Dover to Basel to Breisach

Running between England's most expensive campsite and Dover are 3 miles of clifftop road. More precisely, the road runs from St Margaret's at Cliff, which is a beautiful village perched in a cleft in the chalk rocks running down to the sea. There's a museum there telling of the defences erected all along this coast against the expected German attack in the Second World War. What a strange time that must have been. George Orwell described this part of England as the sleekest landscape in the world. It seems improbable that it could be a frontline of barbed wire and anti-ship guns. It's a place for the milk round, dog-walking and things turning out nice again. I suppose there's nowhere particularly well suited to be in a war. At seven on a sunny August morning, it's easy to see what G Orwell meant - it's a genteel landscape, reassuringly unbothered by anything at all. At that time of the morning the air is cool and moist and the world is alive with smells (not my own, that takes time to accumulate) and the sea makes you look out over it. It always reminds me that we live on a planet, that there is life on it, and I'm part of it, and that is miracle enough.
Dover docks may be an eyesore but they symbolise a wonder, too - travel, which is simply to say, looking for something, and we're all doing that. Talking like this makes me want to smoke a pipe by an open fire and impart wisdom casually to my dog.
After the ferry boat ride I was confronted with riding on the right of the road. It's like trying to read in a mirror, but with more health and safety issues. At one big junction there wasn't enough computing power in my head to work out what to do and I couldn't stop because I was nearly in the middle. I just sailed across, waving apologetically to anyone who cared to look. I've got the hang of it now so don't worry about me - not for that reason anyway. Paris Nord and Paris Est stations both smelled of burning black sump oil. The streets were dusty, dry and dirty, it was noisy and hot, and I wondered quite what it was that was supposed to make Paris romantic. The people were friendly, though - guess what, I got lost in the half-mile between the two stations. A very helpful chap shouted directions through the noise and dust, which I understood, but to make sure he stopped a bus and got the driver to shout them across the street to me.
Let's skip on, metaphorically speaking, to Basel - 1,000ft above sea level but stiflingly hot - and the Rhine. Here the river runs through a narrowish channel with the city climbing up each side. The water is limpid turquoise and churning in large eddies as it flows quickly through the city. Hundreds of people were swimming, or rather floating with the current, through the city past the bars and cafes on the waterfront (see rubbish picture no. 1). Many young lovers seem to do this, floating downstream for a mile or so and walking back in their swimming gear along the riverside for a beer overlooking the water. We can only guess where they go next, probably Evensong. I didn't have time to stay in the city but I saw enough to enjoy its general ease of being - people walked or rode bikes as if they weren't in a hurry. I preferred it to Sittingbourne.
I camped in a campsite just a few yards from the German-Swiss-French border, which is in the middle of the river and, strictly speaking, both infinitessimally small and just a legal construct anyway, but it feels particularly European to be there. On one side of the river, everyone speaks French, on the other, German. There are no border controls any more, in fact I've been in 3 countries and haven't needed my passport yet - I didn't need it for the ferry either. I camped on the French side but spent all today (Wednesday) on the German side. The Germans this close to the border speak French, which I also speak, but I get a perverse pleasure from trying to communicate in German, which I don't know at all. There's something about not knowing a language, and it's that both parties in a conversation usually try much harder to listen to understand and to speak to be understood. It means both parties are much more present to each other, and when one says, 'Ahhhh! I understand now,' it's a moment for celebration, maybe fireworks and both national anthems, and the two people concerned become best friends and want to hug each other. Sometimes it's like that.
From Basel to Breisach, where I am now, the river is wider than the Thames in London, occasionally deep blue and still except for jumping fish, sometimes forming short falls through rocks that folks use for sunbathing. The cycle path along this part of the Rhine is a dusty, tree-lined track quite high above the river. There're lots of butterflies but otherwise the woods seem still. Today there was no wind at all and because the trees are quite far back from the track, no shade either. I don't know how hot it was at the height of the day but at 6pm it was 34 degrees in the shade. Luckily the track was flat as a pancake (I don't mean one of Lorraine's vegan pancakes). In fact there would have been a very slight downward slope all the way along (so quite like one of L's pancakes after all, but you should try her pumpkin and potato soup, which is a work of nature in its own right). Raquel didn't like the dust - she was covered in it - but I tickled her behind the ear and she put up with it (that works on some human beings as well, by the way). Raquel gives me something to project various states of mind onto. You'd think that no-one would be out cycling on such a blisterer of a day but many were. Most looked quite German, if you know what I mean - moustaches (on the men) and funny sunhats, and most were in their 50s and 60s, wearing very little and either sunburnt or very well tanned, possibly cooked. These people are hard-core and it's no wonder they win more Olympic medals than we do. I kept my shirt on because it would be madness not to in this heat (see rubbish picture no. 2 - the kind chap who took it for me took about 20 steps back first - I couldn't take any more because the battery ran out). Mercifully the river is right there if I need to dip my head in it. When I dipped my feet in today little fishes nibbled my toes, especially the little toe on the left foot, for some reason. The end. Have to go to sleep.