Hiking report

Hiking around Bottrop

There are a few places in NRW, which appear so unlikely to be a place for hiking. Bottrop is surely one of them. Since it’s not really possible to visit this area in the summer, when we want to do a real hike, I decided to organise a hike today, when the weather is supposed to be horrible and cold.

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This year, however, for some reason we’ve had really so much luck, that it really never rained. Today, not only it didn’t rain, but also we got a really good weather. It was a total overkill to offer a trip to Bottrop, but nevertheless, that’s what we did.

At the (Bottrop) central station, I first had to control everyone’s vaccine status. As Zaman was there today, I made him start the hike, while I was doing the control. Just like every time, this allowed me to stick to the tail of the group, so I didn’t even have to check the trail throughout the day. What a comfortable way.

I was really unsure about today’s hike, since I knew really little about Bottrop. Besides it looked horrible at the beginning, at least until we reached the highlight of the day, Halde Beckstraße. This one was not the most famous Halde in this area, but still one that was interesting enough. For those who don’t know what a Halde is: This is an artificial hill that was created with the soil produced after the coal mining in the past. Apparently it was really just a hill before, but since it didn’t look particularly good, they decided to make a nice tourist attraction out of it. Now it looks sort of okay, but since the coal mining soil is relatively poor, it’s usually not a very green area.

Anyway, there was this one weird frame standing on top of it. We could walk on top of it and have a great view over the entire area. To be honest, the Ruhr area is not the most beautiful place, but fortunately everything was so far away that it looked kind of nice anyway.

I stayed in this thing for quite some time, so that I kind of lost everyone in the meantime. I just simply kept going with Soumil. The area after the Halde was not particularly interesting. Well, this is Bottrop after all, what do you expect?

We had break in front of one museum. I kind of wanted to avoid creating a large group, but since there was hardly anyone nearby, I guess today it didn’t become a problem.

After the break, the area didn’t even look like Bottrop: there was a lot of trees and hardly any structure. I mean, of course it was more like an illusion, because behind those trees there was industry. Still, it was nice to walk in such a welcoming area.

And there was some stuff to see 🙂

As we found out, the train station where the hike finished was not quite in service. Well maybe it was, but at least there was no train coming when we arrived there. Since the hike itself was relatively short, we decided to walk back to the central station. We then took a train back to Essen and back to Düsseldorf. I could still get an ice cream in Essen. Perfect!

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Shrijal Pradhan
2 years ago

Thank you for the nice pictures