A Bus That Drives Onto a Ferry, Berlin to Copenhagen

A third day in Berlin went to slower things before the evening's real business began. An exhibition at a place called Berlinzeit walked me through the city's own history under gilded balconies that made the history lesson feel almost accidental. Afterward I found an actual stretch of the Wall itself, concrete still scarred where reinforcing bars poke through in places, a narrow path running alongside it that the present day city has folded quietly back into its own geography rather than roping off entirely. I caught the Fernsehturm from street level near a Christmas market with its own small ferris wheel, then let sunset catch me at a tram stop, a church spire and a set of overhead wires doing more work than I did for that particular photograph.

Three nights in Berlin was enough to start feeling settled, which is usually the sign it is time to leave. Getting to Copenhagen the cheap way meant a FlixBus ticket bought without reading the route too closely, and a detail nobody mentions until you are already on the bus: somewhere past Germany's northern edge, the entire bus drives onto a ferry.

I felt the bus slow, then stop, then start moving again at a speed and with a smoothness no engine of its own could produce, and it took a full minute of confused looking around before the penny dropped. The Fehmarn Belt crossing between Puttgarden and Rodby still runs by boat, container ships and passenger ferries doing what a bridge has not gotten around to doing yet, and for about forty five minutes the bus sat parked in the hold of a ship, tires chocked, other coaches and trucks lined up around it nose to tail, while a voice on the intercom told everyone to get out and go upstairs. That is how I ended up standing on a ferry deck in the middle of the Baltic at night, wind coming off black water in every direction, having bought a coach ticket for a bus and gotten a boat as a bonus nobody had mentioned.

I bought a coffee I did not need just to have a reason to stand at the railing.

The ferry had a small shop and a cafeteria doing steady business in overpriced snacks and duty free chocolate, other bus passengers scattered around looking as disoriented as I felt, a few clearly regulars who had gone straight for a seat by the window without bothering to come up on deck at all. I stayed outside anyway, coffee going lukewarm in the cold faster than I could drink it, watching Germany get smaller behind us and Denmark not yet show itself ahead, nothing but dark water in both directions and the low hum of engines that were, for the next forty minutes, doing all the work a bus engine usually does. I thought, not for the first time this trip, that the cheapest option had once again turned out to be the more interesting one.

Twelve days in and I had gotten used to arriving somewhere new every day or two, a fresh skyline to work out before I had even found the hostel. The ferry broke that pattern without meaning to. There was nothing to see and nowhere to walk, just water and the sound of a boat doing its job, and for forty five minutes the whole trip stopped asking anything of me. I did not realize how much I needed that until it was already happening.