Schwarzwald

Rain threatened and we put on our waterproofs, but it never came, although the hills of the Schwarzwald loomed darkly on the horizon. On a small side-road near Baden-Baden we branched off into the woods and set up camp in a small glade. Since the midges were active, we set up a spare flysheet as an insect-proof porch and picnicked on pickled herrings and bratwurst, washed down with olives, gherkins, the last of the Mosel, and beer. It was a very comfortable night, despite the rather lumpy ground. There's a lot to be said for camping by a babbling brook.

Baden-Baden appeared to have turned itself into a tourist trap. There was a bewildering array of signs pointing to hotels and car parks, but none pointing to useful things such as the Roman baths after which the town is named, so we escaped along a tourist road invitingly called the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse - the Black Forest High Road.

THE BLACK FOREST

It got colder as we gained altitude, and the forest got very thick and dark (surprise surprise!). We took a short walk in the gloom to a nice little waterfall and back, and then after a series of winding roads with vistas over blue-shrouded hills stopped for lunch at a crowded little café on the outskirts of Freudenstadt. Bypassing Freudenstadt we took another minor road into Triberg, full of tourists and cuckoo clocks. We couldn't resist experiencing the immense roadside shop 'The House of 1000 Clocks', which as well as an incredible number of over-carved tourist timepieces also sold what looked like quality Vienna clocks at reasonable prices. It must be all the competition.

We had some trouble finding a campsite, but eventually struck lucky in the tourist resort of Titisee. While contemplating the enormous list of rules and regulations ('From your selected pitch you should be able to see only the number of your own pitch', 'Motor vehicles must be parked at right angles to the slope', 'We would not hesitate to remove lines attached to trees', 'Vehicular movement is prohibited between 13:00 and 14:30'), we met up with a group of four bikers, and after a shower and some friendly beers we all set off into town for an evening's entertainment.

After the restaurants had closed, we found our way into a nearby bierkeller, where I started on Dieble Altbier and the other guys got into the pils with schnapps chasers. The ladies were a little more circumspect, but it turned into a riot of an evening, and next morning I suffered for every drop of alcohol that I'd consumed. We spent a slow morning rehydrating in Titisee, and then took a nice leisurely pedalo out across the lake followed by a medicinal Black Forest gateau.

That afternoon we headed up the Feldburg for some dramatic views across the brightly lit but incredibly dark forest, but the traffic was gettting heavy again so we consulted our National Geographic tourist map and found that it recommended a minor road through Schonau toward Mullheim. This was excellent advice, as we were the only things moving on it, and it was a fantastic scratching road through often breathtaking scenery.

Eventually we looped back around through Freiburg (where we didn't stop, although the latticework cathedral steeple looked interesting) and back to Titisee, planning to head south to the lake at Schluchsee, since we had noticed that where there's a lake, there's a campsite. Indeed there was, but the tent part was packed so we kept on going until we found a hillside site with no lake but lots of space. As a sort of money-saving exercise (more from guilt than because we were actually short), and because we couldn't cope with any more rich restaurant food, we fried up some sausages, apples, onions, gherkins, and spatzle (a local pasta). No beer for me, as my head was still hurting.

The back roads to Bonndorf and Singen were fantastic for biking, with loads of sweeping forest curves and hairpins, beautiful weather, and a lot of motorbikes. It must be pretty popular around here, as some villages had signs up banning motorcycles between 22:00 and 06:00.

TDM IN THE BLACK FOREST

In Singen we took the coast road around the Bodensee, which was beautiful but plagued by terrible traffic. The local road planners didn't seem to have understood the concept of linked traffic lights, as they were scattered around on apparently random timing patterns. You actually spent so much time waiting at red lights that there were signs up asking you to switch your engine off to save pollution. However, eventually we made it through and got back onto the minor roads all the way to the hotel that was to be our home for the following week.

Oberstaufen

Throughout the week we got through a fair few activities. At Oberstdorf we climbed up the highest ski-jump in the world with a view to bungee-jumping off the top, but the jump was far too expensive, although the climb was worth it because the views from the top were incredible. Another day we rode through dreadful traffic to the fairy tale castle Neuschwanstein (as seen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), and thought that a romantic-sounding horse-cart up from Schwangau would be a nice idea.

