Christoph Rehage's Blog

This post is about being home after The Longest Way. I celebrate Christmas, take walks, and lose my hearing.

I don’t know what to say. After all these years, I have finally arrived at home, and The Longest Way has reached its conclusion. The Caboose is in the car port. We’re no strangers to love, she and I, but our walking days are behind us.

The thing is, I don’t know what to say. I could tell you that The Cut turns out to be a trip in and of itself. You know the rules and so do I: one hot summer afternoon seven years earlier I am in Northwest China, making the commitment to not touch my hair or my beard until the moment when I will reach my home. A full commitment is what I’m thinking of.

I’m glad my brother Ruben is there when it finally happens. What have I done? I ask him as we arrive at the location and see the crew with their lights and smoke and their cameras and microphones. “It’s only appropriate for the gravity of the situation,” Ruben says with an ironic smile. You wouldn’t get this from any other guy.

After it’s all done we go to have burgers, fries, and coke. One time I look up and see my own reflection in a window. Only it’s not me. The person staring back at me is a confused stranger.

I am writing all of this because I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling. Gotta make you understand. But how? Maybe it’s better if I just tell you about some of the things that I’ve been doing lately.

There’s that moment when I take the very last self portrait of The Longest Way. I do it in front of a map of the Silk Roads. There is a thin black line that I have drawn on the map. I love that line.

Sometimes I go for little walks around Bad Nenndorf. We’ve known each other for so long, the town and I, and so little has ever changed. There is a Christmas market, so I go there to stand around in the cold and have some lumumba.

I make a kohlrabi dish that the bowtie-wearing owner of the guesthouse in Bodenwerder has told me about. I feel strongly about kohlrabi.

One day I notice that I have lost most hearing in my left ear. So I go to the emergency room. The doctor tells me that it’s sensorineural hearing loss and asks me if I’ve been experiencing any stress lately. It’s one of those situations where your heart’s been aching but you’re too shy to say it. I look at my reflection, at the confused person who isn’t such a stranger anymore, and I think: inside, we both know what’s been going on. The doctor gives me some cortisone and I recover my hearing.

I visit my grandparents and play Rummikub with my grandma. I like the moment of sitting down and noisily shuffling the playing pieces on the table. It’s as comforting as it is simple: we both know the game and we’re gonna play it. I drink lumumba and my grandma wins the game.

I spend Christmas at my sister’s place. She gives me a gift, a tiny porcelain plate from Japan with a black cat painted on it. The cat looks so fragile and trusting and stupid that I have to fight back tears.

And then there is the pastel dream. Or rather, it isn’t so much a dream as it is a memory.

Ever so often, before my mind’s eye, I find myself in a certain afternoon in the spring of 2018 when I was walking through East Iran. I am on a country road, and I can feel the Caboose’s handlebars in my hands, I can hear the gravel scrunching under my soles, I can see the earthen walls on both sides of the road, and I can smell the orchards. It is neither hot nor cold, it is perfect. The world feels like a pastel-colored painting, everything is so soft and timeless. Actually, it’s as if time has never existed.

And if you ask me how I’m feeling don’t tell me you’re too blind to see.

being home after The Longest Way:

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This post is about getting a haircut after seven years of being on the road. Not much else to say, really.

One day of rest. One day to hang out with my brother Ruben. I took a long, hot shower. Put on some clean clothes. Had some food. Took some more pictures. Sat around. Talked. Observed myself. I was home now. Home, home. Home.

And so the day came and the day went. And eventually I slept.

I went to bed with my beard and my hair for the last time. Ever since that day in Northwest China more than seven years earlier I had not cut them, not even once, not even a bit. To me, my hair symbolized the journey. The tips were from China and Kazakhstan. Georgia and Turkey were somewhere in the middle. The roots were Germany and France. The journey of The Longest Way was in my beard and my hair. And the journey was done.

So they had to go.

There are a few things about the original The Longest Way video that I think I would like to have done differently. I like the video. But it has a rather long intro that’s just white text on a black background. Like Star Wars where the text doesn’t move. The ending is a bit long as well. And I took my self portraits without thinking about the lighting very much. The stabilization I applied to them was a bit sloppy. Etc. etc.

But the one thing that gets me every time is the hairdresser sequence at the 3:22 mark. It was a very emotional moment for me at the time. And yet in the video it’s just a few seconds, then it’s over: I have gone from the full beard and hair look back to my clean cut self.

Why didn’t I give this transformative moment a bit more space in the video?

I don’t know.

This time I wanted to do it differently. The hairdresser sequence didn’t have to be part of the new time-lapse video I was planning to make, not necessarily.

