Road Trip Day 4 - Munchen to Pfungen (cos it Rhymes)

So this morning we were super efficient at getting organised as we had a deadline to meet and a lot of driving to do. Our deadline was 6:30pm at the Zurich airport to drop Ji off and we also wanted to see a couple of things on the way so we rattled our dags the best ways we knew how. We hit the road at dead on 8am to find another yummy bakery breakfast. We then managed to leave there at our estimated time and arrived at Dachau Concentration Camp at opening time at 9am. It is hard for me to describe anything about going to the camp. I have always been keen to go to a concentration camp, but even that sounds like a terrible thing to say for some reason. So wandering around I was a ridiculous combination of excited/depressed/apprehensive. It was kinda creepy/interesting inside the camp. I have always seemed to struggle to grasp the concept of historic events and visualise what it must have been like at the time but I did my best. Out the front was a memorial/monument to remember the people that died:

The exhibition was really interesting and we had audio guide thingamy jiggers again to talk to us. The best/worst (seems like nothing about a concentration camp can be described with a single adjective) part of this was personal accounts from survivors and people who were involved with the liberation of the people. I learnt quite a bit about how Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power which was good/bad (my learning obviously, not the actual Nazis rising to power, that was definitely bad). There was also some interesting/disturbing information about medical experiments the Nazi doctors carried out on prisoners. The camp was kinda unique in that it was already a prison before the Nazi party existed and slowly evolved as the war progressed to house more people with even less resources. At the peak of the camps use there were barracks designed for 50 people with 400 crammed in them. The camp did have gas chambers for mass executions but there is no accounts of these ever being used. About 30,000 people died at the camp. After the war the Nazi party claimed that American soldiers built the gas chambers themselves to make the Nazi's look bad. Worth a crack Nigel.

So enough of that! We hopped in a car to raced to Neuschwanstein Castle. We arrived at 1pm and were horribly disappointed to find that 80% of it was covered in scaffolding! I mainly blame Grant as he has been whinging about scaffolding so much during this trip that he jinxed it. Such a shame, as it was a fantastic day so we could have got some amazing photos. We decided to line up to have a look inside anyway and found that the first available entry time would be 4pm. It would have then been trick to make the 3 hour drive to get Ji to Zurich so we had to abandon that plan. We decided instead to take the back roads to Zurich and take our time. Which I am pretty stoked about, as we found this:

Bah hah hah, Wank! After some obvious jokes (e.g. that was a good wank, I wonder how big that wank was, hah hah hah...wank...hah hah etc.) we carried on to Zurich and marvelled at the countryside. It was very green and kinda similar to New Zealand but something was a little bit different, I don't really know what though. One thing that was interesting is that there are very few fences. I can only assume that the cows just like their own paddocks so much they never try to leave. Either that or the bloody annoying bells around the necks prevent them from moving to much at a time for fear of going mad.

We arrived in Zurich with enough time to have a quick beer with Ji and an intense conversation about religion (it was only a matter of time!) before Ji left. Then we went to Bea's unkles house in Pfungen which is about 10km out of Zurich where we were lodging for a couple of nights. We had a big yarn to him and a few beers before turning in for the night. Very cool to be staying with locals.