Homeward Bound

The Mintmaster's House at 'Den Gamle By'

A German Railways Inter City Express

A Commodore Class cabin on Dana Sirena

It’s my final morning of thirty days of travelling and I celebrate by having a swim in the Helnan Marselis pool. There is something special about being in a warm pool overlooking a chilly ocean!

I spend most of the morning on a totally justified return visit to the Old Town and like it even more. I have timed my departure to make sure I have a trip on the German Railways superb Inter City Express which goes from Aarhus to Hamburg, although I will only be on board for an hour.

Even so, I am treated to a coffee and a snack in my very private little compartment.

At Esbjerg, I am pleased to discover that, as the holder of a rail ticket, the number 5 bus to the docks is free.

The DFDS waiting room is cramped and lacking facilities, so I repair to the adjacent local island ferry terminal, which is much better equipped.

On board Dana Sirena, www.dfds.co.uk) I am being treated to Commodore Class. The cabins are well-appointed and spacious but the real Wow factor is the comfortable and well equipped lounge. We are on deck ten in a severe gale force nine, but it’s an absolutely splendid way to end my trip.

FROMS BOGS TO BRAMBLES

2300-year old Grauballe Man

 

I am enjoying breakfast at the Helnan Marselis Hotel when a Danish lady with a beaming smile literally bounds into the room. This is Elisabeth Fogh, my guide for the visit to the Moesgard Museum. Elisabeth is hugely enthusiastic about Aarhus, Denmark and life, having had an amazing recovery from a bad head injury following a horse riding accident.

Moesgard, a 15 minute drive south from Aarhus through some delightful beech woods, has a wealth of treasures on display from Denmark’s Viking past amid some splendid surroundings. Many years ago I attended their summertime ‘Moot’, an atmospheric and realistic display of Viking role-play.

But there’s no doubt that the star attraction is the 2300-year old Grauballe Man, discovered in a peat bog with his throat slit in 1952. There’s much speculation over whether it was a ritual killing, but Elisabeth and I (neither qualified in archaeology!) don’t think the evidence supports the theory.

The museum has a fascinating collection of local finds, including a hoard of coins which prove that the Danes were trading with far off lands such as Iraq and Iran as far back as the 10^th century. So much for modern-day globalisation!

Elisabeth, who speaks fluent Spanish as well as English, is a delightful and charming host and I’m sad that we don’t have more time together.

I’m having a quick trip to Aalborg, 80 minutes north by Express Train. It’s a nostalgic trip because I first visited there in a warship some forty years ago, docking on the Limfjord, right at the bottom of the main street.

It’s a gorgeous autumn day and the journey through some beautiful rural Jutland countryside is simply wonderful. My time is short, so I walk up the main street to the river, take some pictures and head back home again.

Back at my hotel, I am startled when a man in a paraglider appears within a few metres of my second floor window. He repeats this act a dozen or so times until, after landing, his foil becomes tangled up in a bramble hedge!

It’s been another splendid day.

Paragliding in front of my hotel window

Jens Bang's 1624 house in Aalborg

In the 'Quiet Zone on Danish Railways First Class

Aarhus

The grocer's shop at 'Den Gamle By'. The man is real.

I’d forgotten what a splendid place Denmark is. The people are friendly, their skin looks unbelievably healthy and there’s a general air of tranquillity which is very much to my taste.

I’ve slept very well in my giant bed, eased into slumber by the waves crashing against the nearby shore. But, yet again, I have a tiny duvet which, reception tells me, is the norm in Denmark.

I’ve got an Aarhus Card (www.visitaarhus.com) which allows me unlimited use of the local buses. The yellow ones, not the blue ones, as I found to my cost last night.

The very friendly receptionist at the Hotel Helnan Marselis has kindly printed out bus timetables for the connections I need to make to get to one of Denmark’s most splendid attractions, ‘Den Gamle By’, which translates as ‘The Old Town’.

Founded in 1909, there are now some 75 historic buildings, brought from all over Denmark.