Instead, I wanted to get the whole process on film. And because this was very likely going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I decided to go all out.

getting a haircut after seven years:

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This post is about a 11km walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf. I walk through the Deister forest, and I finally make it home.

I wake up in my last camping spot on The Longest Way. It is located at an intersection in the middle of the forest called Kreuzbuche (beech of the cross). There used to be a few big beech trees there, but they all died a long time ago. There also used to be a rare dwarf beech, one of the most beautiful types of trees that I know, but it got destroyed during a bout of Father’s Day vandalism some years earlier..

Luckily, I have the forest to myself at this time. I can hear a bird calling from somewhere in the trees, and I can see a thin curtain of rain outside of the hut where I have pitched the tent.

I do my exercises just like I have always been doing them since the time when I was down with a herniated disc in Budapest. I eat two bananas, and I drink a little bit of the tea that I have left over from the day before. I still have a chocolate croissant for the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf. Good.

Home is just a few hours of walking away. I find it hard to believe, and yet here we are.

I follow the gravel road through the forest for a while. One time I run into a group of little kids. They might be four or five years old, there is mud all over their bodies and their little faces, and some of them have twigs and leaves in their hair. I am convinced that I have never seen a more adorable sight in my life. They are a forest kindergarten, and their teacher looks at me with wide eyes.

“Are you Christoph Rehage?” she asks me.

I mumble something between a yes and an excuse. I cannot talk. I have to go.

Then, just like that, I begin to recognize the trees and the shape of the ground, and I know exactly where I am. There is a tower close by. It’s called Belvedere Tower, and it was built in the middle of the 19th century as a viewing platform overlooking the trees. The trees have since grown much higher than the tower, and there isn’t really much to see at the top anymore. But that doesn’t matter to someone who just wants to be in the trees.

I have been up there countless times, sometimes feeling happy, sometimes feeling sad. There is a video that I posted to my Youtube channel 10 years earlier that I filmed on the top of the tower. It shows nothing but the trees in the wind.

And now I’m back. Walking. With the Caboose.

I climb the stairs up the tower. Round and round they go, up and up until I am between the treetops. Bad Nenndorf is somewhere behind them. The place that I used to call home in China is in the opposite direction, somewhere behind the curvature of the Earth. I look down at the Caboose. She is down there between the trees, and she looks very small and vulnerable like that.

Hey Boosy, I say.

Then I start crying.

The rest of the way is quiet. I walk the same ways that I have walked before so many times, and it somehow feels like I have already arrived.

I don’t take the direct way home. Instead I walk through the cemetery, and then I go to a bakery and buy a loaf of Gersterbrot, the bread that we eat in this region. I put it on the Caboose, and I walk up the street, through the pedestrian zone and through the spa park, and then down to the last traffic light that I will ever cross on The Longest Way.

I know this particular traffic light by heart. I can anticipate the amount of time it takes for it to jump to green after you’ve pressed the button. How many times have I crossed here with our family dog Puki, and how many times was our family cat Nase following us?

The street down to my home isn’t long. My father is waiting, and my sister is there, too. I pass the church where I once got a laughing fit during a Christmas service. I pass the feminist graffito that appeared out of nowhere a few years earlier and has never been removed.

I’m glad it’s still there.

And then, just like that, seemingly in an instant, as if the whole day hadn’t happened, as if the years on the road were mere glitches in a video, as if I had never walked through the deserts and the mountains and along the seas, as if I didn’t have the beard and the hair and the scars to prove it, as if I hadn’t cried and laughed and screamed my heart out, as if I hadn’t seen the blackness of the Black Sea and the lights of the galaxy, as if I hadn’t left my soul somewhere behind me in the forest, as if none of these things were even remotely real, as if I had just gone out to buy a loaf of bread – I was home.

the walk from Kreuzbuche to Bad Nenndorf

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This post is about a 19km walk from Springe to Kreuzbuche. I walk through wind and sleet into the Deister. Then there is fog.

I woke up in a warm room with my stuff laid out to dry on the floor. Packed up. Had some food. And then I loaded up the Caboose. Just like so many times before.

I knew that this was going to be the last full walking day on The Longest Way.

The first thing I did was go to a bicycle repair shop. Ever since getting a flat tire a few days earlier I hadn’t fixed it, which meant that the spare wheel had become useless, as it was now flat.

I believe that if I don’t fix it now, something will go wrong up there in the forest, I explained to the owner of the bike shop.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s how the universe works.”

