It’s quiet. All I can hear is the sound of wind whizzing by my ears and the ticking of my rear hub as I coast along a paved path into the countryside. The lush greenery and forests flitting into my peripheral vision from either side of the mostly asphalted path, interlaced with occasional crushed limestone, trick me into thinking I’m hours away from the city.

But the fact is, I never left. In reality, I’m cycling along the scars of one of the most infamous, deadly paths created in the history of humankind. This is the Berliner Mauerweg or Berlin Wall Trail – a 100-mile path that traces the remains of what was once a heavily fortified military barrier that turned West Berlin into a political island for 28 years. Now, what remains of the purpose-built wall designed to prevent people escaping from East Berlin to the West during the Cold War is a veritable hidden gem right under the nose of anyone visiting the German capital.

Even Germans themselves are often unaware that the trail extends well beyond the historical markers turned tourist sites of the city centre, to create a complete 100-mile loop that anyone can cover on two wheels. This is despite the fact that hundreds if not thousands regularly commute along the Mauerweg as it cuts across the Spree River, around Brandenburg Gate, and into the heart of the city where landmarks like Checkpoint Charlie stand as stark reminders of how far Berlin has come.

I first rode along the Mauerweg about a decade ago with Sascha Möllering, a Berlin on Bike tour guide. Möllering was 15 years old, living in the leafy West Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde, when an East German bureaucrat by the name of Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that travel restrictions to the west would be lifted immediately. It was November 9, 1989, not quite a year after Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, confidently declared that “the Wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.”

I hopped on near Schönefeld in the southeastern corner of the city where you can find a rare patch of dirt trail that turns into the aptly named Grenzstraße (Border Street) before alternating between crushed limestone gravel and smooth asphalt. My goal was to wrap around the city, following the path as it turned into a kind of bike highway adjacent to the Autobahn, until I met with Jonny Whitlam at a memorial for Chris Gueffroy, the last person shot trying to escape the Berlin Wall.

Whitlam, a British tour guide specializing in German and Berlin history, explains that Gueffory was convinced to attempt his escape after rumors started circulating that East Germany had dropped its shoot-to-kill orders. Plus, the Swedish Prime Minister was in town. Surely they wouldn’t shoot an unarmed civilian during such a high-profile visit. So alongside a friend, Gueffroy made a run for it along the very same path on which I’ve just cycled.

The following year, he took another ride along the Berlin Wall. This time he followed the former “death strip”—a 100- to 300-foot-wide no-man’s-land sandwiched between the wall’s eastern and western barriers. This strip was once a grim gauntlet for East Germans attempting to escape, where they encountered barbed wire, guard towers with armed soldiers, alarm systems, trip wires, and even a brutal device known as “Stalin’s Lawn,” a patch of 12-inch metal spikes clustered along the wall’s edge.

‘Huge unfulfilled potential’

Asaf Leshem has faced just about every challenge while cycling along the Mauerweg, from mechanicals to negotiating sections covered by eight inches of water after heavy rainfall. But that’s all par for the course, he says. “Riding 100-miles is always a bit of an adventure,” he says.

Leshem is skeptical of my admittedly far-fetched, utopic dreams of similar trails along borders in the Middle East or through the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula. Those regions, he believes, are too dangerous to cycle around like the Iron Curtain trail – another Michael Cramer project that traces the former border of the Eastern European communist bloc known as EuroVelo 13.

Then again, he admits that no one could’ve imagined cycling the Berlin Wall for fun back in 1988. And after offering his Iron Curtain Trail example, he says, “But who knows… people cycle today between the ex-Yugoslavian countries.”

For Leshem, the real lesson of the Mauerweg is that there’s a billion euro industry in the middle of the city that could (and should) be extended to other corners of Berlin.

“Half [of the industry] revolves around the topic of the Wall and the Cold War,” he says. “However, when it comes to the rest of the Mauerweg (the western and southern parts), most of what I see every time I ride is a huge unfulfilled potential for cycling, education, and nature tourism.”

The fact that the Mauerweg exists seems like an anomaly, unthinkable within my lifetime. I can only imagine what my parents would’ve thought in 1989 if they knew that not only would their son one day live in Berlin, but that he’d regularly enjoy running around along the scars of the wall. They probably would’ve thought I was bonkers. But it’s here. It exists. Not only does it exist, but it officially opened just 12 years after that fateful night on November 9th, 1989.