Bonn: A Neanderthal, a river, and a turtle

From Koln, we did two day trips - the first to Bonn, about 30k or so up the Rhine, and to Aachen, about 70k west on the borders of Belguim and the Netherlands.

We caught the rail from Koln to Bonn, accidentally purchasing the more expensive tickets because everything was in German and it wasn't clear. Don't go for the high-speed train. Take your time. Or, catch the ferry...

In Bonn we mostly wandered. We found the Botanischer Garten, which was quite pretty. It was a sunny day and the frogs, moorhens and one turtle were out enjoying the weather. We ate lunch looking out over the pond, watching silver fish under the surface, and the little chicks running along lillypads. We also discovered a section for Neuseeland plants - most notably some rather sad, small cabbage trees.

I was taken with the Rhine, and there are some beautiful parks along it that stretch down beneath a bridge that seems to be on the edge of the town. We walked through it, and I bought a kirsche (cherry) und bannana juice box which was quite tasty. Everything was green (well, not the juice) and lush. There were geese in the feilds, grazing, and people going for all sorts of walks.

By the Rhine I could smell the water, and although it's inland it reminded me somehow of an estuary. Although the banks were covered in stones there was a smell of mud, and something like salt. Then looking up the Rhine, deeper into Germany, was beautiful. There were hills there breaking out of the flatness of the places we'd been, covered in forest. A building on a hill gleamed white - a church perhaps, or someone rich's mansion, we couldn't tell. I imagined walking over the hills and through the forest. I reminded myself how much I want to visit the Black Forest, some time.

Bonn is home to the first Neanderthal man, found in the Neander Valley (about 12 miles east of Dusseldorf). We visited the LVR- Landes Museum. Everything was in German, but there was still a lot to see, including a surprising number of portraits and paintings and a collection of religious relics.

But it was the Neanderthal man I came to see. In Biology classes at high school one of my favourite topics was human evolution. I was very pleased with myself for memorising names like Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) and Paranthropus robustus. Then in Germany I was looking at an example of Homo neanderthalensis, the first one given that name. I must confess it wasn't as much to look at as perhaps I might have hoped, just some fragments of bone that, to my untrained eye, looked like any other random selection of ancient human bone. But, perhaps that's an important point. There was so little difference between one Homo and another - us. We are all Homos. And if there's so little between Homo N and Homo sapiens, how much difference can there possibly be between all us modern "wise" Homos?

In Bonn one can also visit the Beethoven-Haus, where the great composer was born. We didn't visit it - there was a long queue of Japanese tourists - but we did visit his statue, which we eventually got to see once another queue of Japanese tourists had taken sufficient photographs. It looked like Beethoven. Flippancy aside, it was quite neat to think that I was in a city where someone who did create some truly breathtaking - and significant - music had been born.

We caught a ferry back to Koln, and found that we got a discount by showing our train ticket. The journey was a couple of hours, and you don't realise quite how fast you're going really until you pass underneath a bridge. We sat on the deck and watched the flat wide water, the flat banks edged in green grass or stony banks, pieces of towns and cities. There were some people camping by the river in a white tent. And then we approached Koln, and the two prongs of the Dom showed up and neared. Everyone took photographs. The sun was setting bright red and gold behind it.