When I woke up and pulled back the curtain, just after 0730, we were already moored up at the Hafencity cruise dock in the centre of Hamburg. It was a grey but dry day although it cleared up and brightened with some sunshine as the morning progressed.
We had breakfast and headed out at about 945. Surprisingly we didn’t need passports at all, just went ashore with our cruise cards. Seems quite strange given the palaver entering the EU gives non Europeans arriving by air or ferry but hey……
The Hafencity cruise terminal, one of three in the centre, is actually part of a Westfield shopping mall. Absolutely pristine and gorgeous. Some very nice stores indeed.
We hastened through and walked to the Speicherstadt area of town, about 10 minutes away. This is the historic warehouse district, now a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s the largest warehouse complex in the world, built in reddish brick over a hundred years ago and very very picturesque surrounded and accessed by a hundred bridges and many canals of all sizes. Today it is still a warehouse complex. Apartments are forbidden and there are still trading premises for many oriental carpet importers, particularly Persian, coffee, tea and spice merchants. There are also museums: the Maritime museum, coffee, tea and spice museums, a miniature world. We had a good wander around and then headed toward St Pauli piers to find a boat tour.
It was a good walk, perhaps 2 miles to the piers, very scenic past the canals. We wanted to take a 2 hour boat trip of the harbour and Speicherstadt area but the tides were not co operating. Speicherstadt is very susceptible to tide times and heights and visits have to be timed just right. If the tide is too high, you can’t get under the bridges. If it’s too low, the boat can’t get through some of the canals. A lot of this is due to the dredging of the Elbe to allow huge container ships into Hamburg. It has massively increased the flow out in the main channel and deepened the water in the area plus pushing silt into the small side canals. The tidal differences are large: 3.6m and this has caused problems in the old areas. Anyway, the two hour trip couldn’t get through till the afternoon so we took a one hour trip instead.
The tour boats are the flat bottomed kind you see on the Seine in Paris. Mostly glass covered but with a small rear deck where we positioned ourselves. The commentary was in German , given by the captain and must have been very funny as people were laughing a lot. We had to deal with a downloaded audio guide in English. It was informative though and picked up on where you were using GPS data.
We went as far into Steicherstadt as possible given the tide, ducking as we went under some of the bridges. It was good fun. Several times he spun the boat – 21m – really fast around in the canal, turning on a sixpence really. Then we headed back out into the main harbour and saw some of the sights around that. There are a lot of historic ships moored up there acting as museums. Quite beautiful ships. Of course in other areas you can see parts of the huge container port, dry docks and other points of interest like the entrance to the old Elbe tunnel, an ex Russian nuclear submarine, Abramovitch’s mega mega yacht, the glorious philharmonic concert hall, 2 theatres and a lot of historic buildings. It was a really good tour and not bad value for 30 euro each.
After that we wandered back towards the boat, exploring a different route and stopped for coffee and a cake for Bob. Got back to the ship at about 2:30, a bit tired after walking nearly 5 miles. It was time for a late lunch and then we read in our cabin enjoying the sunshine on the balcony and the view over Hamburg.
I have only been here once before 42 years ago and my memories of it were not great. I think it must have hugely improved in those years and we both really enjoyed it and would come back for a long weekend. There is a lot to see and do.
Tonight we enjoyed another lovely show from the resident troop plus other artists, this one around the disco era. So impressed by the fact this group put out a full on performance of a different show every night so far. Most enjoyable,
We had a pre dinner cocktail and then dinner in the restaurant. It was prime rib of beef. OK but the Yorkshire puddings were lamentable. Bob ate his and mine even so.
As I write this we are steaming back down the Elbe to the sea and taking route to Rotterdam which we reach on Tuesday morning. There’s quite a big moon over the water and the lights from passing barges are nice. We stood out on our balcony and watched that for a while.
