Brandenburg likes to call the Scharmützelsee its sea, the Märkisches Meer, and from the southern shore at Wendisch Rietz you can see why. The lake stretches away for about ten kilometres towards Bad Saarow, wide enough that on a windy day it throws up proper waves. Wendisch Rietz sits at the southern tip, with a harbour, a beach, holiday homes and a channel linking the lake to the Glubigsee and the waterways beyond. The name hints at the Slavic Wends who lived here before German settlement.
The riding around the lake is a favourite with Berlin bikers on summer weekends. The road along the western shore runs through pine forest with glimpses of water, and the roads north towards the Rauen hills add a little rise and fall, rare in this flat region. Up in those hills lie the Markgrafensteine, two huge granite boulders dragged here from Scandinavia by Ice Age glaciers; one of them was split in the nineteenth century to make the enormous granite bowl that now stands in front of the Altes Museum in Berlin.
Weekends bring traffic, cyclists and police checks, so the busiest stretches are best taken calmly. Weekdays are far quieter. Watch for sand blown onto the road at forest edges and for wild boar at dusk. In the villages, cobbles still appear.
Wendisch Rietz has cafés, ice cream and fish restaurants by the harbour in season. For fuel and a wider choice, Storkow, Bad Saarow and Beeskow are all within easy reach. Bad Saarow, at the other end of the lake, is an elegant old spa town where Maxim Gorky and other writers stayed in the 1920s, and its thermal baths remain a draw.