Marienplatz & the Olympic Park

 October 14th, 2023

The flight from London to Munich was only a few hours.  Unfortunately it was cloudy most of the way but I did get a glimpse of a massive airport at one point, which I was able to determine later was Frankfurt.

One of the original Concorde's in it's final resting place at Heathrow:

The hostel I chose to stay in was only a block and a half from Munich’s Ostbahnhof (east train station).  Wombat’s is a chain of hostels and it’s a pretty big place, 7 storeys, about 14 rooms per floor and my room had 3 bunk beds.  It was a pretty new building and the facilities were quite nice.  It was a Friday night and I was a bit worried what the noise was going to be like, especially since as I arrived I walked past a long line of heavy metal rockers, almost all of whom were wearing black, waiting for a concert in a nearby building.  I was hoping that my tiredness from jetlag would help me sleep but it wasn’t the best night’s sleep, which was not aided by a couple of my kiwi roomies coming in at 1 am, turning on the light, talking loudly for a bit before leaving, only to return around 5 am.  Such is hostel life.

 

My first item on my itinerary for the day was to head to the central square known as Marienplatz where there is the famous “Glockenspiel” which is high up on the outside of the Rathaus (city hall).   I had seen when I was backpacking in 1995 after university so I was curious to see how well I could remember it…and I did.  The Glockenspiel was going to do its “show” at 11 and 12 am, I made it there for 11.  Marienplatz was not only chock full of people waiting to see the spectacle but there was some kind of exhibition for the local community, but I couldn’t tell what it was about.  Everyone waited in anticipation for the Glockenspiel to come alive.  It is two levels of figurines, probably four feet tall, who rotate around like a giant cuckoo clock to an automated glockenspiel playing.  At first the top level moved with jesters and other figures including a couple of knights on horses with their jousts.  On the first pass nothing happened but on the second, one of the knights was knocked back on his horse, much to the amusement of the crowds.  Then the lower bit came to life with some dancers spinning around.  The climax was both the top and the bottom in action.  I’m sure this was pretty amazing technology some 100 plus years ago when it was created, but it’s a bit of a let down in this day and age.

The Rathaus:

The start of the show:

The knights' first pass:

And now the dancers:

The spectators:

The church in the background of the last pic, close up:

Inside that church:

Hold on, did someone read the instruction manual incorrectly...

One of many lovely buildings in Munich:

I had to go into this Lego store...with its Bavarian twist:

The Star Wars section:

Neuschwanstein Castle...which looks like it is straight out of a Disney movie.  I hope to visit there in a few days time.

The Rathouse, lego style.

I wandered around the area and was drawn to a super tall spire, which was part of the Frauenkirche, the Cathedral of Our Dear Lady.  I’m not religious so churches aren’t my thing, but you could ascend to the top of one of the two spires to have a fantastic view of the city.  The spires are almost 100 meters high and Munich has a strict law that no building in the city centre can be taller than that so the view is unobstructed.  At the top, there were touchscreens that you could use to find out more information about significant buildings both close by and far.

Looking at the Rathaus:

The pole in the middle of the courtyard is a cellphone tower...modern times mixing with the old.

This was the damage to the church in WWII.

The cavernous inside.

Lovely stained glass windows.

Next on my list for the day was to head out to the Olympiapark.  Munich held the summer Olympics in 1972, a year after I was born.  The games were mired by the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian Black September terrorists.  After a memorial service for the fallen, the games resumed 34 hours later. 

The Olympic Park became a Munich landmark and is still heavily used today.  It has a distinctive look to it with these sweeping canopies of acrylic glass stabilized by metallic ropes…supposedly quite revolutionary at the time.  The main stadium was the home to FC Bayern Munich, the soccer team in the Bundesliga, German’s top football league until 2005.   Many concerts have been held there as well, with the Rolling Stones having played there more than any other band.  The swimming complex is still active as well.  It was interesting to see pictures of how the land used to be completely flat area but over 3 years with 5000 workers, it was transformed into some small grassy hills, undulating walkways and the main stadium is partially set into the ground.

 

First off, I walked to the stadium which only cost 3.50 Euros to enter.  It’s pretty impressive with its 75,000 seats of slightly varying shades of green.  What immediately struck me was the narrow walkway, only about 2 persons wide, that rimmed the stadium.  This was the only throughfare for attendees to use to enter and exit…seemed a bit crazy.  For an extra cost you could walk along the roof and for even a bit more money, you could zipline across the field, from the roof down to the top of the stands on the opposite side.  The place had almost a church-like silence to it, apart from the odd excited zipliner, and it was cool to imagine the cacophony of sights and sounds which must have happened 51 years ago when the Olympics were in full stride.

