It was Tuesday evening and I was staring at Google Maps in my Berlin apartment, drawing lines that connects lakes and canals and campsites like I was planning a small expedition. The plan was for the weekend. Diego was coming. I had an inflatable kayak. We had Deutschlandtickets. What could possibly go wrong.
The answer, it turns out, is about four kilometers of forest — and then, the next day, one very large lake.
Getting out of Berlin
Müritz National Park sits about an hour north of the city by train — RE5 to Neustrelitz Hbf, then the RE50 one stop further to Kratzeburg. That’s it. You step off the platform and you’re basically already in it: lakes in every direction, pines, the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring a little after a week in Berlin.
The park’s real trick is that every lake connects to every other lake. Canals, rivers, short portage tracks — the whole thing is designed around people moving through it slowly, on water. You can chain lakes together for a full day of paddling and always find a campsite somewhere along the way.
At least, that’s the idea.
The plan (and why it got ambitious)
I’d done this trip the year before and stayed at Campingplatz Zum Hexenwäldchen — a great little site in a location that lets you do a clean two-day loop without ever leaving the water. This year I tried to book it again. Fully booked. So I went back to Google Maps and started drawing.
Diego and I are casual kayakers — we’ve done this a few times, enough to know what we’re doing but not enough to double-check anything. I traced a route connecting a handful of lakes with what looked like a thin white line on the map. Obviously a canal. Had to be.
We inflated the kayak at the put-in, loaded it up with the food we’d brought from Berlin (the campsite cooking situation is honestly half the fun — camp stove, pasta, whatever bread hadn’t gotten crushed in the train), and pushed off.
The first few hours were everything you want. Flat water, forest on both sides, the occasional other kayak drifting past with a wave or a “Moin.” Swimmers near the shore. A couple of kids jumping off a little wooden dock. The water is clean enough that stopping to swim in the middle of a lake isn’t a decision, it’s just what you do.
The missing canal
Then we reached the gap.
The plan was to paddle from Zotzensee into Woterfitzsee — and on Google Maps, there was a clear blue line between them. Same shade, same thickness as every other river we’d been following all day. A waterway. Obviously.
It wasn’t. There is no canal, no river, nothing connecting those two lakes. Google was wrong.
We paddled back and forth trying to find an entrance. All to no avail. I felt terrible. Diego shrugged. “So we walk.”
So we walked. We deflated the kayak, rolled it up, distributed the gear, and carried everything four kilometers through a dense forest to Leppinsee. And here’s the thing nobody warns you about when your plan falls apart: sometimes the plan falling apart is the best part. The forest was so quiet we could hear our own footsteps. No cars, no people, no phones with signal. Just us, a rolled-up boat, and the sound of wind in the pines. It ended up being the stretch of the trip I remember most clearly.
Leppinsee
We came out of the trees at Naturcamping Leppinsee, run by Haveltourist, and it was exactly what you hope for after an unplanned hike: space on the grass, a spot near the water, neighbors who nod and leave you alone. We swam until we were cold and cooked pasta on my little gas stove as the light started to go.
Later that night we wandered over to the campsite store and bought sausages, figuring we’d grill them. Small problem: no charcoal. We were standing there holding a bag of sausages and looking mildly defeated when a group a few spots over waved us over and told us to use their fire. So we cooked over their coals, ate with them, stayed there.
There was a band playing that night — a group doing American country music, at a campsite in northern Germany, to an audience of people in wooden benches. Country music at a campsite in northern Germany.
Later, the sky. There’s no light pollution out there. None. When it got fully dark the stars came out in a way they don’t really come out in a city — the Milky Way, plain as a smudge. We sat on the bench over the dock and looked up for a while. Then the cold woke us up and we crawled into the tent. A good day.
Day two, or: I underestimated a lake
The plan for day two was elegant on paper. Paddle from Leppinsee through a canal into Woterfitzsee, work our way west through a chain of small lakes and canals until we hit the Müritz, then cross it south to Mirow and catch the train home. A long day, but a clean line on the map.
The morning was easy. Small lakes, narrow canals, the water glassy and the sun still low. Somewhere along the Bolter Kanal, right by the old Bolter Schleuse lock, we spotted a place called Müritzfischer Fischers Land Boek — the full name is Fischer- und Angelhof Bolter Schleuse, which tells you exactly what it is: a working fisher’s and angler’s yard, with a restaurant attached, sitting right on the canal at the edge of the national park. We pulled up to the bank, tied the kayak to a post, and climbed out still a little damp. It’s the kind of place locals rate highly and cyclists plan whole routes around — they smoke their own fish, and you can eat it at outdoor tables looking straight back at the water you just came in on. We ordered two alkoholfrei beers and the local fish soup, and sat there for a while not being in any hurry. The kayak bobbed on its line below us. Boats drifted past. You could feel yourself thinking, yeah, this is why we came.
Then the Müritz.
The Müritz is the largest lake lying entirely within Germany — about 117 square kilometers of water, 29 kilometers from top to bottom. Out on a small lake, a kayak feels like the right tool. Out on the Müritz, it starts to feel like a leaf. The wind was up. The waves were bigger than anything we’d hit the day before. It wasn’t brutal — just that every stroke did noticeably less than it should have, and the far shore stayed stubbornly far. You could feel the scale of it in your shoulders.
We paddled south for a long time. Mirow was the goal. Mirow stayed theoretical. Somewhere around mid-afternoon we pulled into Rechlin, looked at how much lake was still between us and Mirow, looked at each other, and quietly agreed we were done. Not the ending I’d drawn on the map. But pulling out in Rechlin, sitting on the grass next to the deflated kayak, neither of us wished we were still out there. We caught a bus from Rechlin to Kratzeburg, where a train was waiting to take us back to Berlin.
The practical bit
If you want to do something like this:
Take the RE5 from Berlin to Neustrelitz Hbf, then the RE50 to Kratzeburg. The whole journey is about an hour. Rentals for kayaks and canoes are easy to find around the train station — or bring an inflatable like we did.
For campsites, I’d recommend Campingplatz Zum Hexenwäldchen if you can get a spot — its location makes a two-day loop work without any portaging or big open-water crossings. Book early; it fills up fast in summer. Naturcamping Leppinsee is an excellent plan B and a great place in its own right. Bring your food from Berlin; the selection in town is thin. And bring charcoal, or be friendly.
Two things I’d pass on from this trip: don’t plan on Google Maps, use an outdoor map. And respect the Müritz — if the wind is up, plan a route that keeps you in the smaller lakes and canals. Trust me on this one.
Or don’t. The fish soup was worth it.