ANNUAL NEWSLETTER 1999

FROM TROPIC TO ARCTIC

Barry and Margaret Williamson

In 1999 we used our motorhome and bicycles to make a journey down to the Tropic of Cancer through Morocco and then north the full length of Europe to North Cape at the northern end of Norway. We returned to the UK via Finland, the Baltic Republics, Poland and Germany.

Greetings to you as the millennium ends and another newsletter carries our best wishes for the year and the millennium-to-come. As the miles and the days slip by - 44,000 miles and 1,710 days to be precise - we have finally transformed (transmogrified?) into travellers unable to imagine our former lives at Huddersfield's University and Technical College. England is now another country, part of an offshore island which we visit twice every 5 years for spares and repairs for us, our motorhome and our bicycles.

In 1999 Rosie, our 27 ft, 6 ton Four Winds motorhome has carried us from the Tropic of Cancer to the Arctic Circle - from southern Morocco to Norway's North Cape; on Europe's longest north-south journey; through 18 countries; for 17,000 miles of driving; for 3,000 miles of cycling: 4 Winds to the 4 corners of Europe, through 4 seasons and 4 autumns.

WINTER: We left Cherbourg as the Winter Solstice approached and drove south as the sun turned to meet us. The first of the year's 146 resting places was at Mont St Michel in the car park which is available between exceptionally high tides. Christmas was passed behind a sand dune at Mimizan Plage on the Atlantic coast of south-west France, halfway down the empty 140 mile beach of the Côte d'Argent, fronting 8,000 square miles of cycle-track-invested pine forest. At New Year we were crossing into Spain near Biarritz and then heading west along the north coast for Cape Finisterre (End of Land) and the end of our pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (St James of the Starry Field). Continuing our proposed circumnavigation of the Iberian peninsula, we crossed the non-existent border into Portugal and followed its Atlantic coast through Porto, Coimbra and Fatima to Lisbon and Cabo da Roca, continental Europe's most westerly point and the first of its 4 corners.

Cape St Vincent, in the south-west corner of Portugal, is home to Prince Henry's 15th C School of Navigation on the spectacular cliffs leaning out into the Atlantic at Europe's end. Magellan, Vasco de Gama and Pedro Cabral were pupils here and we had a lot to learn as we cycled up into the mountains around Monchique and searched for Roman sites hinted at on obscure maps. The Algarve, Portugal's warm southern coast, was resting between seasons, evoking for us memories of a 1988 Easter cycling tour, flying in and out of Faro, from a cold damp Manchester to forests of cork and the sweet smell of orange blossom.

West again into Spain, the road skirts the Doñana wetlands reserve, continuing via Seville and Cadiz to Cape Trafalgar and continental Europe's most southerly point at Punta Tarifa, our second European corner.

SPRING: We spent March and April in Morocco, driving 3,000 miles and staying in 27 different centres. The Ferry Normal took about 2 hours for the 20 mile crossing from Algeciras, across the bay from Gibraltar, to Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave on the north coast of Morocco. Leaving Ceuta to enter Morocco took about 90 minutes of waiting, confusion and cursory searching at the border - our first experience of ancient Moroccan Customs! We then followed the Atlantic coast road south, through Tangier, Larache, Kenitra, Rabat, Casablanca, El Jadida, Oualidia, Safi and Essouira, reaching Agadir after 685 miles. At Moulay Bousselham, Hassan Dalil led us to a remote lake to show us 36 different species of winter migrants, from stork to swallow and spoonbill to black-winged stilt.

Agadir is Morocco's only coastal package-holiday centre, a place where motor-homers winter on empty cliffs. It is also a base for exploring the nearby Atlas mountains and the Sahara Desert beyond the Anti-Atlas. We had exhaust-pipe and dental repairs, Hassan Chakir painted an oasis scene on Rosie's side and we visited the nearby towns of Tafroute, Tiznit and Sidi Ifni before moving south, through Guelmim and into the still-disputed Province of Western Sahara, an area not recommended for travel by the British Embassy in Rabat. We remember Guelmim for the 3 camel's feet for sale on a pavement butcher's stall at 8 am. Perhaps a nomad was already enjoying a breakfast on the hoof.

For 515 miles we headed south through the desert, past Tan-Tan and Tarfaya, delayed by sand-drifts and police check-points, until we reached Laâyoune, capital of the Western Sahara and centre for the UN Peace-keeping force. We spent several days on the beach just beyond Laâyoune, 1,200 miles south of Ceuta and only 250 miles (as the camel walks) from the Tropic of Cancer. It was hot, dusty, sandy, devoid of vegetation and completely fascinating. Berber neighbours fed us freshly made bread and freshly caught fish.

