Michael Friis' Blog

We now have 3 kids ages 0 to 4 and have travelled extensively with them. In this post I’ll cover our motivations for doing so and share what tips and tricks I’ve accumulated over the past four years.

As we’ve gotten more children, the trips have only become more arduous. I remember our first trip with a baby to Mexico feeling like a lot, but thinking back on it now, having just completed a 6 week sojourn to Europe with 3 kids staying in 8 different cities, the Mexico trip was positively serene. I suspect this latest trip will be the last hard-traveling one we’ll do until the kids grow older, but who knows how I’ll feel next summer. It’s also worth keeping in mind that kids as small as ours likely won’t remember details of the trips in later life (although endearingly the 4-year old does remember past trips year-to-year, and will name things he wants to visit again).

So what are our motivations for going on these trips?

• Satisfy own travel desire: Both my partner and I travelled a lot before having kids, both before we met and after (but before having kids). The parental leaves we both get are unique-in-a-lifetime opportunities to pack long trips into otherwise busy careers. I’ll list other reasons below, but realistically this is the primary motivation
• Family: Part of the reason we go is to visit my family in Denmark, and giving our kids a chance to spend time with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins (and vice-versa)
• Intense family time: Traveling means we’re all together, all the time, doing stuff. Even when on leave but at home, I end up spending time fixing stuff on the house, working on my own projects or otherwise not spending time with the kids. That’s not an option when traveling. The best way I have to quantify this in a positive way is the shared photo album I use to share family photos with friends and extended family: When we’re on trips, I record way more memorable moments in the album than when at home
• Showing kids the world: It’s fun to show your kids places that are new and different and experiencing the novelty and surprise through their eyes.

List of random insights related to traveling with kids

• Kitchen or kitchenette: We’ve bottle-fed our babies but we’re not super fussy about sterilizing and so on. Even so, you really need at least a kitchenette to keep bottles clean, especially in places like Mexico where the tap-water may be dodgy. Trying to clean bottles with bottled water in a hotel bathroom sink is miserable.
• Family-hosted AirBnBs with toys: Partly on previous trips and especially on the last one we’ve tried hard to stay at AirBnBs rented out by families living there, with toys, changing tables and other kid-paraphernalia. That as opposed to hotels or full-time AirBnBs that tend to be much more “sterile”. This has been a great success, and it means that, for the kids, traveling to new places is an exiting occasion akin to Christmas morning, with a whole new complement of never-played-with toys waiting at the destination.
• Longer stays than when traveling without kids: Before we had kids my partner travelled pretty hard, staying only one or two nights at each destination and packing in lots of sightseeing in a short amount of time. This is not pleasant with kids in my experience. There’s much more packing and unpacking and getting settled in, so you need more time each place and just more time overall. This is a lesson we had to re-learn a couple of times, and policy for our last trip was to stay at least 5 nights each place. If we travel again I suspect we’ll make that even longer. 
• Packing nets: Keeping 5 people’s clothes organized across several suitcases is impossible without packing nets and bringing a separate piece of luggage for each traveller doesn’t scale. Packing nets solves this problem. My favorite kind is from MUJI. They’re very light, durable and made from a slippery material that eases packing
• Lunch and snacks: Packing school lunch and snacks is not my favorite activity but I keep doing it even when we’re on vacation. Finding lunch and snacks when out and about and on a schedule can be stressful, especially since our kids are not exactly the most adventurous eaters. And both me and the kids will feel bad (for different reasons) if they end up eating french fries every day. Having just a minimum of lunch and snacks packed in the morning helps with this
• Getting around cities: European cities are generally good destinations for kids. There’s lots to see, including children’s museums and good playgrounds, and public transport is good. One thing to note is that Uber or taxies are not a particularly attractive choice when you have 3 kids and a stroller: you have to get a large van-type one, and even then, loading and disgorging everything takes ages. Public transport is much more pleasant because you can just drive a stroller on to a bus or train. Counterintuitively, European cities not always all that pleasant to talk around, chiefly because sidewalks are sometimes narrow and come with many curbs and stairs.
• Stroller: If you have small kids you’ll obviously need a stroller for walking around cities, taking naps and so on. I’m not the stroller expert in our relationship and our partner got us the UPPAbaby Vista which is a big stroller that can be configured with up to two seats. I have a love-hate relationship with that thing. On the one hand I’m thankful for all the places it’s taken us and the amount of abuse it has accepted. We did break our original one in Berlin on our latest trip, but I don’t hold that against UPPAbaby and we immediately bought a new one of the same make. The flip side is that the Vista is heavy and requires partial disassembly to collapse. While possible, schlepping it up or down stairs when no elevator is available is not enjoyable.
• Scooters: Both our boys (currently aged 2 and 4) love riding scooters (and bikes) in San Francisco and we brought them on the trips even though they’re bulky. Because we stay in big cities there’s typically lots of walking around between sights, restaurants and where we’re staying. The scooters avoid so many “I’m tired of walking” and “Are we there yet” complaints.
• How much to pack: My partner and I have endless debates about how much stuff to bring. For the last couple of trips we’ve arrived roughly at an amount that can barely fit into a mid-size station-wagon or a small minivan. Or more concretely 2 large suitcases, one small suitcase, a large stroller with two seats and a handful of smaller diaper bags and other bags. This is too much in my opinion, chiefly because it makes loading cars, boarding trains and airplanes and getting into condos a major chore (for me). Less luggage would mean more flexibility and less schlepping. We’re on the road for many weeks and are dependent on access to washing machines, so you might as well just embrace that, bring less and do laundry like you would at home.
• iPads: We mostly don’t let our kids use iPads at home, but we do bring them on trips. They help a lot with air travel and long train and car rides and at restaurants. Other than those occasions we don’t use them, both because they turn the kids into zombies and also to preserve novelty for when they’re really needed.
• Air travel: Many parents seem to have a mortal fear of planes and kids, and it can certainly be bad. In my opinion so far, the “worst” age is from when they can start crawling and walking and until they can focus on an iPad (maybe around 2). Before around 6 months they can be in a bassinet if you get one of those seats, or you can hold them or lay them on a spare seat without too many problems. After age 2 they can watch iPads or the in-flight entertainment. But between 6 months and two years they tend to endlessly squirm, crawl or walk around unless sleeping, which can be tiring. We give our kids low doses of melatonin on long flights if it helps them align sleep with the timezone we’re going to. Ultimately, the worst that can happen is that you’re stuck entertaining/consoling your toddler non-stop for the duration of the flight. And that sucks on a long flight, of course, but it’s a finite amount time and then you’re through.
• Chargers: Between phones laptops, iPads and headphones our charging requirements phenomenal. On the last trip I brought two high-powered 4-port chargers, but even that seemed insufficient at times. I recommend compact +100W multiport chargers with built-in travel adapters.