An hour later I was in the Deister. The initial climb turned out to be brutal. It was windy and sleeting, which meant that I was wearing my poncho. But the inclines were a lot steeper than I had expected, which meant that I was sweating like a pig under the plastic.

When I arrived at a wooden hut at the top of the initial climb, I took off the poncho, the windbreaker, the fleece, and ultimately even my shirt. Everything was wet.

I had some spare clothes in the Caboose. I put on a new shirt and a warm longsleeve. Sat in the hut having some food and some tea. And then I got back into my fleece and my windbreaker. They were still wet, but what could you do.

Luckily the sleet hat stopped at this point, so I didn’t need to wear the poncho anymore.

Walking became easier after this. There was a path through the forest called Kammweg (ridge way). It was mostly a gravel road, so even with the snow and the sleet and the general wetness it never turned into a mud fest.

There was dense fog, however. It would come and go, fogging up and then clearing into thin air again after an instant. One time, as I was looking through a clearing in the trees, I understood that this wasn’t fog. It was just cloud after cloud surging against the ridge of the Deister, enveloping the forest for a while, then floating on.

I had all kinds of emotions at this point, and I liked the clouds very much.

Then darkness fell. I put on my head torch. Usually I would wear two: one on my forehead, one on the back of the Caboose as a safety measure. I didn’t put on the second one this time. I was alone in the forest. It was dark and there was nobody around. The world became smaller and smaller until the only thing that was left of it was the cone of light from my head torch.

I would see my red shoes, the pair that I had bought in Fulda, under me. I would see the road, and I would hear it, the gravel scrunching under my shoes. I would see trees, most of them naked. They  would appear out of nowhere and then disappear into the night again just a moment later.

I had feared this forest once, during a cold winter night at the turn of the millennium.

But not anymore.

the walk from Springe to Kreuzbuche:

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This post is about a 25km walk from Hameln to Springe. I walk along a busy road and see a sign with the name Bad Nenndorf on it.

I had stayed in a guesthouse on the riverbanks. It belonged to a local fishing club, and the room was cold, but it was good enough.

Hameln was where the story of the Pied Pieper had taken place. I decided to take a detour through the center of the city, not because I was hoping to get to see anything about the Pied Piper, but because I wanted to have a warm meal.

There was a thai restaurant. I ordered a serving of pad thai, and it turned out to be unexpectedly awesome.

And then, as I was sitting there, I thought of something that surely nobody had ever thought of before: Hitler was the Pied Piper. Whenever he had come to the Bückeberg near Hameln, he had led the people away with his rhetorics, his promises, and the propaganda surrounding his persona.

I knew it was going to be one of my last walking days on The Longest Way. There was only the city of Springe up ahead, and then there was the Deister. And then, after that, after that familiar forest, I would be home.

I didn’t feel it, though. The sky was grey, and there was a cold wind in the air. I walked most of the way on a bike lane next to a busy road, so it wasn’t exactly meditative. I saw the same things that I had seen so many times before: drivers tailgating each other, pedestrians walking their dogs, some traditional houses, some prefab buildings, a bunch of trash that someone had carelessly dumped into a forest, a nice sunset where the clouds ripped open for a moment, revealing a day that could have been.

One time I sat down and ate some bread with lentil spread and a bell pepper. I drank tea from my thermos, and I had some cocoa-flavored oat milk.

It was a typical walking day.

And then I saw the sign. It hung from a traffic light at an intersection, and it stated something obvious in a matter-of-fact way: BAD NENNDORF it said. BAD NENNDORF 24KM.

I could not believe it. This was the first time on The Longest Way, the first time ever since I had left my place in Beijing on November 9th 2007, that I had seen a street sign with the name of my home town on it.

I stood there, staring at the sign. I took a photo of it and stared at it some more. BAD NENNDORF 24KM. Then I continued walking.

It was only after a while that I realized that I had forgotten to take a self portrait with the sign that meant so much to me.

the walk from Hameln to Springe:

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This post is about a 25km walk from Bodenwerder to Hameln. I pass by the Bückeberg, site of the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival.

It was my plan to walk the last bit of the way home to Bad Nenndorf via the Deister, a range of forested hills. This was important to me for two reasons: 1) I wanted to arrive home alone and undisturbed. 2) I had spent a lot of time walking through the Deister in my days.

There were two ways from Bodenwerder to the Deister Gate near Springe: either east via Salzhemmendorf and Coppenbrügge, or west via Hameln.

“The western way is more interesting,” Mr. Hahn had told me, “you will pass the Bückeberg, the place where Hitler held his Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival.” He had a few books on the subject.

