The road less travelled – where did the Iron Curtain go?

Pictured above: Cesky Krumlov

Prague. For a long time, the ‘other side’ of the Iron Curtain – but it’s closer than the top end of Scotland*. So, a road trip was planned: Germany, Czechia and southern Poland, taking us behind what was the Iron Curtain. Was there anything to see on the ground of where the curtain was, between Germany and Czechia or between East and West Germany?

In early 2024 we put together a plan, booked accommodation, set up the spreadsheet**, and set off straight after the Election Court in September 2024.

After a brief overnight on the Belgian coast, our first real stop was on the Rhine, at Boppard. It’s always as surprise to see large barges so far inland. The Rhine is festooned with castles, as a historical border: later, the area was visited by the Romantic poets and painters – we stood in William Turner’s footsteps at Boppard Castle, where he sketched the view in 1817.

On to Bavaria and the lovely walled town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber, on the ‘Romantische Strasse’ that runs south to the Bavarian alps, but our route took us further east to Regensburg, on the Danube. It rained hard and the river was well above normal levels, but, unconcerned, we headed towards the Czechia. The border lay in wooded hills with only a few buildings to mark where the Iron Curtain used to be, and some shops and a petrol station on the Czech side where fuel was a good deal cheaper. No rusting barbed wire, no ruined guard towers, no faded warning signs.

We headed for another lovely old town, Cesky Krumlov, in heavy rain. This turned out to be Storm Boris, that brought record-breaking rainfall to central Europe leading to severe flooding in parts of Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Romania and Hungary. We started to realise this may be serious when we entered the town past the firemen who were sand-bagging the sides of the road to prevent flooding.

Prague – Cold War hotel bugging

Cesky Krumlov sits on a bend in the River Vltava. There was a LOT of water in the river and it rained all the rest of the day, somewhat dampening our visit to the castle and the old town. Leaving the next morning, the road we’d come in on was now closed, but the road to Prague was open, and we arrived there safely. It’s a lovely old city and the weather improved over the next few days. A highlight was the nuclear bunker tour, under a hotel built post-war for foreign visitors and fully bugged for listening by the secret police in the basement.

Our original route took us north-east into Poland through an area devasted by the floods; and after that we were heading for Wroclaw, which had declared a state of emergency as the flood waters were due to hit the city in three days’ time. Realising it wasn’t sensible to carry on as planned we re-arranged the next few days to avoid Poland and head straight into the former East Germany. Coming back across northern Germany, we crossed the border between Czechia and Germany, where there were newly-established border checks on the German side, though this wasn’t the former Iron Curtain as that was further west, between East and West Germany.

Colditz

The benefit of our curtailed route was that we had a full day to spend at Colditz, famous around the world but not, apparently, in Germany, now restored and open to visitors. A very knowledgeable guide took us on the escape routes of some of the successful – and unsuccessful – escapes, of which there were many. When it first opened to visitors they used to get ex-prisoners returning, some of who revealed caches of materials still hidden. On one occasion the guide had said there was a workshop in the quadrangle that she couldn’t show as she didn’t have the key with her, at which point a visiting ex-prisoner produced a skeleton key from his pocket and suggested ‘this might do’. It did.

Harz Mountains listening station

We came to the Harz mountains, which were just in the former East Germany, and where the Stasi had listening posts with a lot of sophisticated equipment to eavesdrop on the West. These are still there, though the highlights of the area are the narrow-gauge steam trains that run to the top of the mountains and the quaint half-timbered small towns such as Quedlingburg.

There is no sign on the ground of the former border between East and West Germany, completely removed post-unification. And so we drove across the Netherlands and the ferry back to the UK.

Last year, on our trip to Australia, we were faced with bush fires. This year it was floods. Next year we’re joining the planned Livery trip through France. I wonder what natural disaster we will meet?

* If you start on the south coast of England.

** Every trip needs a one-page spreadsheet: for every day, a start point, end point, mileage, accommodation, and points of interest en route.