But it’s not just the splendid buildings. A great deal of care has been taken to make each property a living museum with people acting out roles as shopkeepers, bakers, stable lads and much more.

I first visited the museum more than forty years ago and I’m delighted to discover that they haven’t rested on their laurels. There is now the old town, locked in 1864, a new town, which looks at life in 1927 and, currently under construction, the 1974 town. Funding permitting, that will be complete in 2014.

Over a third of a million people visit in a year, with the busiest time being in the Christmas period, when the town takes on a very special atmosphere indeed.

I love the latest developments and I am hugely impressed with the whole place, especially the 1683 Mintmaster’s Mansion, lovingly reconstructed by Den Gamle By’s skilled craftsmen after the building lay in storage in Copenhagen for several decades.

There’s so much to see that I hope to fit in a return visit.

I ask my lovely guide about Danes and their duvets. She confirms that the single duvet is the norm but, having just spent two years in Boston, confesses that she’s brought back a big one for her marital bed!

Aarhus is bathed in autumn sunshine, which makes the buildings look their best. The nine-storey ARoS art gallery is one of the largest in Europe. I admire the work being done for its’ latest attraction, a 150 metre walkway being built on the roof. The five-metre tall sculpture ‘Boy’, by Australian artist Ron Mueck, is just one of many exhibits in this 17,700 square metres of art, dating from 1770 to the present day.

I’m glad that I’ve added an extra day in Aarhus. There really is a lot to see and do.

A typical street scene in 'Den Gamle By'

Danes love their bikes!

Lovely colours and shapes in an Aarhus supermarket

Ron Mueck's 5-metre tall sculpture 'Boy'

Norwich to Aarhus

Writing in First Class on NXEA

 

I’ve planned my trip today using Traveline (www.travelineeastanglia.org.uk). The site has come on apace in recent years and it correctly lists my journey, including my bus connections in Norwich and the fact, being Sunday, there is a bus replacement service from Ipswich to Manningtree.

Everything works exactly as Traveline predicts although I do find it odd that National Express have programmed the bus to arrive just a few minutes after the train to Harwich has left. It’s not the first time I have spent an hour at Manningtree waiting for a connection and it’s not something I recommend.

I’ve had to leave my big Live Luggage bag (www.live-luggage.co.uk) as the tyre came off one of the wheels last week.

Boarding at Harwich is very easy, especially as the ferry seems to be pretty quiet. Dana Sirena is, in any case, not principally a cruise ship. She was built as a cargo vessel and was converted in Poland seven years ago to carry passengers. But she still carries more trailers than cars, something that’s essential when, in winter, the leisure market can drop to forty passengers per crossing.

I would describe the four-berth ‘Seaways-Class’ cabins as functional, more than anything and that is possibly the best word to describe the ship. Certainly the catering is not up to the often lavishly- presented smorgasbord buffets you may remember from former ships on the line such as the Dana Anglia. At around £26 for dinner and £13 for breakfast, it’s also not exactly cheap.

As an ardent non-smoker, I am not hugely impressed by the smoking area inside the Columbus Lounge but the charming and warmly-welcoming Henrik at reception points out that sending smokers onto the open deck in the North Sea in winter is not really an option.

DFDS (www.dfds.co.uk), unlike many other lines, still allows visits to the bridge. Andreas, who lives in Aarhus, the same town to which I am headed, tells me that officers work a two-week on, two-week off routine which allows some planning towards, if not a normal, family life.

We dock at Esbjerg exactly on time after an impressive pirouette and reverse into our berth. It’s a brisk 20-minute walk right through the town centre to the station. I have to change at Kolding and was planning to do so again at Fredericia, but the guard, who’s been the only person so far to ask for ID with my InterRail ticket, says our regional express train will get into Aarhus ahead of the following Inter City train.

At Vejle, I sit in the train waiting for our departure, while a lot of my fellow passengers rush across the platform to catch the Inter City train, which pulls out ahead of us.

At Aarhus, after waiting for a bus for twenty minutes, I discover that I am waiting on the wrong side of the road. If I’d been told the stop was right outside the tourist office, it might have helped.

