Round The World and other travels

A frequent flyer's collection of trip diaries

This is: Japan 2014

High-speed train to a great big plane

I managed to sleep all the way through to 8am, suggesting that my body had felt the need to make up for the previous night's deficit. I had a simple but adequate breakfast at the branch of McDonald's in the main station; not feeling particularly hungry, I felt it would have been a waste of money to pay for a hotel breakfast. I then had another look around the cathedral precincts, mainly because it was difficult to go anywhere without doing so. An attempt to look around the interior of the building proved to be ill-fated, as tourist visits were severely curtailed in order to accommodate a special service at 10am.  

RIGHT: Cologne Cathedral on a bright Saturday morning
ABOVE: Evidence of the social media-driven 'love-lock' craze

I made my way round to the east side of the cathedral to the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine. This had been my method of arrival the previous day, as the bridge carries rail and pedestrian traffic between Cologne city centre and the district of Deutz, once a town in its own right. Since my previous visit to Cologne, the bridge had become a target of the 'love-lock' craze - the practice of attaching a padlock to a bridge as a token of a couple's commitment to each other and then, in our supposedly environment-conscious age, throwing the key into the river. It's one of those 'Marmite' phenomena that tends to polarise opinion: to some, this is a touching expression of love, demonstrating that the age of romance is still alive; to others, it's a grotesque display of mass vandalism, fuelled by a compulsive desire to be part of the latest social media-proclaimed trend. Personally, I found the sheer volume of tacky, metallic litter unexpectedly striking, yet my mind kept returning to the same question: whatever happened to the age-old advice to travellers, to "tread lightly, take only photographs and leave nothing but footprints"?

Having crossed the bridge, it became clear that there was no possibility of using the riverside footpath on the Deutz side because of construction works, so I returned to the city centre by the same route. I wandered through the old town for a little while: it gave me a chance to reprise the main sights in proper daylight, before my limited time in this destination was up.

I bought a couple of filled rolls from Wiener Feinbäckerei on my way back to the Marriott, around which time I also heard a station announcement suggesting that Deutsche Bahn, as well as Lufthansa, was suffering strike action. What on earth was going on in Germany these days, I wondered!

ABOVE LEFT: "Genuine Eau de Cologne"
ABOVE RIGHT: My train is announced,
complete with a warning!
ABOVE: High-speed train (Amsterdam-Frankfurt) arriving at Cologne's main station.
In First Class at least, it's not exactly busy!

By the time I'd checked out of the Marriott and returned to the station, the strike was officially over, but some trains were still experiencing delays of up to 3hrs - another example of the the kind of knock-on consequences that these actions cause. It was therefore a great relief to find that my train was showing as on-time. There was apparently a minor snag in that it wouldn't be observing its scheduled airport stop today, and the advice given over the PA system was to change at Frankfurt's main station. As I had plenty of time and knew this particular territory well, I was resolved not to panic.

I had a more or less free run of the seats in near-empty Coach 29 and chose the one that I reckoned gave the best view. The train soon joined the high-speed line and ran at breathtaking speed on tracks that passed through countless tunnels, as a means of both straightening and flattening the line. When the conductor came round, I asked about the airport stop. She said that the Cologne announcer had given the wrong information: we were going to stop at the airport, but it would be at the local station rather than the long-distance station.

There was an unexpected further moment of anxiety at the check-in counter at Frankfurt Airport, where to my slight bewilderment, a lengthy debate ensued over transit arrangements at Shanghai. At first I thought for a sickening moment that I wasn't going to be allowed to travel, but the situation was never that bad. The computer was clear that my luggage must not be through-checked to Japan and nobody seemed to know what I was supposed to do once I got to Shanghai, but it was eventually agreed that none of this was in any way a show-stopper.

Feeling that I'd had my second lucky escape in a couple of hours, I made my way to the Z-gates lounge for what I considered to be a well-deserved glass of Sekt. By this stage, I'd had confirmation from Bruce that his potential difficulties had also melted away. In fact, he had overtaken me at this point and would have been on his way to Osaka / Kansai via Bangkok, in the First Class cabin of a Thai Airways Airbus A380 - his first experience of the 'Big Bus'. But assuming that my own run of luck kept going, I'd still reach Japan well before him, as my route via Shanghai was considerably shorter.

In due course, I strolled along to Gate Z54.

(Link to flight log in side panel)