Berlin, with a green twist

Germany’s ‘Feel Good’ campaign has a slew of tips that nudge the conscious traveller to savour their favourite sights on foot, bike and the city’s dream-like public transport, writes Susmita Saha

The Oberbaum Bridge

River Spree

The solar catamaran

Bicycles can be taken on city trains and the underground rail network for low-impact travel

It’s still not daybreak in Berlin. The skylight of my hotel room is a dance of blue tints, bringing to mind Picasso’s Breakfast of a Blind Man. But I am dressed and standing in the middle of Potsdamer Strasse, walking briskly to avoid the huddle of tourists at a former guard house called Checkpoint Charlie, perhaps the city’s best-known landmark. It is exactly at this point that Soviet and American tanks were on the verge of rolling into a battle, possibly setting off a nuclear Armageddon during the 1961 Berlin crisis. I have never walked so much in my own tropical country.

Sailing to work and meetings in cabs had gifted me a slow-motion life. In the walking city of Berlin, my boots are cutting through my skin. But my walk stopped midway. A column of cyclists curves into a loop and swings to a stop right before the Mall of Berlin at Leipziger Strasse, a deserted stretch of road at the crack of dawn. I am now inside a circle, its circumference made up of strapping young men, all saddled up. Within seconds, small parcels are thrust into my hands. I become the owner of a bunch of energy bars — a mash-up of vegan chocolate, sea salt and nuts — from a lifestyle start-up.

I get to know that these young men, weaving their way across the city on bikes, are entrepreneurs on a brand visibility exercise. With each purchase, the start-up will donate meals, drinking water, hygiene products and even stationery to those without access to food and education. We end up exchanging notes on sustainability, stories about our own cultures and of course, tips to see the city on pedal power. This, in a nutshell, is Berlin.

Very few Berliners use four-wheeled private transport or hired vehicles. A huge number are on bikes, even start-up founders. And visitors are being encouraged to go green as well. The National Tourism Board’s Autumn/Winter campaign called ‘Feel Good,’ launched this year, has a slew of tips that nudge the conscious traveller to savour their favourite sights on foot, bike and the city’s dream-like public transport. The campaign is an extension of the German Environment Agency’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 65 per cent by 2030, and complete neutrality by 2045. These goals make a lot of sense in a warming planet that saw Europe recording the hottest summer in 2022, according to European climate observation service Copernicus.

It’s afternoon already, and the brilliant autumn sun is lighting up the trees of the city like a flambeed dessert. But I have a river cruise to catch and the city’s public transit system beckons. Urban mobility is mind-blowingly comfortable here and helps you tread lightly on the planet. Berlin’s hallucinatory maze of U-Bahn (underground) and S-Bahn (city train) networks also runs like clockwork. It is a joy getting lost in these knots of local rail systems, having impromptu conversations with strangers and gaggles of cyclists who hop onto the tube and trains with their bikes. But destinations arrive at the speed of lightning and my meditations on the city are sharply interrupted by announcements on the next transport
connection. Moments later I am sitting on the deck of an emission-free solar catamaran on the Spree River, at the Oberbaumbrücke in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Water transportation through sustainable electro-solar technology is the new future-forward personality of Berlin. It is taking shape at a fast clip and allows tourists to restrict their environmental footprint in a big way. Yet modern technology is tethered to Berlin’s historic past in a tight grip. After all, the city has been the theatre where most of 20th-century history has been performed. So, I lose no time to glide across the catamaran deck to witness what is left of yesterday. Clearly visible is the Oberbaum Bridge which has been a hotspot for Cold war tensions in the last century. An imposing structure bearing a likeness to castles of the Mark Brandenburg region, the bridge was a crossover checkpoint from West to East, witnessing armed guards patrolling the border area on the river banks.

Today, the bridge flaunts its cool, party-crawler identity with equal elan. The banks of the Spree, around the Oberbaum Bridge, are now home to Berlin’s pop culture, a tangle of clubs and concert locations that are catnip to night crawlers. Make no mistake. History itself is a blockbuster exhibit in this vast gallery of a city. In the catamaran, I am gliding past the East Side Gallery, a monument to freedom and victory of the human spirit. The concrete structure, stretching 1,316 metres, is the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall. When the Wall came down in 1989, 118 artists from 21 countries painted hope and unity on the remains of the divider and turned it into an open-air art exhibition space known as the East Side Gallery.

The sunset is young right now. And the urge to lose myself in the city is overwhelming. I stash my itinerary in the backpack and head to the iconic Brandenburg Gate, where selfie-stick-wielding tourists can be seen rubbing shoulders with pretzel sellers, gypsies in costumes peddling roses and many others. I see wave after wave of bikers pedalling through the historic sandstone gate, swerving in and out of Pariser Platz and zipping through the tree-lined boulevard Unter den Linden. There is no belching black smoke in their wake, just clean air and the Fall foliage of mind-melting beauty. So, in the last leg of my green journey, I start walking behind them in a trance. And yes, the bruises on my feet now have stories to tell.