Intimidated by the distances, the emptiness, the closed border to Mauritania and the rest of Africa beyond us, we returned north through Tarfaya and Tan-Tan along the haunted wreck-laden coast where the Sahara runs out over cliffs into the Atlantic. At Bouizakarne we turned inland to follow a newly-made single-track road linking oasis villages, with the Anti-Atlas mountains to the north and the Sahara to the south, just above the undefined border with Algeria. Unsurfaced pistes forced a 250 mile detour north to the kasbah city of Ouarzazate (location for 20 films including 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Jesus of Nazareth'), crossing and re-crossing the Anti-Atlas mountains on passes at 5,500 ft. The oasis village of M'hamid gave us a few nights among sand-dunes, surrounded by Tuareg tents and ruminating camels: the distance on a sign pointing south to Timbuctoo was 52 days!

Another new hard-topped single-track road took us 150 miles from Tansikht, north of M'hamid, to Rissani and the dunes of Erfoud in the south-east corner of Morocco. The road back to Europe lay north, over the snow-capped High Atlas and Middle Atlas mountains, squeezing through the Gorges du Ziz, over the country's second highest pass, Col du Zad at 7,200 ft, and visiting the towns of Er Rachida, Midelt, Azrou and El Hajeb, before dropping into the ancient tourist-bound and tout-infested Imperial Cities of Meknes and Fez.

Beyond Fez we spent a fascinating day traversing the Rif Mountains, through Ain Aicha and Ketama to Chefchaouen. The Rif supplies one-third of Europe's need for Kif, one of many names for cannabis, and it's openly on sale along the roadside for over 100 miles. Young men with holdalls made strange gestures while Renault 12's prowled the mountain roads, boxing us in before deciding that 6 tons of motorhome would take a lot of stopping!

100 miles remained after Chefchaouen before we reached the Spanish enclave of Ceuta again, via the Mediterranean town of Tetouan. Moroccan customs spent an hour poking and tapping with long blunt screwdrivers, looking for hidden compartments! The police in Ketama, capital of the Rif-Kif, had taken down our particulars: had they informed on us?

Throughout our time in Morocco, we struggled to come to terms with its many contrasts and contradictions. There is extreme poverty and generosity; harassment and kindness; alienation and personal contact; squalor and beauty; the obscurities of Arabic and the free use of French; narrow difficult roads and a sense of distance and adventure; ancient kasbahs and modern concrete slums; restaurants with French cuisine and roadside children demanding bonbons; peasants with donkeys and tourists with Toyota Landcruisers; crowded mud-walled houses and empty luxury holiday villas; women covered by the dictates of Islam and bikini-clad European women on hot Atlantic beaches.

From Ceuta we returned to Algeciras and drove round its bay for a few nostalgic days in Gibraltar before travelling north to Granada via the white towns of Jimena de la Frontera and Ronda. Alicante gave us our first contact with Spain's Costas, a theme continued through Benidorm and Valencia before we settled at Benicasim on the Costa del Azahar, cycling high into the nearby Desierto de las Palmas hills. We turned inland at Tarragona after visiting what remains of its splendour as capital of the Roman Province of Spain, to begin a month of excellent cycling on both sides of the Pyrenees. The highest pass we rode was the 7,490 ft Col de Boucharo, 3,000 ft above Gavarnie. Our highest climb was 4,700 ft over the Col de la Pierre St Martin, crossing from France into Spain. The hardest climb was the Port de Larrau, a very steep ride to 5,200 ft in the company of 5 Men of Cornwall on a holiday ride from Roscoff in Brittany to Santander in northern Spain. We beat the Tour de France to the top of the Col du Tourmalet at 6,980 ft, helped a little by a 2-week start. Altogether, we climbed 42,000 ft over 12 cols which totalled 72,800 ft in height.

SUMMER: We left the Pyrenees as the heat of June began its own climb into the high Pyrenean valleys and continued north through France as the first tourists stirred from their winter hibernation in Europe's industrial north. We paused to cycle in and around Bergerac, Limoges and Bourges, before taking a week to revisit the WWI battlefields of Verdun, a small salient north of the Meuse where a million young men died to defend the reputations of a few politicians in Paris. Anyone as yet unconvinced about European Union should visit a World War battlefield in northern France (there are many to choose from) and then drive north through now undefended (indeed unmarked) borders into Belgium or Germany!