Trips

Mexico February-March ’20 with first kid about 2 months old

We flew to Cancun on the Caribbean cost, rented a car and then drove to Tulum. We then spent a month crossing the Yucatan peninsula and crossing all the way to the Pacific and Puerto Escondido, before doubling back to Oaxaca and flying home. We stayed places between 2-4 nights. It was a good trip, but we also learned some lessons:

• Area is too hot for family travel for us. My heat endurance changed with kids because you have strollers and more luggage and dealing with all that is much worse when it’s hot. Also note that this is not (as far as I know) a time-of-year thing for that area, it’s literally scorching year round. This is a great shame, since the route contains several large and elegant cities like Merida and spectacular walled colonial towns on the coast. And of course the amazing Maya ruins. Campeche was particularly hot, San Christobal was nice.
• Beaches are tricky for kids/babies. The beach in Tulum is epic for adults, but terrible for kids because the surf is too high (at least when we were there).
• Not a new insight but long car drives can be hard when a baby is just not up for being in the car seat for a long time.

A novel part of this trip was the COVID pandemic unfolding slowly and somehow at a distance as we made our way across Mexico. We got back to San Francisco in the nick of time before everything shut down, with a suitcase full of beans and rice in case we couldn’t get groceries.

Denmark Summer ’20, first kid about 7 months old

At this point the US was still mired in lockdowns and international travel was generally not possible. Except it was OK for me as a Danish national to return to Denmark with my family, so that’s what we did. Traveling during this period was eerie, with almost empty planes flying to maintain landing slots and the few passengers wearing masks and (some) face shields.

On this trip we mostly stayed in Copenhagen but also went on road-trips around Denmark and to Bornholm (through Sweden, which involved international road travel and exotic checkpoints in the middle of Øresund) and we flew to Anholt, a small island in Kattegat. 

This was a pretty problem-free trip and it was nice to get to a place with slightly fewer COVID restrictions. Some takeaways:

• I obviously have home-team bias but Danish beaches are uniquely well-suited for kids. The water in summer is still a little cold, but except for Vesterhavet, there’s hardly any surf and many beaches have excellent sand.
• We stayed on an AirBnB-rented docked boat in Roskilde harbor for a while. The boat was both epic and a fail because we had to spend a lot of time ensuring our toddler didn’t crawl off the stern.

