Left early this morning for the 4hr drive to Dresden. After about 2hr I took a detour to see something amazing. The world's largest brick bridge. This 78m tall, 574m long, 180,000T, 26 million brick Goltzschtal Bridge has been described as the 8th Wonder of the world. Built from 1846, by 1,736 workers (1300 accidents and 31 lives lost). It was pretty amazing to see this in the middle of nowhere. If anyone is interested - it was all to do with the surrounding soil and the alum for the mortar!! It was by now pretty obvious I was in what was East Germany. The buildings and cities looked really drab, and you could tell the Soviet influence on the whole area (it was only in Oct 1990 that the commies gave it up). Nowhere more so than in my next stop Chemnitz, about an hour up the road. This industrial city (it made the engines for the Panza tanks in WW2) was given to the Soviets on May 8th, 1945, and in 1953 was renamed Karl-Marx-Stad. The reason for my visit was to see one of the largest busts in the world. Over 7m tall and weighing 40T the Karl Marx monument was to underscore the political stance of the ruling powers of the time. Kind of weird because Marx had never been in the town. It was pretty impressive. The town itself was re-modelled by the Soviets with huge wide streets and communist era flats and government buildings. From there I made the trek to see the Colditz Castle.The castle gained international infamy as the site of Oflag IV-C, a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II for "incorrigible" Allied officers who had repeatedly attempted to escape from other camps. It was also to feature in a couple of great BBC series and a movie. The museum was pretty good as it focused on all the escape attempts. Interesting that the French had 12 successful attempts and failed 12 times whilst the Poms had 11 successes (including one home run all the way to Britain) and 109 failures. Perhaps the most audacious attempt was to build a glider in the roof!! All in all a great day of exploration. Dresden tomorrow!!
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