Returning to Germany, the first overnight stop was a town in the Rhine Valley called St. Goar. We tasted a range of white wines, including reisling and ice wine, none of which is really my thing, but I’m happy enough to be seen as refined. Extensive graffiti in the long wooden tables in the underground cellar (Dazza Was ‘Ere Contiki June 98) shows just how well-beaten the path through St. Goar has been for this tour company throughout the ages, and how lucrative it must be for the town.

We perused a shop with hundreds of steins on display, including some expensive ones with chunks of the Berlin Wall perched atop them. I purchased a glass mug and a plain grey stein, both with the brewer’s logo HB, remembering fondly the Munich hopera house.

We partied the night away in the hotel bar, just a few locals and a lot of Australians. It was definitely the most fun of the little towns we stayed in, and indeed was the only little town we stayed in. Also, it was the night that one of the girls got a rather stubborn case of lockjaw, leading to a hospital trip and a series of events that got me locked me out of my hotel room for hours. Good times.

Of course everyone is keen to get to Berlin. This is a city that was essentially a big smoking crater at the end of the War, and although the city and country have come back reminders such as the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the Breitscheidplatz still exist, deliberately left there as a warning about the horrors of war. Today, this plaza and the precinct around it is a thriving shopping and commercial area, of course filled with Christmas markets at the time, and filled with people at all times. Indeed, I spent most of my day shopping in this area and taking in the Christmassy vibe.

My Berlin experience was non-stop. I was busy enough shopping to completely miss the bus pick-up to go to dinner, and had great fun getting to the address by good old-fashioned map, foot, and train. Taxis are for chumps.

Apparently from dinner it was straight onto our pub tour, so running down the road to buy deodorant, and changing in to some of the clothes I’d just bought, we embarked on a walking tour of clubs that were mostly empty except for us, the exception being the Sophienclub, where there were also people from another Contiki tour, and some actual locals. Songs that still stick in my head from pubbing and clubbing on this trip come from such insidious sources as the Pussycat Dolls, Nelly Furtado, and the Black Eyed Peas featuring Fergie. After nearly walking into the paths of a taxi and a tram, and helping a very pissed Californian search in vain for her jacket, I decided to call time on a very varied and satisfying day in Berlin.

The final stop on the road to Amsterdam is Hamburg, which I took in a great deal while frantically searching for Internet access to remedy an alarming bank imbalance. It turned out to be in an electronics store metres from the central train station where I’d started. But it had certainly helped me see a lot of this harbour city in the short time that we had to spend there. The hotel was a fair way out, and the group used this evening as a rest (yeah, meaning drinks in the hotel bar) between two exciting cities.