Vampire Country - Day 2

JOURNEY START: SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE BERLIN, GERMANY

I woke up to the noise of people. The rest stop I had “camped” at for the “night” was deserted when I arrived, but in the meantime about 30 cars had shown up for their morning coffee.

I put my shoes on and got out of the car and was surprised to see that I was in a British-style service station with a Macca’s in one side and an oddly English named establishment in the other. I looked down at my Coffee Fellows cup, and I got a weird sensation. I’m in East Germany, a place that was a surveillance state in my lifetime. The two women working the front desks at the Coffee Fellows and the Macca’s are identical, and I’m drinking a cup of coffee from a place in Germany that’s named something in English, and just ever so slightly oddly named that it raises an eyebrow. The whole thing made me feel like the Stasi was about to show up and grab me, like the East had never fallen and they had set up these Coffee Fellows trap to lure in tourists so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Soviet Union and make them work for them. I grabbed my phone and started texting my friends about my observation, and then a notification from my friend David popped up. It was a trans X-Files meme, fitting.

I’m taking a break from driving today to go meet my friend Nick in Berlin. We originally planned to go to an island in Berlin that used to be the home of an alchemist named Johan Kunckel, during the days of the Prussian Empire. His work was very secret, so people living on the island were not allowed to leave, and no one was allowed to come visit. The locals suspected him to be engaging in witchcraft and would occasionally smell a foul odor coming from his laboratory.

His research was financed by a noble, and when that noble passed away, Kunckel’s lab caught fire and he had to flee to Sweden. People suspected arson and his defection to another kingdom seemed to confirm it.

The German imperial family built a home there afterwards and for centuries they imported and kept exotic animals of all kinds on the island. The family was known to be cursed and according to rumors, many of its female members end up becoming white ladies, haunting the castles they once called home.

After the empire was dissolved following the First World War, the animals were moved to Berlin Zoo and the island became abandoned.

It would have been a cool place to visit, but unfortunately the ferry was out of operation due to a mechanical error on the day I was passing through, so we had hastily cobbled together another plan the day before I arrived.

I picked up Nick and we drove out into the countryside of what used to be East Germany.

There is this trashy cowboy themepark called El Dorado and it was built on the ruins of an abandoned East German summer camp. But they didn’t build over the entire thing, just part of it, so all of the housing where the kids and counselors used to stay is still there.

Germany has been reunified for over 30 years now, but you’re never unsure what bits of it used to be the DDR, there is a visible change in the architecture and the budget for maintaining the infrastructure. It feels like the German government is still punishing the east for being occupied by the soviet union….

We got on the motorway in Berlin and we drove out of the city, and as soon as we got onto a country road, my tires could tell that I was in the DDR. 90 minutes later of country driving and we arrived at the trashy themepark.

Since it was day and the park was being visited by people from all over Germany, I decided that it would be best if we scouted the perimeter first and then found an entry point that was secluded. We walked alongside the fence and Nick took a tumble and realized that nettles don’t sting as much as they did when he was a child, which is a revelation I myself had not too many years ago. We found a big hole in the fence that was suitable to enter through, and we climbed over. It was right behind a big building so if someone was inside the camp ground they wouldn’t be able to see us, not that anyone would be because why would they, it’s abandoned DDR summer camp and it’s 2026.

The camp was equal parts fascinating and boring. All of the bunkhouses were identical, and their furniture had been removed decades ago, so there weren’t any little messages or markings left behind by the kids that stayed there during the 30 years that it was in operation, but it was also interesting seeing that places like these that existed on the opposite side of an impenetrable fence look exactly like places did on my side.

I might not have washed my ass in this exact bath house, but I’ve washed it in one exactly like it a thousand kilometers away in Sweden. The iron curtain made the east mysterious to the west, but up here in the north we could see both sides of it, and we interacted a lot with the communists during that time, and we bought stuff from them, like the plans to make very utilitarian buildings that were cheap on materials.

And we weren’t the only ones. On a Facebook page dedicated to the camp, we found messages from people all over Europe who used to stay here, France, Holland, South American countries, and even West Germany. The east was never as cut off from the west as the history books claim it was. I think both sides wanted to achieve the same goal, they were just in disagreement about how to achieve it, but I think a thing they remembered back then that we have forgotten today, is that children shouldn’t be involved in politics, so the west sent their children here to spend time with their eastern neighbors, and the east allowed just a little bit of capitalist exposure, because they knew that seeing the west as enemies they had no relation to, was far more dangerous than exposure to coca cola.