Denmark Christmas ’20, first kid about 1 year old

We went back to Denmark for Christmas the first year after our first son was born. It was great to spend Christmas with my family, but overall Denmark is miserable in the depth of winter, even compared to California’s rainy season. We haven’t repeated this trip since, even though I miss Christmas in Denmark.

Denmark Summer ’21, first kid about 18 months old

International travel was still not generally possible, so back to Denmark we went. This was the first time our son was old enough to really do stuff, and we went to LEGOLAND with my parents and to many beaches. LEGOLAND really is a neat park for smaller kids and we’ve come back every year since.

We also went back to Bornholm, and have returned there every summer since. It’s really is a pleasant place (and my aunt and uncle live there to boot) with better-than-Danish-average weather and some good beaches. It also has immense number of tourists visiting without really feeling overrun, enough to support a large number of small museums and other attractions like restored windmills, small amusement parks and so on. The museums are uniformly parochial and odd, but they’re also perfect for a rainy-day visit with curious kids.

I contrived for us to stay on a boat again, this time while in Copenhagen. This time it was a more proper houseboat (but still not great with stroller), and in fact it was the very houseboat that was where the guy in The Bear (TV show) lived while working in Copenhagen.

Iberian Peninsula May ’22, kids 2 1/2 and 1 month

International travel had finally opened back up. Based on airfare pricing we flew to Portugal, rented a car and drove around Portugal and southern Spain, including Lisbon, Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Tarifa and Gibraltar. This area was also somewhat hot for our tastes, and beaches had some of the same challenges as Mexico. Total time away was 4 weeks.

The highlight of the trip for me was probably Gibraltar, but I’m also an anglophile and I enjoy looking at Second World War stuff. Seeing planes land and take off at Gibraltar airport was spectacular from the top of the Rock.

The food is Portugal was excellent. Southern Spanish cuisine was a disappointment in comparison: lots of fried potatoes with everything. I had somehow assumed that all Spanish food was like the tapas-stuff you get around Barcelona (which I like) but that wasn’t really the case.

With two kids we started bringing so much stuff that it barely fit in a car, and the debates about packing became more earnest. From then on I made sure that places we stayed were either on the first floor or had an elevator.

Denmark and Sicily late summer/fall ’22

We spent time in our old haunts in Denmark, eg. Bornholm and Copenhagen. Then we went to Sicily for 3 weeks. We had originally planned to stay longer and maybe travel to other parts of Italy, but we were tired and went home early.

I had high hopes for Sicily because I had gone there on one of our best vacations ever before we had kids. Unfortunately it was too hot, even in mid-September. And Sicily is not very highly developed, which is much more noticeable with kids. Our toddler loves pasta though, so at least the food part really panned out and it was not a bad trip overall.

Denmark and Germany summer ’23, kids 1 and 3

There was no parental leave this time so we were gone just 4 weeks with one of those weeks working remote. We did Denmark once again, visiting Bornholm and LEGOLAND. This was the first time we encountered the more changeable Danish summer weather (i.e. rain), which was a bummer.

We also drove to Hamburg in Germany, which was something of a revelation. It’s a very large and well-organized city. Miniatur Wunderland was the best attraction but the harbor tour of the industrial harbor and the walking tunnel under the Elbe were also great. Hamburg playgrounds are next-level, with free zip-lines, water cannon and diggers.

Europe late summer ’24, kids 4 months, 2 and 4

To avoid the experience of previous years and avoid rain and heat we had made almost no plans ahead of time and were committed to organizing the trip as we went along. We started and ended in Denmark, and visited Stockholm, Berlin, Nuremberg and Amsterdam in between. Nuremberg was the only destination that didn’t pan out: It was too hot and we got a bad AirBnB. The just-in-time travel planning did cost us some tense and stressful half-days with my partner and I checking weather forecasts and cross-referencing AirBnB and travel options. I’m not sure I recommend this planning approach, but it can work.

Trains are a good option for intra-Europe travel with kids, but sometimes you’re going to have to get on a plane. Going from Nuremberg to Amsterdam we could get neither train nor plane and had to rent a car for 24h. But even that panned out relatively well though, because we could drive along the extremely picturesque Rhine Valley.

