Hiking report

Hiking from Duisburg Großenbaum to Kettwig!

Late autumn – a horrible period for Germany, at least usually. With this in mind, I was looking at the weather forecast regularly to guess properly how it would be on the upcoming weekends. Of course, it’s not an easy task, and sometimes I expect a horrible weather, only to find out that it turned out be perfectly good. This was exactly the case today – a perfect weather, while I prepared what I’d call a rain-tight track from Duisburg to Essen.

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This being said, it is a beautiful green area that I often choose for winter hikes. So in the end while I gave a short warning in the WhatsApp group, I also added that the area itself would be nice. Maybe because of this, or maybe simply because it was close to many big cities, there were quite a few people joining today.

Frankly, meeting at 10:45 at Düsseldorf Central was already super comfortable. In addition (I mean it’s correlated), it took less than half an hour to get to Duisburg Großenbaum. It was truly a local hike.

There are quite a few stops along the line between Düsseldorf and Duisburg, which appear to be partially fairly redundant. But for this reason we could reach the nature within a few minutes.

Maybe I cannot call it a “highlight”, but there’s this one tower in Duisburg among the 6 lakes from which you can have a great view over the area. And I have to say, the trees are having nice colours now. It’s a transition from autumn to winter, and we can see it even in Duisburg.

As I indicated above, it was a real winter hiking trail today. And with this great weather, not so surprisingly there were a lot of cyclists on the way. These days the conventional cyclists are replaced by senior E-bikers. I personally find it good that there are now people who started cycling thanks to those E-bikes, but it’s still worth mentioning that many of them simply ignore rules. It was a bit frustrating to walk in the forest while hearing the endless bells coming from those E-bikes today. Yet, a good thing about Duisburg is that since it’s flat everywhere, those bikers are distributed thinly over a large area, so we didn’t encounter so many of them at once. It would have been a nightmare along the Ruhr or the Rhine today.

There was a zone of construction work on the way. Actually I was there in 2017 and the construction work was in place at that time as well. I’m wondering whether it’s still continuing from 2017 or it happened again. This might sound like a joke, but here in Germany such a thing is not very uncommon… Anyway we ignored it and crossed the area.

We had a break in this small place called Selbeck. And once again, I prepared my lunch on the spot. This time what I called “curry”. Thanks for your tolerance all the people from India 🙂 Anyway it went perfectly, so I’m gonna look forward to what kind of stuff we are going to make in the future :D.

I was a bit afraid of the concrete roads after the break, but it was in the end not quite as bad as I had imagined. Actually we were partly going along the Neanderlandsteig, which tends to be fairly good (at least relatively).

Besides at the end we were in Kettwig – meaning there was ice cream 🙂

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