Mud, mud, snow, rain and mud

Taking Dave's advice I decided to park the bike outside and carry everything in. I hadn't really anticipated having to do this and my luggage hadn't been chosen for its carriability so it was going to have to be done in batches. First batch consisted of the tent, the holdall containing my sleeping bag, air bed etc and the tank bag containing (mainly) documents and money. Loaded up and still wearing all my bike clothing we headed for the entrance. First stop was the ticket office where they relieved me of €20 and I got a little booklet (almost all in German), a wrist band of the type clamped round your wrist at music festivals and a large green rubbish sack in return. Showing the wrist band at the gate a few meters later got me inside and we were then faced with a choice of which sea of mud to squelch through.

 Panoramic picture above - the mud sea just inside the entrance

Again, because Dave had arrived a bit earlier he knew where "Brit corner" was located and we headed there. It was about a 300m walk, through liquid mud to start with but easing to ploughed field consistency after a while and eventually to snow covered grass. Trying to find a level pitch for the tent was impossible so it was a case of trying to minimise the slope. I'm normally fairly good at deciding where to erect a tent but this time I must have considered and abandoned ten different spots. Eventually I decided it didn't make any difference, I was going to be sliding out of the bottom of the tent no matter where I put it. 

Before I left I'd given some thought about which tent to bring. In keeping with the 70's theme of the bike and much of the luggage (the panniers and the white top box are 70's items) I was going to bring my Vango Force10, a tent I'd bought in 1976 and still use frequently but eventually decided that one of the others, a mid 80's Phoenix mountaineering tent might be a better bet. I bought this on Ebay about ten years ago when I was planning a trip to West Africa but it proved to be totally unsuitable for desert conditions; not surprising really as it was designed for wet and windy UK winters. Wet and snowy German winters might be the next best thing so I decided to give it one more chance. I soon began to think I should have thought a bit harder about it. It's not that it's a bad tent but it is infinitely fiddly to put up with loads of guy lines to untangle and something like twenty pegs to position and then reposition. Putting it up with everything in alignment and tensioned can take about half an hour and as it was now raining heavily that half an hour seemed very long. Then you have to crawl around inside to hang the inner tent. The idea behind putting the outer tent up first is that the sleeping compartment remains dry but by the time I came to do this the bike clothes I was still wearing were saturated from the rain and all the crawling around transferred so much water to the inner tent that it was soon soaked. I then discovered that the groundsheet seemed to be porous with water from the wet grass and residual snow coming up through it. There were no holes or tears, it was the material itself that didn't seem to be waterproof.

I partially solved this with the aid of a small tarpaulin I'd got from my main "sponsor", Poundland (I'd bought so much "use once and throw away" stuff from Poundland for so little money that it felt like they were sponsoring me). I'd brought it with the intention of using it in front of the tent as a base for cooking, storage etc but instead it went under the groundsheet as an extra waterproof insulation layer. Unfortunately it was only about half the area of the tent floor (what do you expect for a pound!) so I ended up with a dry strip down the middle of the tent and wet edges. Sleeping looked like it might be somewhat tricky that night. Not only did I have to try and stop myself sliding lengthways down the tent because of the slope, I also had to make sure I didn't roll left or right onto the wet patches. Pulling the sleeping bag out of its storage bag then added a third dimension. It stank of petrol. To carry the holdall down through the mud field it had gone on my back like a rucksack, with my arms through the handles. I'd forgotten that my spare petrol container, with 2L of fuel in it was in one of the side pockets and the change in orientation had allowed a small amount to leak out - straight into the sleeping bag. The ignitable volatiles evaporated fairly quickly but the smell persisted and the bag is still being aired as I write this a couple of weeks later.

The walk down from the entrance

Eventually, about two hours after arriving, I had the tent set up and everything under some sort of control. It was time to have a look around before the daylight vanished.