The destinations were fine overall. Stockholm is arguably a little too similar to Copenhagen to be worth going to but the metro and public transport is extremely impressive. The way the harbor works with ferries going everywhere is also fun. Skansen was great with kids. Berlin was great with the technical museum a highlight, but not as good as Hamburg for our purposes. The main attraction of Nuremberg was the Deutsche Bahn museum but we had already gotten a pretty good dose of trains in Berlin. I was a little underwhelmed by Amsterdam. I thought it was going to be similar to Copenhagen, but there’s an order of magnitude more tourists and touts in the city center, which really ruins it. Amsterdam is famously great for bicyclists, but the pedestrian experience is not great due to narrow and obstructed sidewalks, and public transport is also a little underwhelming.

Back in Denmark we re-visited LEGOLAND and also went to LEGO House (our kids were too young to really enjoy the latter), and also went back to Bornholm where my parents joined us. At this point we were tired but couldn’t change our flight so we spent the remaining days relaxing at a summer house in Hundested that one of my friends has. The weather was exceptional for Denmark in early September and this worked out well. We were gone for 6 weeks total.

The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) is an American outfit that runs skills-based wilderness courses all over the world. You can take courses for college credit, to pick up outdoor skills like sailing, mountaineering, climbing or backcountry skiing, or simply to have a good time in nature. At the time of writing I’ve done two courses: 

• 2020 Winter Backcountry Touring in the Tetons in Idaho and Wyoming. This involves a couple days of resort-skiing (to get everyone at least basic skiing skills) and class-room avalanche instruction and equipment prep. The rest of the course is in the backcountry, first a couple days in a yurt and the rest camping in snow dugouts (quinzhees). Quite a lot of time is taken up just learning to survive, and with level 1 AIARE avalanche qualification, but there’s also amble time for backcountry skiing.
• 2023 Alumni Japan Powder Skiing on Hokkaido. This was the first year for this trip (although I was on the 2nd team to go that year). Alumni trips are less focused on instruction and qualification and more on plain fun. So we slept in actual beds (or on tatami mats at least), staying 3 different places on the island of Hokkaido and driving around to backcountry ski spots that the instructors had staked out. And lots of time soaking in onsen natural hot springs after long days skiing. 

I really enjoyed both (very different) experiences and would recommend NOLS to anyone interested in surviving and thriving in the great outdoors.

I learned of NOLS from reading Chris Hadfield’s (the Canadian commander of the International Space Station) book “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth”. Chris participated in multiple NOLS courses to prepare for his stint on the ISS. His thinking is that the experiences are similar: You team up with a group of people you’ve never met before in an unfamiliar environment (the Utah desert, Low Earth Orbit) and you have to immediately figure out how to work together and solve problems. He also describes how he found aspects of NOLS’ ethos such as “expeditionary behavior” useful for coping with life in space (and on Earth). “Expeditionary behavior” can be bluntly summed up as “always put the group before yourself and never complain or whine unless your problem is a risk to the success of the group”.

In NOLS, opportunities for personal and leadership development are not based on contrived hardship. Eg. there’s no Bear-Grylls-like challenges involving long pointless marches without supplies (although talking to folks that participated in courses in past decades, fasting was sometimes encouraged). You get plenty of food and work with instructors to make sure you’re bringing all the equipment you need to succeed. Instead, opportunities for development come up when learning new skills, when working together as a team and are offered by the vicissitudes of nature itself.

The ethos of NOLS is hard to pin down and having participated in just two courses I don’t claim to have a deep understanding, but here’s my impression: On one hand, inclusivity and personal reflection are important. Students are encouraged to share their feelings and appreciation for one another, there are daily “readings” of poems and other texts that are then discussed in the group and everyone shares impressions and highlights of the day (the way I’m wired, I always have to get over myself to embrace stuff like that with a group of strangers, but it really does make for a much better experience). But NOLS also embodies a flinty hardness. Nature can be unforgiving, and NOLS wants students to be mentally and physically prepared to deal with the ups and downs of outdoor life. NOLS was founded by Paul Petzoldt who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy in WW2 and NOLS works closely with the US Military to provide training to both active duty personnel and veterans. That somehow shines through in regular courses too. The group that had gone before us on the Winter Touring expedition in the Tetons was comprised of Navy SEALS, and they reportedly found it to be tough going which caused some amount of trepidation in our group.