The mesmerizing green seats:

It is a pretty cool venue.

The crazy narrow walkway to get in and out of the stadium:

Trying out a green seat:

A zipliner:

The church-like atmosphere:

What the grounds looked like before construction:

The view from the other side:

Perhaps this is where they put all the dirt they dug out for the stadium:

The still active swimming stadium:

Mandatory Olympic rings shot:

Next, I ventured up the Olympicturm (tower).  It was completed in 1968 and stands at 291 meters, although the viewing deck and revolving restaurant sit at about 200 meters.  Not only is it a tourist attraction, but it also serves as a broadcasting tower.  The elevator rockets up at 7 m/s, quick enough to make your ears pop.  The views, not surprisingly, were great.  Just like the Frauenkirche, there were signs denoting what you could see.  I noticed one showing the Olympic Village (which was pretty obvious to see) but also a memorial for the victims of the Olympic Massacre.  It was a bit of a backtrack to walk there but I decided to head there anyways to check it out.

BMW's headquarters:

BMW's factory complex.  The close building with the black patched roof is BMW Welt.

The Olympic village.  The hostage taking took place in the lower white buildings on the left.

Looking at the stadium:

The green hilly area:

Leaving the park:

The Israeli memorial with the names of the fallen.

Across a main road from the Olympiapark is the main headquarters and factory for BMW.  The place looked massive from the Olympic Tower.  There are two places that the public can visit, the BMW Welt (World) and the BMW Museum.  The BMW Welt is free to enter whereas tickets and about 3 hours are required to visit the museum.  I’m not the biggest car aficionado (unlike my nephew who sells fancy cars in Maryland), nor did I have the time as it was about 3pm at this time so I opted to check out the Welt.  I had been walking for a long time and hadn’t had lunch yet so that was my first stop, a little cafeteria inside the building.  Feeling a bit recharged, I had a wander around but didn’t last too long before deciding to head back to the hostel…still cool to see.

The Rolls Royce Phantom:

And now Rolls Royce's Spectre...worth half a million.

And check out this beauty!  I love that you get in from the front.

This is near my hostel.  I didn't bother going on the ferris wheel after going up the Frauenkirche and Olympic Turm.

I love it...beer in a vending machine!

Es war ein schöner Tag in München!  (It was a good day in Munich)

Off to Africa, but first London

 October 11^th, 2023

I didn’t post anything about my travels last year as it didn’t really seem Wandergliding worthy, although some of what I did was.  My whole family was meeting up at my oldest sister's place for Christmas in Maryland, including our 10 British relatives, so I figured that I couldn’t miss that.  I decided to road trip down to my other sister Sarah’s place in Phoenix and then fly over to Maryland for a month.  I drove to Edmonton to visit my stepfamily, over to Victoria to see friends, a stop in Seattle to see a high school buddy (and got to see a Seattle Kraken hockey game!), followed by dropping into see friends Kevin and Wendy near Bend Oregon before hitting Utah for my first time.  In Utah I met up with a recently graduated paragliding student of mine, Marc, and we hung out for a few days in Moab.  I then hit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park where I hiked the infamous Angel’s Landing before getting to my sister’s place.  The visit in Maryland was great, apart from testing positive for Covid-19 an hour before the big Christmas dinner, so I was banished to the basement!  But I digress…that was last year’s trip.

 

This year I’ve decided to head to Africa.  The only bit of Africa that I have visited was in Egypt on the coast the Gulf of Aqaba near Israel for a few days with my girlfriend Naomi about 6 years ago.  My plan is to land in Uganda and also visit Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.  But to get to Africa from Canada, one must stop in Europe, so I decided to not only visit my family in the south of England but also visit some of my paragliding suppliers in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, a few hours south of Munich.  I’ve been operating a paragliding school for nine years now and I have never been able to put faces to names from the companies that I’ve been buying gear from.  After Africa, I’ll stop again in Europe and head to the Czech Republic (or technically Czechia) to see a few other companies.

 

I flew over to London and had a one night stay there.  I decided not to stay at a hostel closer to the city centre and instead deal with my jet lag at a place close to the Heathrow airport.  I found a place through Booking.com and although it looked like a room at someone’s house (which is kinda like Air BnB), I went for it as it had good reviews. 