So I decided to follow the Weser on its way northwest to Hameln. Sometimes there was a bike lane and sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes I was in the forest and sometimes in the fields. It took a long time somehow, and when it started getting dark, I had only gotten as far as the Grohnde nuclear power plant.

It reminded me of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant I had passed on my way through Austria. Zwentendorf had never gone into service, and Grohnde had been shut down as well. Somehow the German-speaking world had said no to nuclear power, which seemed absurd in terms of energy-security but reasonable when it came to storing the waste that those nuclear power plants produced.

When I arrived on top of the Bückeberg it was already dark. There didn’t seem to be much to see to begin with, but now, in the darkness, it seemed as though I had arrived late to the party. Or rather: I had arrived when the party was already over.

I looked at the information panels and at the large, flat field that the nazis had used for one of their main propaganda events of the 1930s: the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festivals, a sort of popular antipode to the Nürnberg Reich Party Congresses.

It was a bit hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of people had come here every year from 1933 until 1937. Nazi-hippies, if you will. Now there was only black silence and, in the weak light of my head torch, the artificial ridge on which Hitler used to walk up and down to take his propagandistic “bath in the crowds”.

the walk from Bodenwerder to Hameln:

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This post is about a day of rest in Bodenwerder. I stay in an old guesthouse and mostly just pet the cat, Smoki.

The night before I had somehow made it back down from the monastery, in spite of the icy roads. There was a café at the foot of the hill. The door was unlocked and no one was inside.

I sat in the café having my tea until a lady appeared and told me that they had no place for me there. She didn’t say it in an unfriendly way, in fact she took me to a neighboring house that she described as a “commune”. Maybe they had a place for me to sleep?

But when we got there, all we saw were two grey-haired heads in the windows who told us no in a way that sounded more like “meh”.

So this morning I woke up in a guesthouse in Bodenwerder. It was the place that Wolfgang from Amelungsborn had told me about, the one with the interesting owner.

He had been right.

The guesthouse had been run by the same family since the 1950s. It was old and full of books, and there was always some classical music playing from the kitchen. It had a room with a wood-burning oven at its center, and there were a lot of interesting pictures on the walls (one by Konrad Schmidt that I really liked). And it had Smoki the cat, who was always laying around here or there.

The owner, Mr. Hahn, was a gentleman who always wore suits. And I mean always wore suits. With a bowtie. He was very interesting to talk to, and it turned out he was also an excellent cook.

I decided to stay one more day. This was going to be my last resting day on The Longest Way, and I wanted to spend it here, petting Smoki the cat, talking to Mr. Hahn, looking at books and maps. Home was just a few days of walking away.

a day of rest in Bodenwerder:

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This post is about a 21km walk from Amelungsborn to Bodenwerder. I walk through a forest, and I arrive at a dark monastery.

There was no one at Amelungsborn Abbey. The night before I had called a number and a voice on the phone had told me how to get to the key to the pilgrims’ apartment from a lockbox. The apartment was nice, and there were all kinds of informational materials in the kitchen. One of them spoke of another monastery about a day’s march from here.

It was the German Orthodox Monastery of Buchhagen, and apparently it offered lodging to pilgrims.

Before I started walking a gentleman appeared from somewhere. His name was Wolfgang, and he, too, had seen the NDR news piece about me. He told me to try finding a place to sleep at the monastery, and if that didn’t work, go to a certain guesthouse in Bodenwerder, the next town.

“The owner is a friend,” he said, “and a very interesting guy.”

I left Amelungsborn and walked towards a forest. At first I was worried that there might be a lot of mud on the forest roads with all the thawing snow, but it turned out to be okay. It was quite beautiful actually. After walking for about an hour I was alone with the trees and the light of the winter day.

When it started getting dark I left the forest path to walk to the town of Kirchbrak and see their fortified church. It was from the 13th century, and even though its fortifications were much smaller, it still reminded me of some of the fortified churches I had seen in Transylvania. I wondered what had happened in this region in the 13th century for people to build their churches this way.

The German Orthodox Monastery lay on top of a hill, and when I reached the foot of the hill, I noticed that the roads were getting icy. I was a bit worried about the way back down as I was pulling the Caboose up to the monastery.

After a while I arrived at a gate. I left the Caboose there and opened the gate. There was a footpath made from boulders. It was slippery and steep. I went up anyway, just to see what was behind it. Darkness was behind it. I saw a few buildings, all of them completely black. Maybe the monks weren’t home? Or maybe they had already gone to bed? I looked at my watch: it was seven in the evening.

the walk from Amelungsborn to Bodenwerder:

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This post is about a 25km walk from Holzminden to Amelungsborn. I visit Michael Holzach’s grave and give another TV interview.

