Wailing about the walls

The original wall and watchtower between East and West Germany

Most people know about the Berlin Wall. But how many know much about the 1400km wall that divided families in East and West Germany for a more than a generation?

1400 Kilometers long.  A wall right across Europe. Part of the Iron Curtain. Dividing villages down the main street. Fences, Watchtowers. Mines. Dogs. Regular armed patrols. More than 1000 people killed trying to cross from east to west. Until 1989.

Riding along the old patrol routes

Now it is known as the Green Band, an area along much of the wall’s length that is a haven for plant and animal life. There was so little industrial or agricultural activity either side of the wall for 50 years that nature flourished while human activity and relationships shrivelled.

To cycle along the route of the wall takes you from the Baltic Coast through sandy flats, over hills and mountains, through forests, between meadows and into sleeping villages until it reaches the Czech border with Bavaria. This was once a “dreiländereck” where three countries met in one spot, a quiet patch of otherwise insignificant woodland.

Sections of wall remain where they isolated villages and divided communities

Riding the length also takes you deep into a tragic period of recent European history. Illustrating how ideology tore families apart, forced people to abandon their homes and livelihoods, bankrupted businesses and created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust.

Cycling the Deutsch-Deutscher Radweg (the German wall route) on its own or as part of the Iron Curtain Trail, is a great but sobering experience. It is not a bike path as such but a route on quiet roads and farm tracks and often along the bumpy old eastern patrol trials. You will come across watchtowers, sections of wall, see untold numbers of memorials and signs commemorating the re-opening of roads, follow the River Elbe and arrive in towns still struggling to return to prosperity. There are many museums well worth a visit.

 

Point Alpha where troops glared at each other across the wall

Along the way, close to village of Geisa is point Alpha. Here the American and East German troops glared at each other across the fence from watchtowers just 150m apart. In the adjacent museum is a display about the wall, comparing it with other walls separating peoples:

• ·       dividing Israel from Palestine in the West Bank
• ·       the wall which is meant to keep Mexicans out of the USA
• ·       between North and South Korea

Less than two years ago, these were the only walls of any significance between nations and the exhibit indicated that these were as bad as the German wall had been.

 

As it used to be: the wall which divided this village right down the main street

In Nurnberg the Perimeter Protection Exhibition in January 2016, featured about 100 companies selling all kinds of perimeter protection gadgets, barriers, gates and equipment designed to keep people out, or in, was busier than ever. The market is booming as fences are being built across Europe and further afield – a 1000km fence between Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Iran was recently completed.

After years of cycling around Europe, crossing borders which may appear on a map, but in fact are invisible and unmarked, pedalling unhindered between countries, how sad it is to see walls and fences being built between the Schengen countries as a result of the migrant crisis.

Deutsch Deutscher Bike Trail

The Bikeline series of guides is invaluable in helping find the route which is not well signposted in many places and often difficult to find. Accommodation in parts is scarce because tourism has not yet returned to this area.

www.esterbauer.com

Schengen

Schengen is a tiny town at the border of Luxembourg, Germany and France on the River Mosel. It was here, on a riverboat (there was no building big enough) that the plan was forged to enable free travel between EU countries. It would be a supreme irony if border controls were to be introduced here.

The Mosel is a river with an excellent bike path, great wines all along the route, and the opportunity to cross borders at will, no questions asked.

Schengen on the River Mosel, where Luxembourg, Germany and France meet

Hero, the novel bike with green roots

Greensboro's Main Street - boarded up shops - but the barber is still in business

With snow, slush, salt and grit on the roads, this is not the time of year for bike riding. Instead, here is a heart-warming story with an unusual bike at its centre.

Deep in Alabama's rural Black belt, in Hale County, is a little town called Greensboro, once an important cotton growing area with a high proportion of slaves to the white population. Later it was a bastion of the segregationists (and quite possibly those sentiments are still alive among some residents). Today, a large number of the descendants of the slaves live in poverty, often in shacks with no running water or sanitation.

Over the years, with the growth of out-of-town shopping malls, new highways shifting passing traffic away from the town, the centre of Greensboro has fallen into decay. Shops are closed and boarded, the antebellum homes around the centre are faded and peeling, and hardly a soul is to be seen on Main Street.

Pictured left is Lance Rake with his prototype hexagonal frame of bamboo strips

Into this sad situation comes a non-profit, self-help group aiming to revitalise the community and to assist the poorest members of the community into simple but modern and sanitary homes. With volunteers, schemes which help with finance in exchange for work, and a basic house design, HERO is transforming the lives of folks whose homes are without the facilities which we take for granted - and which one might expect everyone in the USA enjoys.

In addition, HERO, which stands for "Hale Empowerment and Revitalisation Organisation”, under its executive director Pam Dorr, has launched a number of ventures including the Pie Lab, a cafe in the town centre offering "food and conversation".

So where's the bike angle? Growing a short way from the centre of town is plenty of bamboo planted in the late 1800s. In 2009, as part of the Hero project, a team designed and began construction of cycles using bamboo as the frame. Now, under the guidance of Lance Rake, a professor of industrial design, in one of the empty shops in the main street Herobike builds and sells a range of street and touring bikes. The bamboo "tubes" are bound together with carbon fibre and, says Lance, offer a comfortable ride similar to that of steel frames.

Shop window model 

He has since begun working on a frame made of strips of bamboo bound together with glass fibre in a hexagonal cross section. Lance is also experimenting with weaving the bamboo strips to make a skateboard and an electrobike. All these products are using simple technology and locally available materials.

Made by the Kansas University students - the bamboo running bike

In January 2016 a group of design students from Kansas were doing a practical exercise at the Hero hq, building "running bikes" for children and using the bamboo strip technique for a wave board.

Most of the Hero bikes are bought on line and are also available in kit form. Workshops are run where you can, with guidance, build your own bamboo bike. Not only are the results practical functioning bikes, they are also a novelty which is contributing to the community effort in this struggling little town.

Find your Hero Bike here: http://www.herobike.org

More about the Hero project: http://www.herohousing.org

Kansas University students at work in the Herobike workshop

Bonding the joints

Bamboo drying in the January sun outside the Herobike workshop in the Greensboro main street