The bus driver tells me where to get off and I luckily find a lady who knows the location of my hotel.

The Helnan Marselis (www.helnan.info) looks to be in a splendid location, right on the beach, although the North Sea is looking very cold and grey, with a positive gale blowing.

I’m slightly worried that I am a bit out of town, but I’ll find out the lie of the land in the morning.

I’ve just thought. In nearly a month of writing about coastal rail trips, this is the first place I have stayed that actually overlooks the sea. 

All the photos from the trip are at http://picasaweb.google.com/MDSouter/2010CoastalRailJourney#

The bridge on the Harwich Esbjerg Ferry, Dana Sirena

First Class on Danish Railways

My room at the Helnan Marselis Hotel, Aarhus

A 'Seaways Class' cabin on Dana Sirena

View from the Drivers' Cab of a Danish Railways train at Kolding Station

Sunlight and Submarines

Leverhulme Hotel desk light

Port Sunlight

The damage caused by Liberators to U534

So minimalist is the décor in the Leverhulme hotel, that there is no provision for tea and coffee making in the bedrooms. I really do not want my privacy invaded by room service, especially not at 5.30am. So I forgo the offered £25 breakfast and enjoy some water and a Marks and Sparks sandwich. The glamorous life of a travel writer!

A couple of hours after rising, I collect my newspaper and my freshly polished shoes from outside the bedroom door.

Despite my window being wide open all night, the room is still baking hot. After abluting, I rearrange the table lights, replacing the hideous, supposedly art deco, lamp on the desk. Call me pernickety, but the telephone handset is not charged, the electronic calendar says it’s the 19^th January, the Airwick electric air freshener is empty, there’s candle wax all over the bathroom floor and the hotel web site isn’t working. Oh, and the wifi password in the room folder is wrong.

Attention to detail? Clearly lacking.

A couple of minutes walk away is the Port Sunlight Museum (www.portsunlightvillage.com). There I get a really good introduction to the Port Sunlight village, founded by Lord Leverhulme for his Sunlight soap factory workers in 1888. Some of the exhibits are charming including the revelation that the prize in the allotment competition was two tons of manure! I also learn that Unilever was former after Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch Margarine Union.

I am met by the splendidly knowledgeable and enthusiastic Maureen, who takes me round this 900-home estate, nearly all of which are Grade 2 listed. Just as in the original concept, all the front gardens are maintained by a Trust, which was set up in 1999. So, even though around 75% of the properties are now privately owned, the front gardens are never part of the deal.

This of course gives the village, built in squares amid large swathes of green space, an uniquely tranquil feel. Unilever still operates from the next-door factory, but almost nobody in the village now works there.

Lord Leverhulme built a school, church, sports facilities and much more. The cottage hospital was built in 1907, some 41 years before the formation of the National Health Service.

While the men were given a splendid building for their bowls club, the ladies had to push for their own facility. The little wooden hut is still in regular use.

The impressive Hulme Hall, formerly used to feed 1500 hot meals a day to single women workers, is now a venue for weddings.

Ten minutes along the line is Birkenhead, where, forty years ago, my ship was in refit at Cammel Laird’s, where there is now a business park. The adjacent Woodside Ferry Terminal has a new £5M display of one of only four remaining WW2 German U Boats. U534, whose sister I have seen at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, was bombed by Liberators and discovered in the silt of the Kattegat near Denmark. Paul, who started life at the owners, Mersey Ferries, by tying up boats, gives me a great introduction. I look in awe at the damage caused by the depth charges dropped by the aircraft.

The silt preserved a fascinating time-capsule of life on board, including gramophone records, uniforms, playing cards and cigarettes, all of which are on display.

I’ll confess I wasn’t sure what I’d think of a submarine, which has been sliced up like a giant sausage, but it really works. You get a fascinating insight into what U-Boats were like and the exhibition (www.u-boatstory.co.uk) is quite splendid.

