BERLIN BY BOAT
Explore city’s charm, culture from rivers, canals
My wife and I took our two sons to Berlin in early August hoping to catch some of the city's summertime vibe.
You can't see the ocean from the German capital, but you can drive there in a boat. The city is landlocked, but coursing through its center and spiraling away from it are waterways that carry freight, passengers, tourists like us and all manner of watercraft. Berlin contains more bridges than Venice, about 120 miles of canals and rivers and a vibrant boating scene. The canals that crisscross the German capital eventually link up to the country's major rivers: the Rhine, Elbe, Danube and Main. Thousands more miles of canals and rivers connect from neighboring countries, making it possible to spend weeks exploring Europe by water or venture to the North Sea.
We weren't planning a voyage of that magnitude, not this time anyway. The city was our destination, and we started at a beach.
The Strandbad (literal translation: “beach bath”) Friedrichshagen sits on the north edge of the Muggelsee. Temperatures soared past 90 degrees as we staked out a shady spot near the water. Everything needed for a day of swimming was here: an outdoor shower, bathrooms and changing rooms, picnic tables, some taller tables with umbrellas, a grass patch where families with babies stretched out on blankets and more sand. A nice-looking bar next to the cafe wasn't open yet. Tied up to the dock was a rentable houseboat. Every few minutes, another shaky customer of the paddleboard rental business voyaged out onto the lake.
Something clicked as we watched boats make their way across the water that day at the beach. The next day we headed to Berlin's center, hoping to find a tour boat.
This is about the most touristy thing you can do in Berlin, other than wander under the Brandenburg Gate, but it's a simple way to see some of the city's iconic architecture.
The one-hour-or-so tour journeyed up and back on the Spree, the river that passes through Berlin's heart. It has an industrial feel, but that's changing. City residents have pushed the local government to clean up a portion of the river for swimming. The Flussbad (“river bath”) project would use natural filtration to clean the water and re-create the swimming areas that once existed there.
Swimming was on our
minds the day of the boat tour, mostly because it was another scorcher. We sat under umbrellas on the deck while our tour operator switched from German to English to talk about the buildings easing by, sometimes throwing in jokes that had a well-worn feel. (He explained that a church's spire was topped by an antenna: “That's because God has internet.”)
The boys liked the comfortable chairs, and a waiter swept past several times with cool drinks, but even the city's magnificent architecture wasn't enough to win me over. We needed a boat — without a tour guide, one that would stop long enough for a swim. We needed our own boat.
We headed to the Wannsee, in the southwest corner of Berlin. The lake is home to sandy beaches, rowing clubs, marinas stocked with sailboats and lakeside homes for the wealthy, with boathouses the size of bungalows.
If the Wannsee sounds familiar, however, it's likely for its dark past. It was in this privileged and beautiful environment that leaders of Nazi Germany met to lay their plans for genocide. The lakeside villa where they held their Wannsee Conference is a memorial and museum, one of the many ways that modernday Germany ensures that people don't forget the past.
We had come to enjoy ourselves on the lake, but we first spent a quiet hour sitting at a picnic table overlooking the water near the villa and its memorial.
Then we went to the rental boat office nearby, and after brief instructions, we hopped aboard our vessel. Anyone who's spent time in a Lund fishing boat would have felt at home. Our “cruiser” came with a 9.8-horsepower outboard, a steering wheel and a simple map showing us a route we could take around a large island.
It was early evening when we started out, a bit cooler than midday, and the light was just beginning to turn a golden hue as we approached the first real sight on our boat tour: Pfaueninsel, or Peacock Island. Today it's a nature reserve and park accessible by ferry, but it was once a private playground for kings who built a castle and then stocked the island with a menagerie that included kangaroos, bears, alligators, chameleons and peacocks. Peacocks still wander the interior, hence the name, but the animals long ago became the first inhabitants of the Berlin Zoo.
The sun was now dropping. A sailboat slipped past us, its sail glowing orange with the last light of the day.
This summertime Berlin thing? We could get used to it.