Turns out Hamburg isn't the home of Hamburgers. What a let down!

Day 36 - June 29^th 

The next day we headed towards the second biggest city in Germany – Hamburg.

It was probably the hottest day we had since leaving Poland and we arrived into the outskirts of town around lunchtime. We parked up in ALDI for lunch but decided not to stay there as the parking lot was littered with signs threatening to tow your vehicle if you were there longer than 45mins.

We decided to find a free spot and began driving towards the city centre, quickly finding a space right next to the bike path. We unloaded the bikes and began the ride into Hamburg. It turned out that we were still about 6-7kms out of the main square, so we were both pretty hot and sweaty by the time we got in.

Hamburg is built on shipping and there is still a lot of heavy industrial operations today. We visited the town hall and main square, which were littered with people enjoying the hot weather.

  

After that we rode out to see the ‘Chile Building’, which was supposed to look like a large ship/ocean liner. It can’t have been that good as we rode past it twice before finally realizing.

Massive Thumbs Down to the Chile Building.

We then took a ride through the canals, which have huge red brick buildings lining them that were used to stockpile goods before they went out to the shipyards. They still use some today and you could see many import/export businesses operating on the canals.

The old red brick warehouses on the canals of Hamburg.
Some are still in operation today.

Hamburg feels like is is built out of rivets and steel.

Our final stop was out to the Reeperbahn (Red Light District) of Hamburg, which is the biggest red light area in Europe. This is due to the number of sailors that used to frequent the area after weeks/months out of sea. It was a huge strip of seediness and kind of reminded me of the Gold Coast.

In fact, there is a street off the Reeperbahn for those that want to go a little bit further than the ‘Rippers’, however, it is off limits to any boy under the age of 18 and all females!

Despite being Germany’s second largest city, neither of us were blown away by it and we headed back on our ride to the van to set course for Lubeck.

After departing Hamburg, we got into a huge thunderstorm, which was one of the first we had seen in a while, as they never seemed to happen in the UK. The rain was so intense that the traffic slowed from 120km/h to about 40km/h, as we slowly made our way through the sheets of water hitting the windscreen and swimming pools forming on the road. It was quite refreshing to be driving in this weather though as the day had been so hot and humid.

We finally made it into Lubeck around 6:30pm although it looked like the rain had hit them pretty hard, with streets being turned into waterfalls. We had no idea where to wild camp that night, but were thrilled to see a Parking sign with a campervan on it so we quickly followed it.

Much to our disappointment, the designated campervan parking was full so we made our way over to an empty parking lot reserved for cars and ignored the signs. Ignorance was bliss, as we got a fantastic spot right along the riverside and away from anyone else.

Cracking Lubeck Wild Camp spot on the river.

After dinner we took a stroll around the quiet streets of Lubeck to take some photos of their spired churches, which strangely appear to be bending and the waterside area.

It's not your eyes, the two spires are
actually leaning towards each other.

Claire got a little worried about this photo.
Something about walking into the light?