I had an inkling that there might be a few paraglider pilots on the same flight from Canada as me, on their way to Turkey to do a paragliding SIV course (it stands for a French acronym meaning “Simulations while flying”…which also means that you purposefully mess up your wing to simulate when the shit hits the fan and deal with it…it’s always done over water with a life jacket and a rescue boat below).  Getting off the plane in London, I stopped at a bathroom, err excuse me, WC, and ran into Peter, a student of mine from about 4 years ago.  His girlfriend Andrea, who learned how to fly with us a year later, then appeared.  We chatted and caught up as we worked our way through customs, which is pretty simple these days as we didn’t even have to chat to a border guard.  Andrea has a granny in the Greenwich area of London, and we talked about maybe meeting up later that day.

 

I grabbed one of those stereotypical black London taxis and headed to my accommodation.  The neighborhood was row after row of similar looking red bricked townhouses.  The address on Booking.com said it was number 37 but luckily, I had read one review that said that it was actually #2, which was where I was at.  I knocked on the door but there was no answer.  I called the owner Joe and thankfully he answered as the taxi had left.  Turns out there was a key in a lockbox, and he told me which room was mine as the apartment was vacant.  I dropped off my stuff and started to walk towards the tube station to head into central London.  It was about 4pm and I needed to do something in order to stay awake and fight off the jetlag.

 

Since the place was only a few miles from Heathrow, plane after plane flew almost over me on their final approach.  There were low clouds and occasionally I could only hear the plane and then it would pop out of nowhere.  I opened the Flight Radar 24 app on my phone to check out the approaching jets.  I noticed that a big A380, the big double decker plane, was about 5 minutes out so I loitered on the street, walking back and forth, trying not to look suspicious to those walking or driving by.  I felt like a true “plane spotter”.  And then she appeared, and I was not disappointed.  Super cool to see it fly over, about 1000 feet above.

 

After a 45 minute tube ride, I hopped off at Westminster station to say hello to Big Ben.  I wandered by the Parliament buildings over to Westminster Abbey, which unfortunately was closed to visitors, but I expected that since it was 6pm.  I walked somewhat aimlessly around the area.  There were a few pubs with crowds of people, mostly men in suits, standing on the sidewalks with their pints in hand.  My guess was that a lot of them were politicians who had finished their day and that this was a common ritual.  I wanted to find a place for a beer and a bite to eat but all of them were packed, noisy and hot.  I jumped back on the tube and tried a different area but couldn’t find anything I liked.  I hadn’t heard from Andrea and Peter yet, so I decided to get on the subway and head back towards where I was staying and find something to eat there.  

I was about halfway back when I got a message from Andrea that they were going to a pub with her uncle in the Greenwich area.  Well, what the hell, why not?  I got off at the next stop and started to head back.  I had a cell signal as the train was above ground so I frantically messaged Andrea to find out what tube line to transfer to before it went back underground where I would lose my connection.  I thought I’d figured it out but when I got to King’s Cross, half an hour later, I realized that the line that I saw on the map wasn’t actually a subway line.  It looked like I had at least another 45 minutes to reach them…provided I could figure it out.  I started to realize that if I did meet up with them, it would probably be at least 11pm before I returned to my place and since I hadn’t even met the owner yet, I didn’t like the idea.  So I bailed on them and got back on the tube.  It was a good call as by the time I got back, it was already close to 10pm.  I bought a shitty egg sandwich at a Sainsbury Express store and walked 25 minutes from the tube station to my accommodation.  It was all quiet at the apartment but there could have been someone there as the other bedroom doors were closed, but that didn’t matter to me.  I ate my sandwich, watched some depressing news about the Hamas attacks in Israel and headed to bed.

Good ol' Big Ben:

Westminster Abbey:

A heron enjoying St. James' Park:

A memorial to the Household Division from WWII:

The Horses Guard House:

Trafalgar Square:

The next morning, I finally met the owner, Joe.  A Nigerian who moved to London 14 years ago, he was a super friendly guy and even offered to drive me to a tube station as it was a windy and rainy morning…thanks Joe!  I had a flight to Munich where I was going to spend the weekend before heading 150 km south to a town called Füssen.  My plan was to visit one of my paragliding suppliers, Independence/Skyman, but also hopefully visit the Neuschwanstein Castle, the castle that looks like it is straight out of a Disney movie.  Back in 1995 after university, when I went backpacking through Europe, I lugged around a thick Lonely Planet book for Western Europe (as this was before smartphones) and the front cover was a picture of this castle…it’s about time to see it with my own eyes!

Gracias Perou y Ecuador

January 27^th, 2022 

Well, all good things come to an end.  It’s been 95 awesome days in Peru and Ecuador.  As is usual with backpacking, I visited many places, did a lot of different activities and met some awesome people.  Before leaving Paracas, I did a mental recall of the trip and I could remember almost every single day, where I stayed and what I did.  That’s what I love about travelling.  When I teach paragliding and do tandem flights in the summer, I do love it, but the days seem hard to discern between one and the next as they are fairly similar.  That’s one of the main reasons that I quit my IT job.  I couldn’t tell one year from another except for what 2 week holiday I took.  That’s not a way to live.