The ten-minute trip across the Mersey reminds me just how much it looks like Shanghai waterfront (or should it be the other way round?). Nearing completion is the futuristic Museum of Liverpool, due to open next year.

I wish all train operators looked after their first class customers like Virgin Trains. They really go the extra mile to win business. There’s a nice lounge at Liverpool Line Street and I hugely enjoy the journey to London on the tilting Pendolino, with a slick service of endless hot and cold drinks as well as tasty snacks and fresh fruit.

In two hours, the Pendolino travels 195 miles; my journey to Norwich takes the same time to go just 115. With not even a free plastic cup of tea in sight.

Museum of Liverpool

First Class in a Virgin Trains Pendolino

FROM LAKES TO LIVERPOOL

Bed in mirrors at the Leverhulme Hotel

Northern Rail's dirty windows

The Ravenglass to Eskdale Railway

The cosy bar at the Bower House Inn, Eskdale

The Bower House turns out to be the most perfect stop over point. Low ceiling, creaking floorboards, plumbing that gurgles. Eminently more to my taste than a soulless chain hotel. The bar has a roaring log fire, a mixture of walkers and people from the big Windscale nuclear power station just down the road. There’s a splendid menu and the food turns out to be excellent in both taste and presentation.
Dave Jenner picks me up and gives me a splendid behind the scenes tour of the railway (www.ravenglass-railway.co.uk). The museum gives a splendid introduction to the line’s origins, as an iron-ore railway. Beckfoot granite, which was extracted until 1952 is especially hard and it is said that Waterloo Bridge in London was built from the stone. Trevor in the signal box shows me the low-tech way of graph and tracing paper that control up to 150 train movements a day. I am fascinated by the engine shed, where the steam locomotives are ‘plumbed-in’ to pipes, which extract all the smoke and fumes while they are sitting there, gently cooking.
But of course the highlight is the seven mile trip through some splendid Lakeland countryside to Dalegarth in the foothills of Scafell Pike, England’s tallest mountain.
There is a large group of Japanese schoolchildren who are visiting from a school in south west Scotland where they are staying for six weeks. They are busily entertaining themselves by having an apple-polishing competition, amid much amusement.
I am hugely impressed that the current timetable of seven round-trips a day will be maintained until the end of October. Coaches pile into the car park from as far away as Scotland and Somerset and one coach operator even has their own special train.
Dalegarth has a splendid cafeteria with some splendid home baking. I can certainly vouch for the chocolate cake!
On the return journey, my special treat of a ride on the footplate of ‘Northern Rock’ is almost ruined by a sudden downpour. But, at the first passing loop, I move up to the front of the train after the rain stops and the sun comes out.
Unlike many preserved railways, the steam locomotives on the ‘Rattie’, as the line is affectionately known, are driven not by volunteers, but by full-time staff. Steve is a former baker from Merseyside and, although he says he is ‘not a puffer-nutter’, he is about to spend a few days on the Bure Valley Railway driving their trains.
There’s quite a link between the three main 15 inch gauge railways, with locomotives regularly being loaned out. Staggeringly it costs around £2000 to transport a loco from Cumbria to Norfolk.
It’s my first ever trip to the Lake District and as unlike my preconception of the area. ‘That’s because you only know about Windermere and places like that,’ I am told. ‘Blackpool with a puddle’.
Certainly I am charmed by this part of the country and by a little railway which nobody wanted in 1960 and which now attracts 125,000 visitors an annum.
I head to the mainline station for the train to Barrow. One of the reasons for the huge cost of maintaining the line is, I am told, the 28 manned level crossings between Whitehaven and Cumbria.
The views from the train, of the fells on the left and the sea on the right are splendid, if somewhat marred by Northern Rail’s filthy windows. At Barrow, I connect to the very comfortable (and clean) First TransPennine Express service to Preston. The views, as we head round Morecambe Bay, continue to be splendid. The mudflats of Grange-over-Sands, the station and folly at Ulverston and much more.
I join a virgin Pendolino tilting train for the short hop from Preston to Wigan, just enough time to have a cup of tea and download emails. Northern takes me to Liverpool Lime Street, where I pick up one of Merseyrail’s frequent services towards Chester to reach my final destination of Bebington.
I am spending the night in the Leverhulme Hotel (www.leverhulmehotel.co.uk), housed in the former cottage hospital of Port Sunlight village. Port Sunlight was built by industrialist, Lord Lever, to house his employees and I’ll be exploring it in the morning.
My luxuriously appointed room (£175 per night, not including breakfast, which is £25 more) is a classic case of an architect having loads of clever ideas, without actually thinking of the practicalities. All the lights are controlled by a credit-card shaped remote control which needs a degree course to operate it correctly. Of course it always seems to get lost under papers. If you want a ceiling light, you have to have nine. There’s no decent reading light at the desk, which entails one of the bedside ones being pressed into action. Electrical sockets are not where they are needed, the worst example being the shaver socket in the bathroom which is about four feet from the sink. Barmy. The room is impossibly hot caused, the receptionist tells me, by the lights.
There’s also a secret staircase, partially obscured by a very wobbly and heavy folding mirror, which protrudes into the room. I think it’s positively dangerous.
The bed is luxurious, though, although I am not at all keen on the mirrored ceiling above.
I leave the window wide open to try and cool the place down and go to bed.

