Follow the Pied Piper

As we all should know from Robert Browning's poem, Hamelin was full of rats until the Pied Piper came along and led them away. However when we arrived there were rats everywhere including hundreds of brass rats all over the place set into the cobbles. Hamelin (Hameln in German) is a few kilometres west of Hanover and is a medium size medieval town. We drove down through delightful countryside and parked up outside a baker's shop for lunch - and that was full of rats too, these ones being made of bread! In fact we only saw a couple of pied piper statues in the town centre, the natives of Hamelin preferring to major on the rat theme with rats, rathauses and ratskellers everywhere. 

Phooey! Can't catch me.

Hanover has been described as a boring city probably because most of it got obliterated during the war but it does have some redeeming features such as an excellent tramway system which goes underground in the city centre and lots of open space including parks and gardens - in one of these we found some very well stocked glasshouses - this one featured amazing tropical flowering plants with small birds flying through the creepers. And Smurf found the turtles - he had to wait until there were no Germans in sight as he thought they might be very disapproving of this type of levity!

Oh go on turn your head round so we can have a better look at you!

Heading down to Bielefeld we visited a quite remarkable zoo spread over a large area in a forest. We found packs of wolves, rather large chunky bears which wouldn't turn round for the camera, lynxes (is that the plural of lynx?) and various other dangerous animals all of which exist in the wild in Europe today. In fact I was astonished to find out that bears can be found in more than a dozen European countries including Spain, Italy, Sweden and Greece. When you consider they can weigh over three times as much as me and can run at a speed of over 20 mph perhaps it's best to stick to road running on those countries!