Here are some highlights:

Paragliding in Lima

Paragliding in Paracas

Flying over the Nazca Lines

Gorgeous skies in Arequipa

The floating islands of Lake Titicaca

Machu Picchu of course

Making new friends

Banos, Ecuador

Paragliding in Banos

The Devil's Cauldron Waterfalls

Volcanic caldera in the Galapagos Islands

Scuba diving with hammerhead sharks, rays, turtles and sea lions in the Galapagos

Quito

Swinging above Quito

Straddling the equator

Near Huaraz in Peru

Laguna 69

Monkeys!

And big snakes...

But I’m ready to return to Canada, my home.  Having a regular bed and not being constantly on the road is also nice.  I do enjoy the current lifestyle I have.  Six months of intensive teaching and tandems at the Freedom Flight School, two and a half months of a part time job of doing tandems at Revelstoke’s ski hill and three months to explore another part of the world.  I feel very fortunate.

 

Where to next?!?

Kite Surfing Lessons in Paracas

January 19^th-21^st, 2022 

For my last side trip before heading back to Canada, I decided to return to Paracas to continue my kite surfing lessons.  I booked the front seat on the top floor of the double decker bus and it was a lovely 3 ½ hour journey south of the capital during a sunny afternoon.  The weather was much better than when I travelled this route in early November and I got to appreciate the terrain more.  Going back to somewhere you have already visited certainly reduces the stress factor of backpacking.  I knew where the hostel was, where my favourite restaurant was etc.  You don’t feel like a rookie.

I would assume some kind of Jesus statue south of Lima.

Somebody's little beach home.  That's the ocean in the background...hard to tell with the tinted glass from the bus. 

Rollin' down the highway.

Nice coastline.

Back in Paracas:

The Malecon:

It was the chef at the restaurant next door's birthday...someone hired a mariachi band to celebrate.

The day after arriving I was picked up by Jorge, one of the instructors with Jose Luiz’s kite surfing outfit.  I had met him briefly back in November but only did about an hour of lessons with him.  For the next three days, he would be my main guy for the daily two-hour sessions.

 

On the first day, it took me a probably about 45 minutes to shake the rust off and get consistent with my water starts.  Then it started to flow and I had some good rides.

The action on the beach after my first day's lesson:

Near the end of the second lesson, we started to work on transitions; turning around and coming back the other way without sitting back down in the water.  The trick was to try and flip the board around so you were on your toe edge for a brief moment before swinging the kite back in the other direction and then following it.  Well, needless to say, the first number of times I tried I would either focus on the board and forget about the kite or the other way around.  Finally, it started to click and I had some decent transitions.

An okay water start:

On the last day, I was going to jokingly ask Jorge if I could learn how to do jumps.  Seemed a bit early for that, but before I even brought up the suggestion, he stated that we would try it.  Well, that was a bit of the cart before the horse.  I didn’t seem as in tune with the board and the kite as I was the day before.  I eventually got some good transitions in, and I did have about a 4-5 minute stint of continuous riding but in general I did perform as well as I had hoped to.  I also had a few good runs upwind, which is a key skill to develop as otherwise you’ll be walking up the beach at some point.

Stoked for today's lesson:

On one of my runs, I felt like Mother Nature was challenging me.  I was riding away from the beach and all of a sudden a curious sea lion popped up about 20 feet way.   That was cool but he threw off my concentration and soon after I wiped out…then I felt my right leg wrapped around what felt like a wet blanket.  I knew right away what it was and quickly tried to move my leg away…it was a huge jellyfish.  That’s going to hurt.  I wanted to relaunch the kite but then I saw another big jellyfish and I was heading straight for it so I overpowered the kite in slight panic and did a bit of a “Jesus walk”.  Thankfully it wasn’t too hard to retrieve my board and it did improve my confidence with that skill as the day before I couldn’t get back to my board and I had to bodysurf into the beach.  Jorge went and retrieved it.

Didn't quite pull off this transition...and none of my good ones were filmed.  :(

I kind of wished I had one more day to do another lesson, although my body was actually pretty happy to be done.  My stomach, back and shoulder muscles were ready for a break.  I feel like I’m at the point that I could practice with minimal supervision and hone my skills.  I was definitely happy to have come back for a few more lessons.

Me and Jorge:

In the back on the left is Jose Luiz and another instructor Andres:

Thanks Jorge and Jose Luiz!