After visiting Xanten's Archaeological Park on the Rhine, where a 20-year-old under-graduate Margaret had dug for Roman remains, we paused for a Service (for Rosie) in Wettringen, west of Osnabrück and near Germany's border with Holland. We explored the (restored) medieval centre of Lübeck (near the old border with East Germany), the first of several Hanseatic towns we didn't then know we were to visit. Parked alongside a train for an hour, a splendid modern ferry took us from Puttgarden to R dby, the shortest crossing to one of Denmark's many islands. North lay Copenhagen, then another short ferry ride from below Hamlet's castle at Elsinore (the absence of ghostly ramparts showing that Shakespeare hadn't travelled this way) to Helsingore, on the opposite Swedish shore.

For a week and more we drove on one of Europe's great, unknown roads, the 1,030 miles of Sweden's Inlandsvägen (route 45), which runs north from Göteborg to Lapland, between the Gulf of Bothnia and the mountainous border with Norway. Just south of Jokkmokk, and marked only by a cafe, the road crosses into the enchanted land encompassed by the Arctic Cicle and we soon swung east to cross the river Muonio which forms Sweden's border with Finland. This is country we will never forget: Finland, north of the Arctic Circle, where we spent the high summer. We walked and cycled and camped in its never-ending, reindeer-grazed forests of fir and birch, around a few of its 60,000 lakes and on its remote, treeless, northern tundra.

We left Finland only once in August to go yet further north to Norway's North Cape, the most northerly point in the world reachable by road in an ordinary vehicle. It was our third corner of Europe at 71° 10' 21", over 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle as the reindeer runs. Although it is parallel with the top of Alaska and further north than any part of mainland Canada, the Gulf Stream keeps it free of ice and snow for 5 months of the year. Nearer to the North Pole (1,300 miles) than to London (1,600 miles as the Arctic Tern flies), motorhomers sleep on the edge of 1,000 ft-high cliffs facing north to the Arctic Ocean, lit by the midnight sun in summer and Northern Lights in winter.

Nordkapp lies on treeless Mager ya ('Lean Island'), linked to the mainland by the world's longest (4.25-mile) undersea road tunnel, dropping steeply for 750 ft. Reindeer, easily outnumbering people on the island, prefer to swim across on their summer migrations.

AUTUMN(S): As our first early Arctic Autumn approached, we turned south, sadly leaving the magic of the Arctic Circle through Rovaniemi, dropping a note down Santa's chimney: all we wanted was to come back again, one day. En route to Helsinki, we detoured east for an 80-mile cycle ride to our fourth corner - the most easterly point of the EU and of Europe excluding Russia (which it usually does). Written permission is required from the border guards to enter the no-man's land along the Russian border; the exact point is marked by a post on a small island in a lake at the end of long forest tracks. This remote place, jutting out into Russia, was formed when the land to the south, Karelia, was ceded to the USSR as the price of peace in 1940.

A second Autumn overtook us as we waited in and around Helsinki to make arrangements for travel through the 3 Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and on into Poland. Two days after the 5th anniversary of the sinking of the ferry Estonia with a loss of 852 lives, we took the ancient ferry Georg Ots for 50 miles/3.5 hours from Helsinki to Tallinn for Rosie's first visit to the FSU (Former Soviet Union). Space does not allow us to begin to describe the fascinations, complexities, contrasts and frustrations throughout the Baltics.

We spent a few days in each of the capitals (the Hanseatic ports of Tallinn and Riga, the German/Polish town of Vilnius) and a few days in a small town in each country. Occupied successively and repeatedly by Danes, Swedes, Prussians, Russians and Germans, speaking obscure non-Slavic and non-Germanic tongues, turning their backs on each other, these 3 small countries are searching for an identity and a place in modern Europe.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of our month of north-south Baltic travel was the intermingling of the old and the new: the 'old' is only 7 years ago when this was the USSR! McDonald's stands opposite KGB headquarters, where the basement cell doors are now open to visitors. Here, as in Poland, the scars of the Holocaust are raw, bleeding and slow to heal - from the Latvian Concentration Camp at Salaspils outside Riga to the killing fields in the Paneriai Forest, 10 minutes by train from the centre of Vilnius, where the Lithuanian capital's 100,000 Jews were herded, shot and then burned in open pits.

