Bielefeld, Germany - Part 1: Getting there

(Getting to) Bielefeld

Bielefeld skyline from the Sparrenburg Castle

Getting there is half the fun (?)

As mentioned earlier I decided to try and take buses on this trip to decrease my carbon impact - the first long trip was from London to Bielefeld, Germany. The bus left Victoria Coach Station at 8 pm on September 9, 2019, and was meant to reach Bielefeld, Germany at 11:30 am on September 10, 2019.

It was not a fun trip to say the least. Perhaps in deference to the weather the air conditioning was turned up very high and I was extremely cold (I was wearing a light cotton dress with short sleeves because I didn't want to be wearing constricting pants). Although I was very lucky in that I had two seats to myself I couldn't seem to get comfortable enough to get any kind of quality sleep. This was my first experience of going through the Chunnel (the tunnel underneath the English Channel from Dover to Calais) and it was this that caused the first delay - I think due to a passenger. 

The train that goes through the tunnel is kind of like a ferry - cars and buses and people (? - not sure about the latter, I think maybe you have to transit in some kind of vehicle) - drive onto a double decker high train which then goes through the tunnel. Departures are not that frequent and when we arrived about 2 hours after leaving London there were two departures shown - one at 22:50 and one at 23:20. All the passengers have to get off the bus and go through passport control and then reboard the bus. The bus then gets into position to drive into the sort of 'corraling' area (again reminded me of the ferry with numbered lanes) where they will then be directed down a ramp onto the train itself. We got into position to drive into this area and then backed up and let another bus go ahead of us. After maybe 15 or 20 minutes the door opened and a passenger got on apologizing to us all - presumably she had lost her way somewhere between passport control and the bus (or maybe she was subject to extra examination). Anyway, I think we missed our spot and then had to wait until 23:20. The trip itself is super fast - only about 25 minutes and then we were in France. 

I dozed on and off as we trundled along to Belgium (Antwerp), the Netherlands (Eindhoven) and in to Germany where I had to change buses in Dortmund. We arrived there pretty much on time and I went for a wander around the town as I had about 2 hours until my connecting bus arrived. I went in search of coffee and a toilet that wasn't moving (the one on the bus seemed to be broken - certainly nothing meaningful happened when you pushed the flush button - neither water nor vacuum evacuation - and it was pretty gross by Dortmund). I found a place run by a nice Italian gentleman who sold me an extremely strong coffee and let me make use of his delightful toilet (behind a locked door) for €2.30 (considering the toilet at the bus stop was €1 I thought this was a good deal). I wandered back to the bus station and started up a conversation with a young woman who asked a man in English if he couldn't perhaps go and smoke his cigarette somewhere else. I asked her if she thought the fact that the bus to Bielefeld (which she was also taking - final destination Copenhagen) said +75 minutes after it meant it was 75 minutes late. She went to the kiosk and confirmed that was the case. She used her phone to navigate us to another (nearer) cafe where she had tea and me coffee and I charged my laptop. There was no WiFi at the cafe (the elderly proprietor just looked at me blankly) so she set up a hotspot with her phone and I managed to message Diana (my classmate from Sweden who lives in Bielefeld and who I would be staying with).

Finally, some two hours late, the bus that would take me the final hour and a half to Bielefeld arrived. A pleasant hour and a half through the German countryside and I bid my new friend farewell, thanking her for the loan of her Internet access and was happy to give a big hug to my friend Diana who I hadn't seen since 2016 when we had a mini-reunion of Uppsala students in London.

Verdict - this trip was not a good experience though the cost was low. The driving was occasionally erratic - several times we seemed to veer onto an exit at the last minute as if the driver had not been paying attention and had almost missed the exit. The traffic was appalling (though luckily it was mostly going in the opposite direction to us) in Germany - I was so surprised to see so many solo drivers - I thought the Europeans had all this stuff sorted out and it was just us folks in North America who are still struggling with car culture that has drivers travelling alone (I was to get a more dramatic taste of this later). Fifteen and a half hours to go 717 km seems pretty pathetic and if I was to do this trip again I would plan further ahead and try to take a train rather than a bus which I think would be more comfortable though probably more complex in terms of changing trains and connections.