Hiking around Duisburg and 6 Seen Platte

This weekend, we were supposed to go to Rurberg over the weekend. Sajjad, being on Ramadan right now, decided to not to join us, but instead organized a short hike in Duisburg (where he lives). However, according to the weather forecast, the polar wind was coming to Europe this week, and the youth hostel in Rurberg was kind enough to allow us to postpone the reservation by two weeks. So, in the end, I was joining the hiking of someone else, for the first time in the VRR area (I’ve already once joined the hike in the VRS area organized by Bhagyashree two years ago).

At the beginning, I was not even really motivated to go hiking with them; Duisburg is simply too flat. Also, it is true that Duisburg has a lot of nature, but the landscape doesn’t really change. You see trees, trees and trees. Anyway, Sajjad made me an organiser as well, so I did my best to make the trail interesting. Here’s the trick: Duisburg has famous lakes, which are mostly not fenced, so that we can walk along the water, and if the temperature is high, we can also enter the water, which was obviously not the case today. Nevertheless, I did the most effort to maximise the paths along the lakes for today’s hike. So after a long consideration, I got the trail as shown above, which might have made you wonder why it looks so aimless and unsettled. Now you know why. Anyway, those who follow the group usually don’t realise how weird the trail actually looks. So even though I got a few comments, I don’t think it was a real problem for anyone.

It was indeed cold today, hard to believe that we were swimming in a river over a year ago. But the sky was bright blue with a few summer-ish clouds here and there. Despite the horribly dry summer last year and the wet spring this year, we could see the vivid green leaves on the trees today.

There is a tower inside the 6 lakes area (on top of the only one hill there). I don’t know what this was originally made for, but anyway we can go up the tower and see the surrounding area. There must be thousands of photos from this place. Nevertheless, I took one.

There is one restaurant inside this area, Haus Seeblick, where we had a break, even though I guess no one had lunch inside (although some people used their WC). It might have been a better idea if we had had the break at the large bridge near the restaurant.

We walked along the artificial canal which is often used for water sports. There was obviously a canoe competition (or something in this sort) taking place when we were there. It is, as a matter of fact, not a place to hike. But compared to other flat places along the water in the Ruhr area, there were clearly less cyclists and the trail was rather stress free. Besides, we could get the first ice cream of this year towards the end.

More about this event can be found on this page. The trail can be downloaded from this link (in kml-format) or this link (in gpx-format).