FunkyGibbon
Well-Known Member
Personal Background
For those who don’t know I’m going to start off with a little about my personal circumstances. It will help explain how, why and when I travel. As my location shows I currently live in China, but I’m actually from the UK. For the past two years, and hopefully several more in the future, I’ve been teaching English at a university here. One of the perks of this job is that I have two long holidays per year, a second is proximity to a variety of attractive Asian destinations, and a third is that the university pays for a return ticket to my home country once per year (or two singles). This allows me to travel in both Asia and Europe quite cheaply. As an additional bonus, my employer is not at all concerned with the exact details of my flights, as long as they come in under budget. For example, last summer my ‘flight’ from London to Shanghai included a weeklong ‘layover’ in Prague, and a day in Frankfurt. This summer I have all of July and August off and I will spend almost all of that in Europe, including a large chunk of time with family and friends in the UK.
Trip Background
The genesis of the trip I will take this summer, and therefore this thread, was the sudden map-prompted realization that Duisburg and Arnhem are in fact very close together. For whatever reason, I had always assumed Duisburg was in eastern Germany. I think a lot of journeys start this way: “Oh, so I could go there, and then there, and then there!” (Warning: this next section is going to ramble and be incredibly boring. Best to skip it.) For the last couple of years I have had the desire to visit the Netherland’s best zoos. Now I realized I could, and should, combine them with Duisburg and Cologne. But wait, what’s this? As any self-respecting zoonerd knows, the Ruhr (the region where Duisburg and Cologne are located) is rife with good zoos. So much the better. I probably couldn’t visit all of them, but I’d fit the better ones in and not worry about the rest. But then my plans hit another ‘snag’. I want to visit different regions of Europe and the best zoos therein quite methodically, so that over the next five years I hit most of the top-tier collections on the continent. But if I did the Ruhr and Holland this time, when would I realistically visit Belgium, with its three powerful offerings?
Belgium was thus added to the itinerary, and the BenNeRuhr dream took shape. Given the short distances between collections, I decided to do the trip by bicycle. Obviously I would also include non-zoo days in the major cities in the region, as well as any other sights worth seeing. However, the more I planned, the more the trip ballooned as I discovered zoos or other destinations that I couldn’t miss. Eventually it became so unwieldy that I felt I was going to have to make some fairly painful compromises (worth noting that at this point I thought I only had six weeks total in Europe). Luckily, a fresh realization showed me the way forward. Due to some bizarre and as yet unexplained connection between China and Denmark, I have been slowly but steadily acquiring Danish friends here. So the new plan was to visit the Ruhr zoos, then make my way north to the land of pork and Lego, stopping along the way for any noteworthy collections. Belgium and the Netherlands were thus preserved together for a future trip.
(For anyone wondering why I chose the Ruhr over the Netherlands and Belgium this time, it is almost literally as simple as saying I would rather see the last Amazonian River Dolphin in Europe than the last Eastern Gorilla. In general I suspect I will enjoy the Dutch zoos more, but now I won’t know that for a couple of years.)
For those who don’t know I’m going to start off with a little about my personal circumstances. It will help explain how, why and when I travel. As my location shows I currently live in China, but I’m actually from the UK. For the past two years, and hopefully several more in the future, I’ve been teaching English at a university here. One of the perks of this job is that I have two long holidays per year, a second is proximity to a variety of attractive Asian destinations, and a third is that the university pays for a return ticket to my home country once per year (or two singles). This allows me to travel in both Asia and Europe quite cheaply. As an additional bonus, my employer is not at all concerned with the exact details of my flights, as long as they come in under budget. For example, last summer my ‘flight’ from London to Shanghai included a weeklong ‘layover’ in Prague, and a day in Frankfurt. This summer I have all of July and August off and I will spend almost all of that in Europe, including a large chunk of time with family and friends in the UK.
Trip Background
The genesis of the trip I will take this summer, and therefore this thread, was the sudden map-prompted realization that Duisburg and Arnhem are in fact very close together. For whatever reason, I had always assumed Duisburg was in eastern Germany. I think a lot of journeys start this way: “Oh, so I could go there, and then there, and then there!” (Warning: this next section is going to ramble and be incredibly boring. Best to skip it.) For the last couple of years I have had the desire to visit the Netherland’s best zoos. Now I realized I could, and should, combine them with Duisburg and Cologne. But wait, what’s this? As any self-respecting zoonerd knows, the Ruhr (the region where Duisburg and Cologne are located) is rife with good zoos. So much the better. I probably couldn’t visit all of them, but I’d fit the better ones in and not worry about the rest. But then my plans hit another ‘snag’. I want to visit different regions of Europe and the best zoos therein quite methodically, so that over the next five years I hit most of the top-tier collections on the continent. But if I did the Ruhr and Holland this time, when would I realistically visit Belgium, with its three powerful offerings?
Belgium was thus added to the itinerary, and the BenNeRuhr dream took shape. Given the short distances between collections, I decided to do the trip by bicycle. Obviously I would also include non-zoo days in the major cities in the region, as well as any other sights worth seeing. However, the more I planned, the more the trip ballooned as I discovered zoos or other destinations that I couldn’t miss. Eventually it became so unwieldy that I felt I was going to have to make some fairly painful compromises (worth noting that at this point I thought I only had six weeks total in Europe). Luckily, a fresh realization showed me the way forward. Due to some bizarre and as yet unexplained connection between China and Denmark, I have been slowly but steadily acquiring Danish friends here. So the new plan was to visit the Ruhr zoos, then make my way north to the land of pork and Lego, stopping along the way for any noteworthy collections. Belgium and the Netherlands were thus preserved together for a future trip.
(For anyone wondering why I chose the Ruhr over the Netherlands and Belgium this time, it is almost literally as simple as saying I would rather see the last Amazonian River Dolphin in Europe than the last Eastern Gorilla. In general I suspect I will enjoy the Dutch zoos more, but now I won’t know that for a couple of years.)
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It will be nice to have a smaller zoo that is very much not an Usti 
