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Interrail 9b: Basel, faulty – the world’s first ever bike trip

Posted on 19 September 202210 November 2022 by Rob Ainsley

This morning we followed in the footsteps of the world’s first ever bike trip. Literally. Because, on 19 Apr 1943, research chemist Albert Hofmann rode 8km from his lab in central Basel to his house on the outskirts while high on a certain substance he’d just synthesised: LSD.

The trip started here: Novartis campus in Basel, where Albert Hofmann started his visionary bike ride in 1943

It’s a very dull, yet also utterly fascinating, ride. What must it have been like for Al, his field of vision a swirling, hallucinated fireworks display? Buildings turning into flowers, trees coming alive to dance, buses talking and sounds turning into colours? Did he remember to avoid getting caught in the trams tracks, and to give way to the right at crossroads?

The sign at Novartis actually says this. Or maybe I imagined it.

No such psychedelia for us, because we’d had nothing stronger than a coffee from Mannheim station bar. Well, I say coffee. I couldn’t tell what it was. If it was a cappuccino, I wish I’d had chocolate. If it was chocolate, I wish I’d had cappuccino.

Hofmann rode this way. But more colourfully. He thought.

We stopped halfway up to have a drink and snack at a supermarket opposite a school, so I got some sort of kick from my rather delicious custard’n’jam pastry. It was home time, and the car-free access path was chocker with parents on box bikes picking up their kids, as well as commuters zipping past. Like many Swiss towns, Basel has a lot of cyclists, and the infra’s not too bad.

Fewer cars in Hofmann’s day, of course. Just as well.

Anyway, Al made it home in one piece, thanks perhaps to the watchfulness of his assistant, and went straight to bed to sleep off his unintentional overdose. He tried LSD several times later, but at the max on only a tenth of the whopping 250 micrograms he’d taken before his bike ride. His pioneering mind-expansion commute is celebrated by many pharmacological enthusiasts every year who cycle the same route, hopefully without quite so much chemistry involved.

If Hofmann could see one of those now, he’d think he really was tripping

Hofmann’s house is a salubrious semi in a well-to-do residential district. It’s on a main road on a mild hill south of the centre, though nothing that would require any amphetamines for a 1960s Tour de France rider.

End of trip: Hofmann’s house at 39 Oberwilestrasse. Somehow he got there in one piece.

We enjoyed the downhill freewheel back to the city centre and crossed over the Rhine to get back to the station via the old town. Our brief jaunt in Basel was over; we had a train to catch for Freiburg back in Germany. It had been a good little trip, though.

Back to earth: Crossing the Rhine in Basel

Not quite such a good trip for Albert. But as he went on to live to be 102, it evidently didn’t do him too much harm.

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