randform

Last week we did a short trip to the Island of Rügen in the baltic, which is amongst others famous for its stunningly beautiful Chalk Cliffs in the Jasmund National Park, including the Königstuhl (king’s chair). You may know the well-known picture Chalk Cliffs on Rügen by C.D. Friedrich.

update 15.08.11: Warning: especially after that recent rain the chalk cliffs can break. On Saturday evening there was an amount of ca. 30.000 cubic meters of chalk gliding. The Jasmund park authorities thus currently recommend not to stroll in their vicinity. According to the article the sea level has been rising by 28 cm in the last 200 ys. so that the hillside toe vanished. This leaves the chalk without any protection against the baltic.

The trip was very nice – apart from some minor uncomfort during the train rides. That is – due to a bomb alert in Berlin – trains were delayed and cancelled (and we were send to another station). So the train was more crowded than usual. This became quite uncomfortable, when it started to rain and the train turned out to leak, so that people had to escape the raindrops from the ceiling. Some luggage got actually quite soaked, before people noticed. The way back was unfortunately similar uncomfortable (see below).

Empty Berlin Hauptbahnhof:

rain drops at the ceiling (when the train was braking the drops became rather streamlets)

But here some images from the Kreidefelsen and surroundings which were partially covered in chalk dust:

The trip back went first rather smooth. We took the public bus to Sassnitz and then the train to Lietzow, where we even could help some chinese tourists that were about to use the wrong commuting (the train stations in the province are usually quite deserted). But then things got less comfortable – that is we we took the train from Stralsünd and after an hour or so the train stopped in the middle of nowhere! For a long time we got no information about the cause. Later it turned out that the engine had broken down. Luckily there were two train engines in that train and the conductor could change them after we had been slowly rolling back to the last stop. As the train track was a one-way track, our train actually jammed the north-south regional traffic for quite some time. In the end the delay was just two hours, so the ride from Stralsund took just about five hours, but it appeared longer. This may have been partially due to the fact that some toilets were broken and that there was almost no food and drink (there was only a little candy bar machine, which was emptied rapidly and the hot drink machine was broken too).

Sassnitz:

engine breakdown:

posted by nad on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 4:26 pm // berlin, environment, trips. // RSS 2.0 feed skip to the end and leave a response // pinging is currently not allowed //