The reality was far from romantic, as after a lot of loud wrangling with rude German tourists about who had and who hadn't pushed in to the queue, about fifteen of us crammed into a very small buggy and were pulled very slowly up the mountain by a very smelly horse. Once at the castle, we spent an hour queing for a ticket (the ticket clerks thought that it would be a good idea to go for lunch at the busiest period), and then we had to wait for another half hour for our guide. I think that if I hadn't been there before I would have given up before we got in, but I knew that it would all be worthwhile in the end, and it was just as crazy as I remembered it, commissioned by Mad King Ludwig whose personal style could best be described as Big, Colourful, and Gothic.

NEUSCHWANSTEIN

Rather than face the crowds again on the way down, we headed across country, following a stream bed that cut down the wooded mountain side back to Schwangau. We did look up at the twin castle of Hohenschwangau, but we'd really had enough of queuing for one day, and left it for another time. Another morning we spent an agreeable if rather smelly time at a traditional cheese-maker's, where huge rounds of cheese were hand-crafted by jolly German craftsmen, and one afternoon we spent a long time trying to find a local museum of traditional farmhouses at a place called Illerbeule. We nearly failed, but by considerable luck we managed to find it, although since we arrived at 16:00, which is closing time for most places in the area, we thought it had all been to no avail, but for some reason this one place still had another couple of hours of opening time.

It really was a fascinating place, consisting of a complete farm built from cottages and barns from different eras and from different parts of Germany. The thing that struck me most compared with similar structures in the UK, was the amazing amount of living space that these farmers seemed to have. In Britain, in most historical ages, everybody hunkered down in a tiny room with all the animals. Here, if a farmer decided to go in for instance for cheesemaking, then he just built a whole new cheesemaking room on the end of his farmhouse. The barns were enormous too, and beautifully finished in bold black and white designs.

On yet another beautiful day of blazing sunshine, we caught a cable car to the top of the 1833m Hochgrat ridge which marks the border between Germany and Austria, and set off westward along the top. Some 5km and several hard hours later we decided to leave the crumbly conglomerate of the main path and continue along the spine of the ridge, but somehow we went a little astray, and after an interesting 1500m descent through an almost vertical forest we arrived at somebody's farm.

The amused farmer explained to us that the reason that we couldn't work out where we were on our map was that we'd walked right off the edge and were now in Austria, so there was nothing for it but to climb all the way back to the top and then back down into Germany. Once more at sea level, and thoroughly footsore, we were extremely grateful to discover a small bus waiting to take us to civilisation, Jacuzzi, and beer.

STRADDLING THE GERMAN-AUSTRIAN BORDER

We also spent a day visiting a couple of local geological features. The first was Sturrman's Hohle, a meltwater shaft and tunnel bored over 600,000 years ago through a mountain near Obermaiselstein. There was quite a climb up to the entrance, and then, once inside, a long long descent into the heart of the mountain, at first along a crack or crevice, but then down the actual vertical shaft itself by means of a series of metal steps.

From the Hohle we headed for the Breitachklamm, hailed as "Germany's most beautiful gorge", and we had no quarrel with that. It was really impressive, a deep fissure scoured by a fast-flowing river, with sides so high that they appeared to close in at the top and blot out the daylight. Judging by the mangled and twisted steel handrails along the way, the river must get pretty tempestuous at times, and there were also entire pine trees jammed crosswise across the valley some twenty or thirty feet above the current water level. It must be an incredible place in a storm.

BREITACHKLAMM

Finally, we nipped over into Switzerland to go white-water rafting with a German fire brigade, which wasn't as scary as I expected but was still great fun. And then it was time to get back on the bikes and go home, visiting a few more campsites along the way. On the border between Switzerland and France we passed a long queue of steam-powered cars, which was strange, and in the tiny French village of Freland we ate at a museum that doubled as a restaurant in the evenings, but on the whole we just rode, tired and happy, home to England and to bed.