Rostock provides gateway to rural province

When cruise ships dock in Rostock, buses lie at the ready to carry hundreds of passengers to Berlin. For many foreign visitors, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is little more than a stretch of land to be covered en route to their destination. They don't know what they're missing.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern attracts more tourists than any German province other than Bavaria. Oddly enough, however, barely one percent of these visitors is American. Indeed, few Americans have even heard of this province in the new Germany's northeast corner.

Despite its high tourism ranking, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-East Pomerania) is by no means overrun by tourists. In fact, much of the province is pristine, protected wilderness. Most tourists congregate in a handful of coastal "resorts" and sleepy fishing villages along the Baltic. And, since towns are spread sparsely along the coastline, most of the beaches beyond the outskirts offer total refuge and privacy.

Just inland from the Baltic, the moors, heaths and woodlands of the coastal plain build gradually toward a distinctly rural landscape of rolling hills, meadows, farmland and dense forest. Farther south, the fields and forests are broken up by the 1,750 lakes of the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau, Germany's most sparsely populated region.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is perhaps the country's least changed province, mostly untouched by war, the DDR times or commercialism. The cities are small, and the few towns and villages that break up the countryside seem like snapshots from the 1930s. Many are destinations unto themselves with architectural, cultural and culinary delights and with views both into centuries of history and into decades under Soviet control.