Border crossing times in the Baltics averaged 2 hours, time to absorb the colours of our third Autumn. Vehicle insurance was rudimentary or non-existent, so it was with relief as well as regret that we entered the Green Card country of Poland after another 2-hour wait. The delays were not caused by long queues or searches, just leisurely form-filling and inspection of 'papers'. After the tiny Baltics, Poland seems and is enormous: the rough corrugated roads stretch for ever, roads shared with Poles still enjoying the feeling of power that comes with their first ownership of a well-used German car. We failed all 3 unexpected limits on a bridge over the river Bug (weight 2.5 tons, height 3 m, width 2 m), turning us back from an intended visit to the site of Treblinka and the shades of its one million inmates. We did, however, reach Warsaw to stay at Camping 123 and use our cycles to explore the carefully reconstructed old town, bustling new centre, riverside parks and palaces and the legacy of Soviet/Stalinist 'architecture'. Warsaw will become one of the really great cities of Europe when it reaches its full potential, a process hardly yet begun.

200 miles further south, we were engrossed for several days in Krakow, as we traced the remains of the Jewish Kazimierz district, ghetto, concentration camp and factory described in the book and film 'Schindler's List'. The Izaac Synagogue in Kazimierz is now a museum, with haunting music, SS film of the ghetto's clearance, deeply affecting photographs of the faces of people on their way to genocide. As we left, a flamboyant group of Orthodox Jews visiting from America arrived. They allowed us to smile again as one called to his mother: 'Hey Ma, d'you wanna buy the video?'!

45 miles west of Krakow lies the small industrial town of O swi ecim, more infamously known by its German name, Auschwitz. In the absence of any camps suitable for a motorhome, we spent 3 nights in the car park of a modern German youth hostel, established to improve international understanding. Well, we tried to understand. Both Auschwitz I (the original camp) and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the huge complex 2 miles away across the railway lines, are open as museums and much remains of the original barrack huts, electrified wire and gas chamber/crematoria complexes. At least 1,250,000 people were killed here, most of them Jews from all over occupied Europe, taken straight from cattle trucks to 'showers', each holding 2,000. Others were 'selected' to work, a postponement of death, perhaps in one of the 40 subsidiary camps around Auschwitz, each serving a German factory.

Another long drive west brought Wroc aw within cycling distance, a splendid town on the river Oder with a market square big enough to have a tiny village at its centre. To the Germans, this is still Breslau, capital of Lower Silesia, land lost to Poland after WWII. In the square stood an exhibition of sections of the Berlin Wall, reminding us that we would be there for the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, 9th November 1989. History zoomed in on us again as we also remembered the 9th November 1938, Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) when Nazis in Germany and Austria smashed up Jewish property and synagogues, the beginning of their end. The 11th of the 11th also loomed, with its echoes of earlier visits to Arras, the Somme, Verdun. The EU is indeed a modern miracle!

The crossing from Poland to Germany took only 45 minutes, from a rough single-track road to a smooth-as-silk 3-lane autobahn, a Hitler original, widened and covered in good solid West German asphalt, gliding through our fourth and final Autumn in the unspoilt forests of East Germany. We camped near the former RAF airfield at Gatow, between Potsdam and Spandau in Berlin's western suburbs, just inside the former Wall and within cycling distance of the centre (wherever that now may be). The whole city has been transformed since our first visit in 1990, shortly before re-unification. We looked almost in vain for signs of the Wall; the Checkpoint Charlie Marketing Company in one of many modern glass-and-concrete buildings on Friedrichstraße is one of the few reminders of this famous crossing point. Restored to more than its former glory, the Reichstag stands near the refurbished Brandenburg Gate on the Unter den Linden (Under the Linden Trees), in the centre of a massive building site, rapidly filling the open spaces around the former Wall and abolishing the emptiness of Potsdamer Platz with government offices and headquarters for multi-national companies. Capitalism abhors a vacuum. We could still pick out the former East Berliners - they looked as confused and as lost as we were.

But Berlin still has some wonderful open spaces, lakes and forests, an excellent road, bus, tram, train and underground system and they had even thought of us and laid some rudimentary cycle paths which only occasionally ploughed us through bus queues. Mending a puncture in a light rain outside the restored palaces of Frederick the Great in East Berlin, we reflected on the contemporary distribution of power and privilege as the stretched-Mercedes convoys of eminent visitors flashed past, flanked by BMW motorbike outriders. Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl, Schroeder and a dozen other minor Heads of State had also been in town for the celebrations! But freedom does have its own rewards and we knew that they wouldn't be moving on to spend a few days cycling in the Harz mountains, as the snow begins to settle above 2,000 ft.

It's good to stay in touch, however vicariously, and we hope that you let us know something of your news, of your travels. Perhaps we will meet sometime in the New Millenium. We hope to start it as we have always meant to continue - in Greece (Insh Allah), perhaps on an Aegean island, perhaps on our way to Cyprus, to Israel, leaving Rosie for a cycling/flying journey round the world. Well, we can all dream, can't we?