Overland Tales

All nostalgia'd up from my time in Mainz, I took off down the Rhine by bike. I started off following the banks of the river, but pretty soon I came up against a slight issue. The river, which I had thought had looked rather swollen, was lapping over the path in front of me, so I had to double back a short way and choose another route to my destination. I struck upon a cyclepath indicating signs to Bingen, the next town along, and cycled there.

I'd been cultivating a headcold over the tail-end of last week which unleashed itself in its full glory today, and as a result I didn't have the legs to continue after Bingen. So sheepishly I nipped on a train for the ten minute or so journey along to my chosen stopover of Bacharach.

Bacharach was one of many quaint little German towns hugging the steeped banks of the Rhine, but for me it stood out amongst the others for a single reason: its Youth Hostel was situated high on a hill in a 13th Century castle. Since it's not every day you get to stay in such a place, I hiked up the vertical distance to its gateway and hoped it would be open.

It was thankfully, albeit rather quiet. I checked in and took a moment to savour the beautiful views over the Rhine from the battlements, with the constant stream of river traffic, trains rattling by on both sides, and the glinting lights of Bacharach and other communities below. The hostel's rather Germanic 9pm curfew - "zere vil be no haffing fun in zis taun!" - forced me to have an early night and try to recover from my illness.

I carried on through the gorgeous scenery of the Rhine valley, with embattled castles lining every meander of the river and rows of neat vines lining every hill, passing through St. Goar and St. Goarshausen, two half-timbered house-filled settlements, and up through to Boppard, where I stopped for lunch. The town was in full Christmas cheer - the first time I had noticed Christmas in Germany be as overdone as it normally is in my home country - with speakers on every corner of the main shopping street blaring out Christmas carols and other cheesy Christmas songs. Yuck!

From Boppard, which I had reached with relative ease, I switched to the trains and journeyed via Koblenz on to Cologne. Cologne is all about its cathedral; as you stumble out of the station, you can't miss it - it's right next door. It looks nightmarish - a huge, knobbly, blackened, gargoyle-ladened Gothic masterpiece.

My first hostel of choice was full, so I headed over the bridge to the YHA, in which I managed to score a four-bed dorm to myself, with en-suite and all. The was immaculately clean, which was surprising, given the number of ungrown adults running about. YHAs in Germany do tend to be popular choices for school trip accommodation, unfortunately.

I tend to get Cologne mixed up with Munich, because they both love their beer and like to frequent beer halls. The four halls I visited in the station/central area that evening were all packed out, with people queuing or the door barred, so I headed to the Belgian quarter to try my luck with a fifth. It was open, and had space right at the back, and so I treated myself to the best meal I have had in Germany so far, a sumptuous meal of goose breast with roasted apple, stodgy mashed potato, red cabbage, onions and a token tiny leaf of lettuce. It was all washed down with the enjoyable local brew, called Koelsch, which is a fresh, bitter tasting beer served in special long, thin 200ml glasses.

From Cologne, I trained it to the border town of Aachen to buy gingerbread, for which it is particularly reknowned. They also seemed to be fond of fountains here, as there were many elaborate examples. The main thing they had in common was that none of them were doing any, er, fountaining. Perhaps their prevalence had to do with its own natural fountain, the hot spring on which the settlement was founded and which was drinkable, although why anyone would I don't know, given that the area all around smelt of eggy farts.

The area eastwards from Aachen is something like the Twilight Zone, as no-one is entirely sure where they live. A southern sliver of The Netherlands starts there, which I headed towards, but Belgium is lurking there also and it all gets a bit confusing. The only way I could detect I had entered The Netherlands was that the names on the signs suddenly had ma lot more j's and k's in them.

I headed for Maastricht, which was thankfully downhill nearly all the way. Whilst the majority of the North of The Netherlands was as flat as a pancake, it is a myth that Holland does not have any hills whatsoever, so I thought as I puffed up the hill just west of Maastricht.

Maastricht was a little gem, and no doubt one that gets overlooked on traveller's itineraries which understandably focus on Amsterdam. The centre was all cobbled streets lined by immaculate red-bricked, flat-fronted houses with lots of windows, and was a pleasure to walk around. Although there were hostels, for a change I stayed on a place called the Botel, which - you've guessed it! - was a boat moored on the river. The cabins were a little tatty, but bigger than I had expected, and I slept well.

Christmas was nearly upon me, and before I had left home I had made plans to return home from my trip for the festive season. I had spent one Christmas away before, whilst on my last Round the World Trip. I was in Chicago and whilst I had kept myself busy there, going for a Chrimbo meal and seeing a fabulous showing of It's A Wonderful Life, it wasn't the same as being at home. So this time, being only a few hundred miles away rather than a few thousand, it was easy for me to get back.

I was leaving from Brussels, which was my next - and final - destination for 2007. I was expecting a stuffy, concrete, bureaucratic capital, so imagine my surprise when I found the opposite. Brussels was a thriving multicultural hub with a real edge about it. It had quirky sights, like the building you could text to display your messages of love and greetings by flashing them vertically up its side by lighting up the windows (each of which was a "pixel" of a letter). It had old fashioned sights, like the Grand Place, a square of delicately carved buildings and a musical clock. And it had a mini-red light district like that in Amsterdam, with women standing in windows, or so I found as I unknowing (honest!) stumbled through it on the way to my hostel.

I set my bike on the train a day in advance, so that it would be guaranteed to be waiting for me in London. The night before my journey back to the UK on the Eurostar, I felt I had had enough of hostels for a while so I booked myself in at the Brussels Hilton (via lastminute.com, of course - it cost a paltry £48) for a good night's sleep, as I was due to rise at 5:30am the next morning.

I managed to meet my 7am train with ease, and we sped through into France and innocuously through the Channel Tunnel to pop out into a rather frosty Kent. After picking the bike up, I had a sketchy 15 minute bicycle journey to undertake from St Pancras to Paddington at rush hour. What a difference to cycling in Paris! I feared for my life with the traffic and buses hassling me, and I was glad to see familiar old Paddington and dismount for the train to Bath.

And after waking up in Brussels that morning, that lunchtime I was pedalling back from Bath past Kelston Roundtop to my one-horse hometown of Keynsham, having completed a whirlwind tour of a part of Western Europe by bike and train, feeling paradoxically that I had done and seen so much, and yet it only seemed like the other day I was walking the other way up over Kelston on the first day of my journey on which I went out the door and turned left.