We took some pictures and then we started to hear weird sounds and could have been coming from human sources. The camp area belongs to the theme park, and while they don’t use it for anything, we were technically trespassing, and we decided to not push our luck and got out of there as quietly as we got in.

It’s a shame that the area isn’t open to the public. While we were investigating we were talking about our own summer memories, and how people in the 60’s and 70’s coming here would have had those exact memories. No matter what point in time you lived in and no matter what regime you lived under, you were at some point a kid experiencing your firsts and a lot of kids experienced them here, and it’s a shame that they can’t return as adults to a place they still think about enough to seek out a Facebook page dedicated to it.

After the summer camp we stopped by a Döner place because I was getting a bit hungry. We thought El Dorado was a western themed restaurant and had planned to eat lunch there, and it was exactly that, but it was inside a trashy theme park and I didn’t want to pay admission fee to then go eat expensive theme park food afterwards, so I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and I was getting a bit hangry.

The döner was good, and while waiting in line a group of German-born Danish residents showed up and we chatted a bit in the döner queue. They live down south from me, and they are apparently involved in the Danish bitcoin business and gave me some promotional materials that I could look at if I was interested. I’m not but I will still check out their link out of some odd social obligation. Nick didn’t get anything because he bought a pretzel at a gas station earlier which he refused to eat in my car because “what if he got butter in my car”. I tried to argue but decided to just let him eat his pretzel outside. It’s the least I could do, he did pay the euro for the bathroom so I could piss like a civilized person instead of pissing near a bush like I usually do at german rest stops.

After lunch we headed to our second destination, a place we had heard mentioned as “The secret Stasi hotel”. The description didn’t tell us if it was a hotel that was secretly staffed by members of the East German government, or if it was a secret hotel exclusively for members of the East German government, but when we arrived it became clear it was the second one.

We entered through what was once the servant quarters and vehicle depot, it even had a bus terminal where members of the Stasi could be dropped off and enter the hotel through, without having to step outside.

The hotel had been abandoned mid construction, and we saw on some building materials that they had been delivered about 6 months before the wall fell, so the construction project was probably halted and then postponed and then quietly killed after the two Germanys reunited. There was just no longer a need for a hotel to cater to the East German elite, which was exclusively government workers, and there was no way a luxury hotel like this could survive in what was going to be the poorest region of Germany in the new unified country. Why go to a luxury hotel in a forest outside Berlin when you can go to a nicer one in Bavaria or Austria?

We walked around the place and talked for a long while, and then we got back in the car and drove towards our final stop.

That one turned out to be nothing. Back in the day it was a secret Soviet military base where the USSR hid some of its nuclear arsenal, but by 2026 much of it has been demolished, and since it was about an hour’s hike from the nearest road, and because it was getting late, we decided to skip it and head back to Berlin where I dropped Nick off and continued south.

It was great seeing him. We have known each other for almost a decade, ever since a common online mutual introduced us. It’s funny, neither of us really talk to those people we used to hang out from that group anymore, but we’ve kept in touch with each other. We don’t talk every day or every week, sometimes months pass by between chats, but when we talk it’s never awkward, we always just fall right back in sync and can talk about everything and nothing for hours.

He’s exactly like he is online. He once called himself a “warmduscher” which is German slang for someone who likes comfort, and that’s very on brand. He doesn’t like to go out of his comfort zone and he likes his life simple. It’s very different from how I live but I have nothing but respect for it. I’ve come to really like people that can just enjoy life and who are content living the life they live and who don’t need to constantly be striving towards bigger and better things. It’s a refreshing contrast to how I live, and it gives me perspective.

We said our goodbyes. Nick tried to bribe me into sleeping on his couch with ice cream and other things because he worried I would be too tired to drive and that I would crash, but he knows when he can’t change my mind so he relented and let me go. I wanted to hang out more but I had places to be, and I drove about 5 more hours and crossed into Czechia where I pulled over at a rest stop and tried out the car bed setup I had come up with 20 minutes before leaving for the ferry the day before.

JOURNEY END: GROSS TRUCKSTOP, CZECHIA