The excitement of whooshing down Kangaroo Valley’s ‘rapids’ having knocked the beans out of me, I embark with my faithful travel mate on an epic journey back upside the world.

Berlin. At last we locate our hostel. In itself it’s fantastic - clean and with great amenities - but for only €12 a night we know there has to be some catch…and we quickly learn that the descriptive terms ‘happening and funky area’ happen to translate to ’surrounded on all sides by sex shops and strip joints’.

Not to say that the locals aren’t friendly - as we wander past the nearest erotica joint with a pizza in hand and our eyes tactfully averted, a pair of hookers in see-through red fish-nets, a couple of burly, no-necked Soviet-looking security guards and a group of bikers all pause mid-brawl to bid us a schönes abend and guten appetit.

In the evening we catch the underground to Rosenthaler Platz, part of the former east turned super-funky, where friend of friend Adi “keeps” an apartment. I say it so because my understanding is he’s only there when not at his other apartment on one of the North Sea islands or the other one in Lausanne, Switzerland.

But he and his girlfriend are in fact very nice and cook us a delicious meal of many meats, of which I recognize chicken and bacon but am at a loss to identify the rest, though that doesn’t stop me going back for thirds.

From the dinner table by the open window I could have reached out and touched the famed Fernsehturm (East German TV tower) at Alexanderplatz. Probably I would have fallen out the window then, but that’s of little consequence.