I remember telling you about the meaning of December 6th a long time ago as I was walking through China. In Germany, it was the day of Saint Nicholas. Kids were supposed to clean their shoes and put them outside so Saint Nick, the patron saint of children, could drop chocolates, fruits, and candies in them.

When I opened my door in the morning I noticed my shoes, the red trail runners I had bought in Fulda. There was a little chocolate Santa in one of them.

[face-holding-back-tears-emoji]

I sat down for breakfast with the family and shared with them why I had made Holzminden a destination on The Longest Way. It was because I wanted to visit the grave of one of my favorite writers: Michael Holzach.

He had done a year-long, penniless walking tour of Germany in 1980 and written a book about it: Deutschland Umsonst (Germany For Free). I loved that book. After his death in an accident a few years later, Holzach had found his final resting place in Internat Solling, the boarding school he had attended as a youth.

That’s where I wanted to go today and pay my respects.

A moment later I had a book written by Holzach in front of me. It was about his dog Feldmann who had accompanied him on his walk through Germany, and it was illustrated by his girlfriend Freda Heyden.

There was even a little Caboose in the book.

[crying-emoji]

When I arrived at the boarding school I had just gone through a tire change with the Caboose. Luckily I had bought that wrench a while earlier.

Also, there was a TV crew waiting for me. They were from Sat.1, a privately owned German TV channel, and they ended up filming a short segment of me walking around and talking about this and that in front of the wintery backdrop of the boarding school. It was fun, the only caveat being that they somehow made me appear more adventurous than I really was.

I went to Holzach’s grave by myself. It was a simple slab of stone on the ground. Hey Michael, I said, ich bin da. Then I placed a little stone on his grave as I had learned to do a while earlier, and then I said goodbye.

After a bit of walking a local paper called Täglicher Anzeiger Holzminden asked me for an interview in their office. They had tea and cookies, and their place was warm.

When I finally got going it was dark outside, and there was that gruelling sleet again. I had about 18km to go until I would get to Amelungsborn Abbey, where they had promised me a room. So I put on my poncho and stepped out into the blackness.

the walk from Holzminden to Amelungsborn:

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This post is about a 30km walk from Würgassen to Holzminden. I see inflatable pink flamingos in a lake, and I visit Corvey.

Again there had been a monastery, and again they had told me that there was no place for me there. No room at the inn, so to speak. And so I woke up in yet another hotel.

What does that mean: “And so”? Couldn’t I have put up my tent somewhere instead of paying for a warm place? Yes, I could have. The truth is I didn’t feel like I had it in me anymore. There were many reasons not to camp: laws and regulations, the fear of catching a cold before my hairdresser appointment, the necessity of my exercises, the fragility of my medication, etc. etc.

But all of that was just smoke and mirrors.

The truth was that I wanted my things to unfreeze and get dry at the end of a long day. I didn’t want any adventure anymore. I just wanted to get home.

As I was walking down a muddy country lane, with the snow thawing under my shoes, I felt somewhat conflicted. There were real outdoor people out there. Danger lovers, exploration enthusiasts, makers of fire. And then there was I, a dude who had gone for a walk. A person on what could be called an extended stroll, a prolonged breeze, a promenade that had gotten out of hand.

The Longest Way.

And then, while I was still pondering these questions, I suddenly found myself standing still. I had arrived at a lake. A lake with some snow and a lot of naked trees around it. And in the middle of the lake, there were a few bright objects floating around. They were inflatable flamingos, and they seemed to be there for no reason at all.

They were flaming pink, and they looked like they didn’t give a fuck about anything.

I crossed the Weser at the small town of Beverungen and entered the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Princely Abbey of Corvey was up ahead. I was excited because it had the oldest Carolingian westwork in existance, and because it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But there was also a more personal reason: the first time that my home town Bad Nenndorf had ever been mentioned in history was in the year 936 – in the documents of the Benedictine Abbey of Corvey. They called Bad Nenndorf Nyanthorpe back then.

Alas, when I arrived in Corvey the sky was already getting dark. I hung out for a while, took some pictures of the facade, and I plucked a leaf from a bush because I wanted a keepsake from this place. Then I marched on.

When I got close to the town of Holzminden I called a private guesthouse to inquire about a room. It was run by a German-Bolivian family.

“What are you doing out there?” they said when I arrived, “it’s so cold!”

We sat down at their table, they gave me a bowl of pasta, and we talked for a few hours. I, the perambulator who liked to have it warm, was with friends now.

the walk from Würgassen to Holzminden:

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