KAISER CHIEF

We journey to the hidden gem of the sunkissed Kaiserstuhl hills in south-west Germany

- John Whitney

For readers of issue 402 last January, you may remember our trip to Germany's Black Forest and the town of Baden-Baden, and a promise of a second Big Ride in the neighbouring Kaiserstuhl region, later in the year. Well, here we are!

I'm writing this a few days after a UK train journey which, on paper, should have taken three hours, but had ballooned to six by its end, thanks to a mix of strikes, last-minute cancellations and in-journey delays. This desperate state of our railways put me in mind of my fantastic rail-based trip to Germany last September, where trains were reliably on time, didn't empty your wallet for a ticket and allowed you to board with a bike without having to phone ahead. Halcyon days indeed.

Anyway, it was a warm, clear, late-summer morning in Baden-Baden, a spa town in the northern Black Forest, as photographer Chris Lanaway and I boarded a train for the 90-minute journey to the southern university city of Freiburg im Breisgau. The Black Forest had, a day earlier, served up imperious riding on long, testing mountain passes and impeccably thought-out cycle paths that allowed us to swerve the busier roads. Today we had our sights set not on a different part of the forest, but the region to its west, in the south of the country, close to the French border: the Kaiserstuhl. In a sea of flat, with the French Vosges mountains to the west and the Black Forest to the east, the Kaiserstuhl is an oasis of short, punchy hills for the road cyclist.

Made in Merdingen

One reason for wanting to go there was that it is the home, both during the first half of his career and now, in retirement, of 1997 Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich. It had been 25 years since that victory and a new, riveting biography, The Best There Never Was, written by journalist Daniel Friebe - a first on Ullrich in the English language - had just been published.