Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 11 - Luxembourg I awoke in room 410 with enough time to throw my clothes back in the pack, bid farewell to Munich, I barely knew thee, and begin the end of our journey. We only had one stop left, that of Luxembourg, the sovereign tax haven straddling the borders of Germany, France and Belgium. It was a tiny dot on the horizon and we'd have to cross most of Southern Germany to reach the place. As James steeled himself to six hours behind the wheel with equal fortitude I took up the pen again, every epic journey needs its chronicler right? But my mind, never the most biddable beast, drifted from the empty page. It stared wordlessly at the passing hills and trees as for the first time on the trip the car pointed towards home. The landscape was imbued with a glow, as if the softest and most gentle tune followed its contours and weaved through its verdant forests. A thread of gold too thin and fine for all to be able to see glinted in the sun and stretched off into the landscape pu...

Day 10 - Munich So many people have become just portraits hung only with cobwebs in the attic of my memories. Passing acquaintances and fleeting passions created by chance intersection of different paths criss-crossing the world. And so I thought it was with her. I hadn't seen the girl since those last days of Margaret River, part of the sturm und drang that fires the memory of it. There is a delight in the dramatic recall but memory is just our internal storytelling function, malleable to the narrative that we want to hear. Is all history oral and shaped by Chinese whispers? Maybe this blog will act as my corrective to that, once stripped of the requisite flourish. Even now those events seem improbable, like EastEnders in Oz. After a hasty goodbye shielded from inflamed eyes, and one prompted by belated decency on my part, I welcomed the escape of the road. But they were great days for all their filthy, haphazard melodrama and I tear a little at their remembrance. I guess not all...

Day 9 - Bratislava Breakfast was taken in Hotel Sacher in Vienna, home of the famous Sacher Torte. I wouldn't ordinarily begin the day with cake but holidays do strange things to a person. Suitably tortified we jumped on a train for the second of our two day-trips, this time to Slovakia. I had preconceptions about the places that we'd been to so far, some based on personal experience others less so but Slovakia ranked as a genuine unknown. Having great affection for Prague and by extension the Czech Republic I suppose I wondered if the Velvet Revolution of 1989 had cleaved off the less desirable part into the eastern state. Luckily we three had established a means of determining the level of advancement of a place, thus - Question 1 - Does it have an Ikea? yes, we saw one from the train. Question 2 - Can you tour the place on a segway? yes, one was sitting outside a tourist office. Question 3 - From where you are standing can you see an H&M? ...oh Bratislava you were so...

Day 8 - Budapest A Buda, a Pest, maybe a golden grand piano and a hidden treasure chest (i'd settle for a Nazi gold train though), we pulled out of Hauptbahnhof Station and were on our way to the country of the mighty magyars. Booked in an old fashioned cabin with 6 seats in a 3 + 3 facing arrangement I had the misfortune to be seated next to a grimble who had decided that now was the most opportune time to trim his fingernails. Being English I was unable to make any complaint louder than an internal 'tut' but there was a woman in the cabin of indeterminate origin who had no such social restrictions and soon called him to account. He shrugged in a nonchalant 'what could possibly be the problem' way and turned instead to his cyrillic newspaper. Decorum restored the soothing sway of movement lulled me. There is an unexpected luxuriousness to closing your eyes on a train, a delicious reduced consciousness softening the hard lines just beyond your eyelids. I can't ...

Day 7 - Vienna We'd been there only hours before but there was no sign of the absinthe bar. The place where it should have been seemed to offer no sign of its existence. Maybe we did drink that hallucinatory stuff after all but not here... The miles behind the wheel were starting to take their toll and both drivers eagerly accepted the opportunity of an extended break. The next stop was Vienna and we could pitch up there for a few days, visiting Hungary and Slovakia by train. We passed Austerlitz, scene of Napoleon's most renowned victory 110 years ago which caused the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the political entity, centred around Germany, that had dominated Western Europe for near a thousand years. There is a certain irony that the wild and unconquered Germania delineated by the Rhine and Danube should become the spiritual successor to the Roman Empire, in the west at least. The battle caused William Pitt, the British prime minister at the time to say of the map of...

Day 6 - Prague The aroma of wild pig filled our nostrils as it slowly roasted in the midday sun. Unfortunately rather than being on a spit in a beer garden it was instead on a central reservation as we crawled past in traffic. Bade farewell to Wrocław and the Monopole and our short stint as high rollin' ballers we made a westward turn. Small villages dotted the, pig notwithstanding, beautiful Czech countryside as it swept out and up and down to our either side. There was a crispness to the landscape, the air seemed fresh and clear, everything just so. I have good memories of Prague have been taken here as a surprise for my 30th birthday. The three of us had seen one or two mediaeval city centres at this point but for my koruna Prague's remains one of the most visually arresting. The cobbled streets and castle perched high above, saints peering down at you from Charles bridge, one of ten crossing the Vltava here. It also retains the, not inconsiderable, appeal of cheap living c...

