Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
nodded genteelly to the six Turkish waiters who had been waiting hours for me to go and ascended in a tiny
slow-motion lift to the fourth floor, where I spent no more than half an hour stabbing at the keyhole with my
key before bursting unexpectedly into the room, pushing the door shut with the back of my foot, shedding
some clothes (one sock, half a shirt) and falling onto the bed, where I dropped more or less immediately into
a deep, contented and, I dare say, grotesquely blubbery sleep.
I woke in a square of sunshine, too hot and bright to sleep through, and stumbled to the window to find
a gorgeous morning blazing away outside, much too gorgeous to waste. The Hauptbahnhoff concourse and
the street below, the Kirchenallee, were so brightly bathed in sunlight that I had to shield my eyes. I had a
hangover you could sell to science, but after two cups of strong coffee at a sunny table outside the Popp, a
handful of aspirins, two cigarettes and a cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm, I felt
tolerably human and was able to undertake a gentle stroll to the waterfront through the dappled sunshine of
St Pauli Park. There wasn't much to see upon arrival, just cranes and dockyards and the broad, sluggish
estuary of the Elbe. I thought of what Konrad Adenauer used to say: 'You can smell Prussia when you get to
the Elbe.' I could only smell dead fish, or at least I assumed it was dead fish. Maybe it was Prussians.
In the 1930s, the docks at Hamburg employed 100,000 people. Now the number is barely 1,200,
though it is still the second busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam), with a volume of trade equal to the
whole of Austria's. Until just a couple of weeks before, I could have witnessed the interesting sight of
freighters unloading grain from their aft holds and redepositing it in their forward holds as a way of
extracting additional funds from the ever-beneficent EEC. With its flair for grandiose fuck-ups, the EEC for
years paid special subsidies to shippers for grain that was produced in one part of the Common Market
and re-exported from another, so shippers taking a consignment from, say, France to Russia discovered
that they could make a fortune by stopping off at Hamburg en route and pointlessly unloading the cargo and
then reloading it. This little ruse enriched the shippers by a mere οΎ£42 million before the bureaucrats of the
EEC realized that the money could be much better spent on something else - themselves, say - and put a
stop to the practice.
I walked a few hundred yards inland and uphill to the Reeperbahn, that famed mile-long avenue of sin. It
looked disappointingly unlusty. Of course, sinful places never look their best in daylight. I remember thinking
even in Las Vegas that it all looked rather endearingly pathetic when viewed over a cup of coffee and a
doughnut. All that noise and electric energy that is loosed at dusk vanishes with the desert sun and it all
suddenly seems as thin and one-dimensional as a film set. But even allowing for this, the Reeperbahn
looked tame stuff, especially after Amsterdam. I had envisioned it as a narrow, pedestrianized street
packed on both sides with bars, sex shops, peep shows, strip clubs and all the other things a sailor needs
to revive a salty dick, but this was almost a normal city street, busy with traffic flowing between the western
suburbs and the downtown. There was a fair sprinkling of seamy joints, but also a lot of more or less normal
establishments - restaurants, coffee shops, souvenir stores, jeans shops, even a furniture store and a
theatre showing the inescapable
Cats.
Almost the only thing that told you this was a neighbourhood of dim
repute was the hard look on the people's faces. They all had that gaunt, washed-out look of people who run
funfair stalls.
The really seedy attractions were on the side streets, like Grosse Freiheit, which I turned up now. I
walked as far as the Kaiserkeller at No. 36, where the Beatles used to play. Most of the other businesses
along the street were given over to live sex shows, and I was interested to note that the photos of the artistes
on display outside were unusually - I am tempted to say unwisely - candid. In my experience, places such
as these always show pictures of famously beautiful women like Christie Brinkley and Raquel Welsh, which I
dare say even the most inexperienced sailor from Tristan da Cunha must realize is not what he's likely to
encounter inside, but at least they leave you wondering what you
are
going to find. These pictures, however,
showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years - women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in
mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They
weren't just over the hill; they were pinpricks on the horizon.
The sex shops, too, were as nothing compared to those of Amsterdam, though they did do a nice line
in inflatable dolls, which I studied closely, never having seen one outside a Benny Hill sketch. I was
particularly taken with an inflatable companion called the Aphrodite, which sold for 129 marks. The
