Achtung Baby!

After a one night stopover in Paris, we headed for zee land of zee Beer and zee Bratwurst, Deutschland. First stop Munich. Normally when we visit a new city, we hit the streets running and manage to see a good portion of it before leaving. However, despite having almost four days in Munich, we didn't end up seeing that much of it. Something got us a little sidetracked...

The Beer Festival of All Beer Festivals

We made a bit of a late call to come to Oktoberfest and since accommodation starts getting booked out about a year in advance, we struggled to find somewhere to stay. With more than enough "sorry but we've been booked for months" email replies, we decided to just rent a station wagon and sleep in the boot. Worked out pretty cheap and not that uncomfortable so it was a good option really. Plus we had a car to cruise round the autobahns in! Not just any car either. A free upgrade from the rental car company saw us kitted out German-style, in a brand new 5 series BMW with leather, sat-nav and a decent engine to boot.

On the first day of the festival we wanted to make sure we had a seat at a good tent, so we got in there not long after 7am. The doors finally opened at 9:30 and it's a minor miracle that no one had to get carted out on a stretcher after the stampede to get in. About 80% of the seats in the good tents are prebooked so it really is a mad dash to secure a table (and we had a big bunch of Kiwis so we needed two). Then, at noon they finally tap the first keg and the place goes nuts. It took about 45 mins before our beer wench managed to get us our first round of one litre steins. After that the beer arrives a bit more easily and the consumption continues long into the night. Well, long into the night if you can make it. For the festival, each brewery serves up a special batch of beer, which is actually stronger than their usual brew!

We ended up having two massive days at the festival and also a quiet walk around on our day off. The main tents are massive, seating up to 5,000 people. Over six million litres of beer are consumed over the course of the festival! It really is an impressive sight, especially seeing as it's all temporary. The place is huge and there is a never-ending sea of people (lots in lederhosen too!) jumping on the rides or downing pretzels, beer and bratwurst. Good times.

Dachau

For a bit of a break in between two days of madness at Oktoberfest, we decided to do a bit of sightseeing. So the majority of Sunday was spent beneath a cloudless sky, exploring yet another example of the only species on earth that continually aims to destroy its own kind. Situated northwest of Munich and opened in 1933, the concentration camp at Dachau was one of the first to be opened by the Nazis. It was also one of the first to be liberated by the Allied forces but not for another 12 years.

The list of atrocities committed during its existence is appalling. Prisoners of this camp (and the others that Dachau served as a model for) were malnutritioned and over worked, and that's assuming they were deemed fit enough to work. If not, they were either left to starve to death, given a lethal injection, gassed, shot or otherwise killed. As if that's not bad enough, the unluckiest prisoners of all were used for medical research purposes. The research (which often ended in death) included tests to see how the human body was affected by things like g-force, air pressure and various chemicals. Of the 200,000 prisoners that were housed here, about 35,000 didn't survive (although this was also due to disease outbreaks). Despite having four ovens in their on-site crematorium, they often still had piles of bodies just lying around. They really were killing on a grand scale and yet Dachau was small when compared with Auschwitz.

More From Bavaria

After the shenanigans of Oktoberfest we thought it would be a good idea to spend some quality time in the Bavarian Alpine region. Fortunately for us I spent a year here when I was a wee fella so had some old friends to visit. On Tuesday morning, feeling rather less lively than normal we got on the train at Munich and headed in to the hills where we met Frank and Cilly Peterhoff(cheers for everything guys, it was awesome!). When I was four years old my family did an exchange with the Peterhoffs, we lived in their house in Gaißach, Bavaria and they lived in our house in trendy Lower Hutt. I found out from Frank on this trip that the year we were living there was just after the Chernobyl disaster, a mere 2,000kms away, the effects of which were present in Bavaria - this explains a few questions I had about myself... Anyway, that evening we went and saw some more friends, the Lechners, who not only filled us up on tasty Bavarian food and beer, but hooked us up with some tickets to watch Bayern München FC the next night...

So the following night we rocked back to Munich to see our new favourite football team in action. Fortunately Bayern are the top team in the league and were playing FC Energie Cottbus who are the bottom team, no surprises that it was 5-0 in favour of Bayern so we got to see a lot of goals. Half the fun was also sitting in the rowdy fan zone, so we got to learn all the chants and songs, it's pretty amazing to see and hear 70,000 people all getting in to it! Neither of us have ever been huge soccer fans, but it's a whole lot better when you can see it live.

On our last day in Gaißach the Lechners took us up to their mountain hut just over the border in Austria (tick another country off the list!). It's a cool we cottage built into the hill about 1,300m up, where they managed to fill us with even more good food and beer!