Day 5 - Wrocław "And I got an engine full of trunk space, I get money three ways, f*****g bitches three ways, seven different foreigns plus no hablé. But I make that bitch walk for some cheesecake." Tyga's words from early 2015 inspired us to leave Berlin's Meininger Hotel and take a left turn into Poland. We pointed the ride towards the city of Wrocław where we could live like kings for a fraction of the money Scandinavia had demanded of us, £8 pancakes whaaat? The relative weakness of the country's economy was ably demonstrated when silky autobahn became torn and undulating tarmac. The car bounced and juddered and my pen criss-crossed the page like an etch-a-sketch in the hands of a drunk child. The second demonstration came when a car behind, furiously flashing its lights, got us to stop on the hard shoulder. A balding, middle-aged, be-paunched guy walked to the driver's window and, handing over a business card, proceeded to try and interest us in a deal ...

Day 4 - Berlin A restless night's sleep hadn't left Matt best disposed towards a long drive (my standing offer to take a turn still being rebuked) but I'd wager me and James felt worse. Matt likened the car to a hearse given the state of his two passengers. I drifted in and out of semi-lucid dreams, my consciousness on the melting edge of reality. 6 hours passed until I stepped out, blinking into a dusty car park somewhere in the Mitte district of Berlin. I'd long heard naught but good things about the capital and of all the places on the original itinerary it was the one I was keenest to visit. The itinerary, however, was evolving and we'd set ambitious targets to steam through Europe in a grand arc. Coincidentally it was exactly 5 years since my first road trip through the continent from Istanbul to Italy. How many countries had I seen since then? How many thousands of miles travelled by plane, car, train? On bike, boat or on foot? How many experiences since that...

Day 3 - Copenhagen My first new country on the trip (not that I'm, y'know, counting) and a city that Matt, having passed through on the way up had sung the praises of. The Danes are amongst the happiest people in the world and those that aren't happy tend to commit suicide thus removing themselves from the statistics (or is that Swedes? I'm not sure). Certainly the aesthetic qualities of the city ought to keep a person happy, especially if you happen to be male. It is also a place shot through with cycle lanes and vast numbers of residents take to two wheels, woe betide the unwary traveller straying onto their part of the road. The way to Denmark from Sweden is a curious mix of water traversing structures. A bridge begins on the Swedish side before reaching a small island in the middle of the channel and abruptly diving under the ground to become a tunnel. Did each country take responsibility for half the crossing and simply not communicate their intentions? Does the S...

Day 2 - Jönköping We left Stockholm and its scenic if somewhat austere environs for a city 200 miles to the south. Jönköping perches on the bottom edge of the country's second biggest lake, Vättern, and is the the home town of such notable persons as Agnetha from Abba, Nina Persson (Cardigans fame) and a man with whom James and I have much in common - Olympic kayaker Anders Gustafsson. Leaving behind the convenience of an H&M on every corner and an off-license never more than an hour's walk away we began the road trip proper. Urban sprawl gave way to endless coniferous forest, clatter and chatter to 101 Party Classics, a 5CD odyssey charting the highs of pop music over the preceding decades. It also, inevitably, included some lows and to counter this we were each granted 5 vetoes. However these were to apply to the entire CD collection in the car which were to be played back to back in strict alphabetical order. Looking at some of the CDs my vetoes would be...

Day 1 - Stockholm Road. Trip. Two words whose constituent parts of car, road, here and there are less than the whole. They don't capture the listless miles, the blurred tarmac, the landscape passing on either side like the bars of an equaliser. They don't capture the urge to leave, the limitless reach and limited grasp, the, for want of a better word, romance. Kerouac got it, Hopper and Fonda summed the stateless rebellion of just driving, or in their case riding. Is it more about the dots or the lines? The getting there or the getting there? So...road trip, as good a reason as any to be be getting up at 3am on a nondescript Tuesday to catch the night bus to Gatwick Airport and begin a journey back to England via 11 countries, 12 cities and 2550 miles of road. I was flying with a friend to meet a friend in  Stockholm. Matt had gone over to compete in a Ironman competition which is a physical epic comprising a ride, a swim and a run. That doesn't do justice to over 10 hour...