NOLS courses have also been a great way to get to know people that—like me—love being outdoors in winter. As an example, the packing list for the Winter Backcountry Touring trip does not include toilet paper, and you instead do your business by digging a hole in the snow and wiping with snowballs upon completion. What I’m trying to say is that folks that sign up for NOLS courses are typically willing to go the extra mile to have great experiences in life and turn out to be great expedition partners with lots of fun stories to share. I am mindful that NOLS also ends up selecting for students that are like me in less interesting ways, that is white and relatively well off (courses are not cheap, although still a bargain in my opinion). NOLS is working hard to try and change that, but there is clearly a long way to go.

The NOLS instructors on the courses I’ve been on are of a breed apart. I can recognize aspects of my own life arc in them, but for all of them they seemingly decided that being outdoors and sharing their love of nature with others was as-or-more important than office jobs or traditional careers. Some of them have—over decades of NOLS instructing—literally spent half their time “in the field”: sleeping in tents, snow-caves, under tarps or just under the stars. All the NOLS instructors I’ve met are highly educated, knowledgable, resourceful and extremely high energy. NOLS is the only place I know where you’ll find a Rhodes scholar helping you adjust your skis, while unironically holding forth on the spiritual importance of skiing deep powder snow.

I’ve just returned from a trip to Hong Kong. While there, I toured several startup parks and incubators and talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and some government officials. I think it just may be a pretty cool place to found your tech startup. Read on for reasons why.

In the fall (of 2008) I won a trip to Hong Kong by submitting a business idea on the back of a napkin to a competition run be the Øresund Entrepreneurship Academy. You can read more about the competition and my winning it here (including a picture of me holding a bouquet of flowers, a rare and uncommon sight). While I agree that sending more-or-less random people halfway around the world is a rather dubious use of taxpayer money, I was hard pressed to complain and dutifully went along.

I’ll start off with an interesting fact: Hong Kong has been an administrative region of the Peoples Republic of China since 1997, yet for the past 15 consecutive years it has been named the freest economy in the world by the Heritage Foundation. How do you like that, an area under the nominal thumb of communist China is on the top of a list published by a conservative American Think-tank? And it’s not the one of countries to invade next — I think it’s great!

The explanation for this wonderful paradox is that Hong Kong is administered under the “one country, two systems” regime. So while the Peoples Liberation Army diligently liberated Hong Kong after the British left, they limited themselves to doing just that, and have been holed up in their barracks ever since. Hong Kong is thus still governed under the principle of “Positive non-interventionism” formalized under John James Cowperthwaite, the colony’s financial secretary in the ‘60s. Some consequences of interest to entrepreneurs are:

• Taxes are very low, with corporate tax at 16.5% and income taxes capped at 15% (most pay much less).
• There is no value-added tax or sales tax.
• There are no tariffs or customs on any imports, including wine and spirits.
• Registering a limited liability company is easy and costs about 300 USD.
• There are no controls on capital flows so you are free to brings investment in and take profits out.
• The local currency is tied to the US Dollar so you run no currency risks if you are from that country.
• There’s a strong and independent common-law based judiciary which strictly enforces IP rights.

Old Milton Friedman was a big fan of these policies (which brought the Hong Kong per capita GDP from 28% to 137% of Britain’s between 1960 to 1996) and wrote a great article for National Review in 1997.

China has promised that Hong Kong can shape its own policies for at least fifty years after the takeover, leaving another 37 years of laissez faire. The current Hong Kong political system has some democratic traits, but business interests are generally much more prominent than in Western-style democracies (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, just stating a fact). Freedom of Speech is respected and the government officials we talked to (from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and Invest in Hong Kong) were very forthright and mostly positive in their estimates of Mainland Chinese intentions. The foreign officials we met (the Danish and Swedish general consuls) were slightly more cautious, but the general consensus seems to be that China is unlikely to mess with Hong Kong if for no other reasons than because the city is such an important conduit of goods and services to and from the mainland (Port of Hong Kong is the third largest in the world by container throughput). Hong Kong is also useful as a demonstration to Taiwan that it is now safe to return to The Motherland. A good example of the two systems at work is the recent cancellation of Oasis concerts in Beijing and Shanghai, apparently because Noel Gallagher played at a Free Tibet event in 1997. The concert in Hong Kong is still on.

Our itinerary included visits to two incubators operated by Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks. The Science Park is particularly impressive, newly built and stretching over 22 hectares of seaside property with shared IC labs and wet-labs should you need them. The other one is the InnoCentre, which focuses more in design startups. The programs at both incubators feature heavily subsidized rent, it’s free for the first year and then ramps up until the program ends in two to three years. Programs include financial aid packages to the tune of about 100,000 USD which can be used to cover non-recurring operational costs. The admission criteria are not onerous, other than your business idea having to pass several panels judging soundness and profitability. In particular, the incubators are open to foreign nationals registering their companies in Hong Kong, as long as they plan to hire local staff. We met a Swede and a Brit who had set up shop in Hong Kong and looked pretty chuffed. Whether you like government meddling with start-ups or not, these incubators just seemed very no-nonsense and well-thought out.

