Langeoog, Juist, Borkum: Holidays on the East Frisian Islands

2023-09-07 15:37:09

Many Germans seem to have succumbed to beach and holiday nostalgia when looking at the East Frisian Islands. People remember happy childhood days on Wangerooge or have been a regular guest on Norderney for decades, writers write possessively about “Mein Juist” and “Mein Spiekeroog”, others rave about weeks-long holidays on Langeoog or Borkum. We can’t keep up with that, but can only come up with a day trip to Baltrum at best, and so we decided to fill this gap straight away: with island hopping across the seven German places of longing in the North Sea. But that turned out to be far too ambitious an undertaking. We don’t own a boat and there is no direct public transport from island to island because tides and currents are too variable and unstable for regular connections. Excursions from one island to the next rarely take place, and you shouldn’t swim anyway. Some time ago there was an island swim from Langeoog to Baltrum, but despite ship escort and supervision by lifeguards, it was so dangerous that it had to be stopped again. That leaves flights with small propeller planes, but they are extremely expensive.

There is also no point in hoping that the nearest headlands will dock together in the meantime, even if the Hofcafé in Borkum Ostland advertises a deceptive “last beer before Juist”. But that can only be meant as a joke, because the ebb and flow of the dividing streams repeatedly clears them with persistent regularity and the force of nature. So the route from island to island necessarily leads across the mainland, but buses and trains avoid the straight path along the coast and do not always harmonize with the ferries that have changing departure times because they have to adapt to the tides. The three or four kilometers from island to island are only an apparent proximity; Instead, it takes four to five hours to take the detour across the mainland by island train, ferry, bus, train and ferry again. We still tried this type of island hopping, but limited ourselves to three destinations: Langeoog, Juist and Borkum.