Hiking report

Hiking near Wetter!

Right after the hike in Witten, I absolutely wanted to go back to that region. Even though my colleague who comes from Witten doesn’t really agree, it was marvelous. Not quite surprisingly, I came up with a hiking path very quickly. Without even checking it out, I approved it and put the hike in the internet this week. Couple of weeks ago, I cared about the hiking paths. Now I just invent a hiking path and post it online, without even knowing what it may possibly look like and without checking it out beforehand. The risk of having a horrible path is high, but this way I can make the hikes more sustainable. At the same time, it’s not like I have no idea at all now.

Due to the train ticket issue, most of the people who join us regularly live in the Ruhr region, north of Düsseldorf. Since the hike was in the Ruhr region today, there was almost no one at the train station in Düsseldorf. Luckily for me, Ankur came, who saved my train ticket.

It’s true that around Cologne is extremely beautiful, but the region around the Ruhr river is also extremely beautiful, even though the name Ruhr is not something people associate beauty with. I myself didn’t know it either before I came here. It’s a pity that there are also quite a lot of cities very close to the river.

Already yesterday, I didn’t talk much, but today, I was essentially only walking. Just as yesterday, I was still enjoying the nature, so it was perfectly fine for me. A difficult thing is that there are still some people who think I’m not fine. Actually, there’s a slight difference between different cultures. Here in Germany, it’s not particularly a problem not to talk. So it happens every now and then, that no one is talking over meal for example. In the southern countries, like Spain for example, people feel uncomfortable when there’s someone who doesn’t talk. It looks funny when I see Spanish people asking Germans if they are fine when they are not talking. And Germans often don’t understand why they ask it at the first place. 🙂

Just as yesterday, there was no café or what so ever on the way. Actually it’s not easy to find something between the Wupper and the Ruhr, except at Velbert and Hagen. We simply decided to stay in a large field in the middle of nowhere.

The discussion that I had there was not directly related to the hike, but after yesterday’s hike, there was Rally from Korea, who was saying that she’d go to the “Middle East”. Specifically, she said, Turkey and India. When I talk about the Middle East, I don’t really think of Turkey and India. We all more or less agreed. Now the question was, what’s Turkey then? This became even more difficult, as we had two Turks there, both of whom from Istanbul, but one from the Western and the other one from the Eastern part. They themselves did not know exactly which region Turkey belonged to. Now looking up on Wikipedia, I found out that Turkey is included in the Middle East, even though I’m pretty sure that the region that Rally is going to visit is the European part of Turkey (and maybe this Wikipedia article is also politically motivated). What do you think?

The total distance of today’s hike was something like 15km, but it felt much more because of the hills, which is a great feature of this region, too. Still maybe I should have underlined it at the end of the hike to make newcomers understand that normally it’s easier.

Since we usually hike in small cities, when we crash an ice cream parlor, we not only occupy all the tables, also we drive away all the people there. It’s often clear that they never see this number of people. Fortunately, we never had a problem so far. Maybe I should make a reservation beforehand from next time on 🙂

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

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