Hong Kong has a young, well-educated and tech-savvy population with most people using at least two mobile phones for work and private use respectively. In the MTR (Subway/Metro/Underground), which has excellent connectivity, you’ll see everyone punching away at iPhones and Blackberrys. There’s a more-or-less citywide wifi provided by either telcos or freely by the government and broadband is widely available. The transport infrastructure is ruthlessly efficient: The MTR will take you most places you want to go in air conditioned, escalated comfort and to top that off there’s a profusion of busses, trams, ferries and escalators. The airport has frequent flights to most places in Asia and abroad. Most Hong Kongers are immigrants or refugees (or descendants thereof) who have fled the excesses of various mainland governments. They’re self-reliant, industrious and hardworking. English knowledge is still widespread and many schools teach English as the first language.

While it lacks a good venture capital and business angel community, Hong Hong has excellent financial institutions. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is the second biggest in the world in terms of IPO value. Asian banks have lower exposure to the global financial crisis because the buttoned down somewhat after the Asian financial crisis in the late ‘90s. Asia is traditionally a saving economy where people tend save up money before they go an buy stuff, as opposed to taking out a mortgage straight away. I’m not implying mortgages are bad, this is just to say that there’s a lot of money hidden away in bank accounts and mattresses in Hong Kong and the rest of Asia. Chinese banks, indeed, are lending freely now, as this Economist article details.

Other than rather steep housing costs, Hong Kong is a pretty cheap place to live. Transport is cheap and a good meal, with drinks, can be had for less than 10 USD. A live-in maid working six days a week is less than 1000 USD a month. For fun, you can go to the horse races or take the boat to Macau to gamble or just look at the lights. Somewhat surprisingly, Hong Kong has pretty good hiking, including the 100km MacLehose Trail. There are also lots of swimmable beaches dotted around the islands. Pollution can be bad in the built up areas, but I found it be no worse than Manhattan, say. Hong Kong is extremely safe, with a crime-rate that is lower than most large cities.

Is Hong Kong a good place to found your tech start-up? I’m certainly contemplating it: Taxes are low, it’s very livable and there’s robust government support for high-tech entrepreneurs.

Here is some recent related discussion:

• Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. By Paul Graham, discussing whether government can “will” a startup hub into existence.
• Building an Innovation Nation. By McKinsey on various types of innovation clusters.

Here are the startups we visited while in Hong Kong (thanks for having us!):

• TeeLocker, production and online selling of locally designed T-shirts.
• agogLimited, hardware design and development services.
• Office for Product Design, industrial designers.
• AIRGINI, custom mobile development and thumbdive.com.
• Beez Network, builds and run up4food.com, skelaxy and several other sites.

When I tell people that I once took the ferry from Copenhagen to Świnoujście and rode my bike across northern Poland, many go “I wanna do that, please tell me how!”. It’s rather simple really: If you live in Copenhagen, you just pack your bags, check the ferry schedule, ride down to Langelinje in time to buy a ticket, get on the ferry and you’re off. For those wanting a slightly more elaborate guide, I present — by popular demand… “Frytki means French Fries – Świnoujście to Gdansk on a pushbike”. I’ll start with some general observations about traveling by bike and about Poland before moving on to the day-to-day itinerary.

Riding from Świnoujście to Gdansk, will take you trough the old German lands of Pomerania and West-Prussia. The Germans were booted out (or killed) after World War II and the land taken over by the Poles (who themselves had been kicked out of Eastern Poland by the Soviets). So while Świnoujście used to be “Swinemünde” and Gdansk “Danzig”, all modern maps use Polish names and so will I. Some twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Poland still has a distinctly communist feel. The traveller in Northern Poland will see rusting machinery on abandoned communal farms, gray, dilapidated residential housing and Polski Fiats. The countryside is very pleasant however, generally flat or with gently rolling hills (good for biking), pine forests and nice, if narrow, beaches — rather like Denmark actually. Poles seem an easygoing and talkative bunch. Knowledge of English alas, is sporadic and German won’t get you much farther.

