Hiking in Witten!

Today was the last day, that the railway stations in the Wuppertal region were still working. From tomorrow on, the entire region will be closed down until the end of summer. There’ll be buses, but it won’t be the same.

This was partially the reason (another reason explained below), why I chose Witten, which is a bit far away from Düsseldorf, because the direct train to Witten does not go through Wuppertal. Since it had really good references here, I was quite looking forward to this hike. Since it was too far away from Düsseldorf and it was not shown in the list of events nearby from Düsseldorf, I had to create two separate events.

Just as last week, I was expecting a lower number of participants. But still it was somewhat surprising that there were only about 20 people that came. Related to this, there’s something I’m not so sure about. That’s whether it’s better to choose locations far away from Düsseldorf, or nearby. On the one hand, students do not really care where it is, because with their powerful semester tickets they can go everywhere within North Rhine Westphalia. However, since we’re in the middle of exam preparation period, there are not many students. On the other hand, there’ll be more technical problems if we go far away, as we saw at Königswinter. The probability of having a problem is relatively small if the number of participants is low.

With all this in mind, I thought it would be good to have something somewhere in between. However, there was another problem: since there were not many students, we did not have so many people, who could take other people for free. For the distance to Witten, the price would be 15 €. Hm, somehow it’s stupid to pay.

Fortunately, there were just enough people to carry everyone for free. Anyway, the inspector, who showed up today exceptionally, did not even control my ticket. I don’t know what he was doing. By the way, not to mention that we had a delay of 20 min (and had another delay on the way back home).

Witten, the limit of VRR region, was the most eastern city we’ve seen so far. And it’s along the Ruhr river, so it was somewhat similar to Kettwig, Werden and Stehle. It appeared to me a bit strange to hike in a hilly place. The great view over the Ruhr is reminiscent of these cities. And just as these places, it has a great mixture of forests and fields. So the landscape varied a lot today.

After last week’s hike, there was an outbreak of ticks in the WhatsApp group. Sure, we were sitting in the middle of nowhere in the forest. In order not to make the same mistake, we walked more to find a field. The first photo of this article is what we found at the end. Under a bit cloudy sky and in the comfortable temperature with a little bit of breeze, it was the perfect place to have a break.

Usually, I make my 1 liter box full when I go to work, which is what I did for today. Not good to eat too much…

Regarding the distance, today’s hike was not very different from last week, but we had the feeling that it was much easier. The exact reason is not clear, but maybe the landscape changed a lot today and we did the break after we completed half of the hike.

Fortunately, Witten was large enough to have a market place, so that we could stay there after the hike for a beer or ice cream. I must say, it was one of the best locations we’ve seen so far. I’ll certainly organize other sessions nearby.

Following day, something really weird happened to me. As you probably already know, I organize my hikes on couch surfing. At the same time, I post them on the Facebook page “NRW hiking group”. This Facebook page is actually not so important to me, but when I arrived here in Düsseldorf, I signed up for this group, with the hope that there’d be regular hikes around this area. In reality, it turned out there was nothing. That was also partially the reason why I started organizing hikes myself. Anyway, I post my hikes there, because I wished there was someone doing so at that time. Now in summer, there are sporadically hikes organized by other people as well, but virtually none of them take place in North Rhine Westphalia, and they are too far away for me.

So here’s the weird thing: the admin of the group contacted me, saying in her capacity of this group’s admin she was ordering me to refrain from posting my hikes in the group because they were in competition with other hikes. It was a rapid ultimatum, with no offer for talks.

I left the group quickly. After all, I don’t have to be blamed for doing something to make other people happy. But this was not the important point for me. The thing is, I was extremely surprised that she saw it as a “competition”. Whether people come with me or not is not my business, because they go wherever they want to go and they do whatever they do according to their free will. So in this sense, those who come with me are not the members of my hiking group, but independent hikers who go the same way as I do. I can’t possibly consider them like pieces of chess and count how many of them belong to me. For the heaven’s sake no.

Moderating a group is a difficult thing. Especially because I know and I want that people behave just as they do. In this sense, what the moderator is supposed to do is to take a collective decision, which would be one of those which could be naturally taken by everyone, like the duration or location of a break. I truly enjoy the complexity of being ergonomically flexible. Especially, this ill-defined concept of “moderator” leads to ramifications of various ideologies, paired with the various backgrounds of people we meet there. So some people propose new things. Others tell me they don’t take any decision and just follow me, which itself is in fact a decision.

All this is like a smaller version of what the society is about. And I don’t want to forget that I am not doing this job because I am in any way better than anyone else. Anyone could do the same job and it’d certainly work out just as well.

The admin made a clear distinction between “we” and “you”. For her, there are probably her group, and separately, people like me, who are not part of the group. And this notion of group must have led to the idea of “competition”. I don’t think the same way, because whether we go hiking together or not, there is no group (just as there is not even any group in the internet). We’re independent hikers with free will. So what matters, it not the group, but between you and me.

The trail can be downloaded from this link (kml-format) or this link (gpx-format)