York to Eskdale

Monkbar Hotel Courtyard

Newcastle First Class lounge

Newcastle Station

1130 is long past my bedtime

I am never at my best when I’ve had a disturbed night’s sleep. I shudder to think what the noise in the courtyard must be like at weekends. In addition, I have discovered that my king-sized bed was equipped with something I absolutely hate – two single duvets.

So, rather than linger till  my intended 1100 departure time, I head down for an early breakfast. It is a buffet, another pet hate. A coach load of elderly Americans are busy squirreling away (they thought, surreptitiously!) croissants and pots of yoghurt into their bags, presumably for their lunch.

As York wakes up, I enjoy the 20 minute walk up the hill to the station. The choristers from the Minster School being led, crocodile-style across the road, to the Cathedral. Cycling commuters, many still bravely (or stupidly) in shorts, despite a distinctly autumnal chill to the morning.

I’m just in time to catch the Cross Country Service from Birmingham to Edinburgh, although I am only going as far as Carlisle. It’s very pleasant, but not a patch on the comfort levels onboard East Coast trains’ HST’s..

I wave my ticket in front of a camera to gain admission to the First Class lounge at Newcastle and help an old lady make sense of the high-tech tea and coffee machine.

The Northern Rail service to Carlisle is formed of two ancient diesel carriages, long overdue for refurbishment and much in need of a decent clean. But the train is quiet and the journey turns out to be a gem. The route follows the Tyne Valley and its splendid countryside. We trundle through stations with names like Haltwhistle and see endless flocks of sheep and dry stone walls. It’s an unexpected treat.

We are held up by a signal outside Carlisle and although I alert the conductor to my short connection to Whitehaven, that (also Northern Rail) train disappears off to my intended lunch destination as we are pulling in. Such things would not happen in Germany!

So instead of a nice lunch in Whitehaven, I sit on Carlisle station for an hour.

I make sure I am sitting on the right hand side of the carriage, because, after Maryport, you have a splendid view of the seaside. At least I would have done if the windows had not been, like the train, filthy. I fully realise the difficulties of trying to run rural railways, but there can be no excuse for sloppy cleaning.

We pass lovely St. Bees with the impressive buildings and grounds its’ public school, followed shortly afterwards by the enormous nuclear power station at Sellafield/Windscale.

One is left wondering if the line would exist at all, were it not for the constant stream of nuclear and other materials being delivered as freight.

As we have headed south down the Cumbrian coast, the weather has deteriorated to become torrential rain. Dave Jenner, my host at the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, agrees with me that the best bet is to settle me in at the splendidly characterful Bower House Inn in Eskdale (www.bowerhouseinn.co.uk) and we’ll do narrow gauge steam trains in the morning.