Preparations and Info

This being a biking-holiday, your bike will obviously take center stage. I took my sturdy-framed, plenty-of-gears city-bike (since stolen) which worked pretty well. In retrospect, I would probably sacrifice a bit of speed and go for a good, old-school touring-bike. Modern bikes have you leaning over the handle-bars, putting a lot of weight on your wrists and hands. This is fine for zipping around town for a few minutes, but after half a day on an imperfectly paved road, your hands tend to go numb and your wrists get sore. This can be greatly alleviated by a pair of padded biking-gloves, but the human body is just much more comfortable with it’s weight resting on it’s bum instead of the hands. Other than gloves, biking-tights are recommended — at least for guys. They will make you look singularly silly but,…. do it for the kids. Martin, a friend, was good enough to lend me his — note that lending of tights between men infer a very special bond.

Other than the bike, I brought along the following: tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, bike tools and spares, towel and toiletries, compass (for crude navigation), some nuts and raisins for breaks and clothes to wear when not in the saddle. This was carried in two saddlebags (also kindly lent be Martin) and on the cycle rack. Do be sparing when packing, you will hate any unnecessary weight as soon as you hit the first dent in the landscape.

I generally camped in camp sites which are to be found everywhere along the Baltic Coast, a major tourist destination for Poles. Most campgrounds seem unfamiliar with itinerant travellers and getting them to understand that you wish to stay for just one night — as opposed to hanging around at the beach for a week — might take some hand waving. It’s entirely feasible to sleep in the countryside but since campgrounds are cheap and plentiful, I didn’t find it to be worth the trouble. If you want to jettison the tent and sleeping bag, I’m sure there are plenty of hostels around.

Polish cuisine is rustic and hearty. Bread and pastries are cheap and good and can be enjoyed with a wide selection of pâtés and sausages. In the mornings, shops carry freshly made cheese called “twaróg”. It’s kinda like cottage cheese, only strained and compacted — I love it. Bottled water can be bought in all shops, but remember to get the “nie gaz” variety — lukewarm fizzy-water is not what you want when hot and thirsty. In the evenings I would usually have a two course meal of soup or gulasch followed by some kind of meat with gravy and potatoes. Variations of this theme exists, but vegetarians would have a hard time I fear. This, along with a beer, will set you back about kr. 50. You could certainly bring you own cooker, but with restaurant food at these prices, I wouldn’t bother.

From Świnoujście to Gdansk, going by the small roads near the coast is a distance of some 400-500 km. When going by bike, you should definitely try to stick to small roads as the bigger ones carry heavy, inconsiderate traffic. Riding 100 km in a day is not a problem, with 150 km possible if you get going early and stick to good roads. The trip can thus be completed comfortably in a week, including a day of sightseeing in Gdansk. If you want a longer trip, you can continue on from Gdansk to the supposedly nice “Lakes region” to the south-east.

Itinerary

In the summer of 2004 I was mooning around, waiting to go to the US in the fall to buy a Jaguar and (less importantly) study at Caltech. Usually these summers would be productively spent playing Heroes of Might and Magic III and eating fish-sticks with my flatmate Jon, with an occasional guest appearance by Gabriel. This summer Jon had defected however, and was in Thailand with his girlfriend. Single-player Heroes, it turns out, blows. I debated the merits of the Camino de Santiago with Susanne, but ended up telling her that I was going biking in Poland. Note to self: If you can’t summon the resolve to do something, tell someone else you’ll do it — no chickening out then.

So, on July 15, 2004 I went by Martin to get his bike-gear and then packed my stuff. In the afternoon I biked down to Langelinje, bought a ticket (kr. 520 open-ended return, including bike) and rode onto the ferry, the good ship “Pomerania” (the name in Danish is nothing short of hilarious: “Det gode skib Pommern”). Sailing out of Copenhagen harbour in the sunset is very nice. Going south, you sail all the way around Amager and get to see airplanes taking off from the airport right above your head. The ferry reeks of oil, both the lubricating and the cooking kind. I didn’t taste the french fries so I can’t say whether the lanky Polish cooks got the two reversed: try them at your own peril. If you don’t have a cabin (I didn’t), you sleep in uncomfortable air-plane like seats or on the floor.

Once off the ferry in Świnoujście, I adjusted my packs in the shade of a tree. The interesting parts of town are on the opposite (western) side of the Swina river so unless you really want to see it (it was thoroughly flattened by the Americans during WWII and then used by the Soviets as a naval base — don’t bother), you might as well head east out of town. I had neither map nor money at this point, luckily there’s only one road going east. In Międzyzdroje I withdrew the equivalent of kr. 1000 in złoty from an ATM (these lasted me thought the week) and purchased a 1:200.000 tourist map of the entire Polish Baltic Coast. For reasons of morale, I recommend maps with fairly large scales as they give the impression of covering great distances :-). Międzyzdroje, by the way, is a beautiful, genteel resort-town in Wolin National Park.

