking gem.

the house

A few decades earlier, a local doctor with a love for old buildings had bought the ruins of a farm house. It was from the 1600s, and parts of it had collapsed or were on the verge of collapsing. So the doctor had painstakingly renovated the whole thing and turned it into a guesthouse with an attached restaurant.

And then he had filled it with antiques.

I was the only guest in the morning, and so the caretaker gave me a little tour of the premises. It reminded me of the Flanderhof Mansion in Romania, just without the strange tower.

the plan

It was an easy walk at first. It was windy and rainy, but for some reason I didn’t struggle with it a lot. I – once again – crossed the former inner German border, following a quiet road to the town of Wanfried. Then I left the road and followed a bicycle path along the river Werra.

The day before I had written an email to a Franciscan monastery on top of the Hülfensberg, a mountain that was close by, asking if I could spend the night.

“Just be there before seven in the evening”, the monks had replied.

Sure, I thought, I can do that.

lost

A few hours later I was struggling up a forest path, pulling the Caboose through mud and foliage, with tiny snow flakes landing on my jacket. I was lost, and darkness was falling.

Suddenly I didn’t feel so sure anymore that I would reach the monastery before seven.

And then I did a thing that used to be almost impossible for me: I turned around. I gave up on the forest path that I was on, and I walked back down until I got to a fork in the road. And then I took a different way. I don’t know why this used to be such a difficult thing for me to do. Maybe I needed The Longest Way to learn how to turn around?

enter Tristram

I reached the monastery at 18:55. Darkness had fallen hours earlier, and I could see the silhouettes of trees and grave stones against the night sky. There was a massive church with light shining out of the windows. Snow flakes were falling through the light.

It looked like a cut scene from Diablo.

pictures

the walk from Heldra to Hülfensberg.:

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A cold night. Or rather: a warm night in my thick winter sleeping bag, but an utterly cold morning. Putting on my clothes, brushing my teeth, having a banana, doing my exercises, packing up the tent – all of this felt awful. For some reason I remembered the snow days in Turkey and in Bulgaria two years earlier to be more bearable than this. Maybe it was simply nostalgia.

Or maybe it had to do with the different levels of humidity. The cold in Germany had a way of creeping into your bones.

plans

It took me a while to get back into walking mode. I watched the goat farmers try to herd in some of their goats for a while, then I turned around and walked north out of the little town of Ifta. My fingers were very cold, but at least it wasn’t raining.

There was a path through the hills that was supposed to take me to a town called Treffurt. I wanted to do three things there: have lunch, buy some provisions, and go to a hardware store. The new spare wheel that I had bought didn’t have a quick release skewer, so I needed a wrench.

road or path

One time I took a wrong turn and ended up in a place where the path led onto a road that was bad. It looked very busy, and it didn’t have a bike lane or a sidewalk or even just a shoulder. I stared at the the cars and the trucks for a while, and I even fastened one of my head torches onto my forehead, but then I decided to turn back and try to find another way through the forest.

A wise decision.

Another wise decision was lunch. I went to a Turkish restaurant and got a large plate of falafel, fries, and salad. The chef was Syrian, and he seemed proud of his falafel.

Then I went grocery shopping, and then I finally got my wrench. Just in case.

choices

There was a choice to be made at this point. Should I stay on this side of the former inner German border and wing it? Or should I cross over to the former West and go to a little guesthouse I had found on the map?

I looked at my fingers and at the clouds of breath that were forming in front of my face. Then I walked towards the west.

pictures

the walk from Ifta to Heldra:

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I spent two days in the city of Eisenach. Got a new spare wheel for the Caboose (the old one was beyond repair), did my laundry, looked for signs of neo-nazism.

antifa stickers

Yes, neo-nazism. Eisenach apparently had a problem. Or rather: it had an even bigger problem than many other places. The far-right AfD had won four seats in the city council, and the even more far-right NPD also had won four seats.

I had no other way of gauging the situation but to look for stickers and graffiti, but the only ones I found looked like they were from the other end of the political spectrum. Better antifascism than fascism, I thought, the kids are alright.

nazis in hiding

I was already on my way out of Eisenach when I noticed the first ambiguous graffito. NAZI KIEZ it said: NAZI HOOD. I was confused: had this been made by a neo-nazi who wanted to proudly proclaim the political identity of their neighborhood? Or was this the work of a political opponent who wanted to say that there were too many nazis in the area?

A lady on her morning walk explained it to me. “Look over there,” she said, “you see the name Wieschke? That’s a local neo-nazi from the NPD. This was probably made by leftists.”

I looked up the name Patrick Wieschke later, and much to my surprise, he wasn’t just an NPD bigwig, but he had also been charged with sexual molestation of a twelve-year-old.

Nazis being nazis.

goat carousel

The rest of the way was easy. There was an emotional moment I witnessed several flocks of birds joining each other in the sky above me, only to then fly onwards into the sunset.

When I arrived at a farm that I had noticed on the satellite map, it turned out to be a goat farm. Four hundred goats, dozens of them in a rotating milking machine at once. “Do you want to sleep in the barn with the goats?” Mira, the owner, asked me.

I opted for the barn with the bales of hay and straw instead.

pictures

the walk from Eisenach to Ifta:

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