Heading out of Rewal, I encountered the first of a string of army bases that line the coast. During the Cold War, these bases where used by Polish marines training for the invasion of Falster and Sealand so that we Danes could also have shared the wonders of socialism. The bases are not marked on maps, nor by signs on the road so I had to double back some 5 km after having been pointed at with an AK by some dude in a guard tower. In general I found that the absence of towns/beaches/roads on my map suggested an abundance of sullen conscripts in real life, but it’s not a reliable measure. I’ll warn you of the ones I encountered, ask the locals for directions if in doubt.

Army bases not withstanding, the Baltic coast is absolutely wonderful. On this the first day alone, I rode through dozens of small resort villages perched in dunes behind the beaches. The coastal areas also feature another communist relic (other than military bases): Giant holiday-camps for the youth of the industrial heartland, replete with dorms and communal kitchens. The camps are still run by someone it seems, so young, tan and happy people on vacation abound. My first day of riding left me in a forest east of Kołobrzeg, some 100 km from Świnoujście (not counting the diversion).

The second day took my as far as Jarosławiec with another army base impeding progress in the Sarbinowo-area. On the way I stopped in Darłowo, an old Hansestadt. The town features a castle with a lot of old junk which I duly inspected. Eric of Pommerania (who succeeded Margaret I as regent of Denmark and the Kalmar Union) is buried there, you should go say hi. Fed up with having to turn back, I asked the lady at the restaurant where I had dinner whether I might encounter obstacles going east from Jarosławiec. And “bingo”, this time an airbase no less. You can even see it on Google Maps. I wonder why they have to put these installations right on the beach where people will want to bask and frolic and ride their bikes…?

From Jarosławiec I rode through Słowiński National Park to Leba, a somewhat larger resort town. The next day, there was a slight drizzle and I decided to just stay in town and read Don Quixote. The weather cleared somewhat in the afternoon so I biked out to climb a giant wind-mobile sand dune west of town. I was staying at a very small campground (someones backyard really) and the other guest were interested in my expedition. One of them — a friendly engineering student — even spoke some English and we drank Bruderschaft (and then some) before the five of us went out on the town. Good times.

Rising later than usual, I continued on to Hel (watch out for some sandy roads east of Leba), a 35 km sand dune sticking out into the sea. During WWII, the Germans managed to hold on to the tip right until the end of the war and military installations remain to this day. The most common sight during the summer however, are kite-surfers taking advantage of the shielded bay. On the very tip, you’ll find a small village with a dodgy campground (no shower) and a lighthouse that affords a nice view.

Unless you wanna go all the way back along the peninsula, you should grab one of the ferries running to Gdansk. There’s a fast hydrofoil, but it was a windy morning so I had to contend with a lumbering 3.5h trip on an older ferry, including stop-overs in Gdynia and Sopot. The ferry will take you right into the center of Gdansk, past the giant cranes of what used to be the Lenin Shipyards. This was where Solidarity, with Lech Wałęsa in front, laboured tirelessly for freedom and democracy before finally overthrowing the communists in 1989.

Gdansk is a tourist destination on it’s own, and you could easily spend a weekend there. I deposited my luggage at the station and explored the city center which has been restored to it’s former hanseatic splendor. The Church of St. Mary is the worlds largest brick church, and is indeed huge. When standing in the entrance, the people near the alter look positively tiny. Remember to climb the tower to get a view of the town.

Back at the station, I got a ticket for Świnoujście for the night train with a change in Poznań. The timetables for Polish Rail haven’t been digitised (as of 2004) it appears. I was unsure of how to get to my destination, so I presented it along with the required time of arrival to a serious-looking guy in a glass box who then, from memory and after much furrowing of brows, produced an itinerary for me. Polish trains are old as dirt and not made with bikes in mind so getting on and off involves much pushing and clambering. After my middle-of-the-night change in Poznań, I was bruised and sweaty and ready for a shower, but I still had to endure the cruise back to Copenhagen on M/F Pomerania which looks even more depressing in daylight. Back in Copenhagen, seven days after I left, I rolled gently home, unpacked and took a looong shower before dozing off.

So there you have it: Want a cheap, unplanned and cheerful holiday, just pack your bike and hop on the ferry to Poland :-).