Hiking report

Hiking to Dutch-Belgian-German border at Aachen!

Hiking in the Netherlands is not quite what people look forward to, since most of the Netherlands is indeed quite flat. The weird thing is, Belgium is not so flat. And this NL-BE-DE triple point happened to be the highest point in the Netherlands (or at least nearby). I mean, highest is still something like 300 m, but nevertheless, it is still abroad for us. It’s exciting 🙂

Quite visibly, everyone was just as excited: on couchsurfing, there were more the 100 people signing up for the event. Obviously not everyone came in the end, but still I could see high expectations.

Despite their high expectations, I wasn’t so sure if the trail would be a good one. Actually we’ve already been to the triple point before, going through a different trail. To be honest, that one was overly complicated and not that beautiful, even though I had put existing hiking paths together. This time, the trail was very much random. So even though I knew it wasn’t nonsense, I didn’t expect this one to be particularly beautiful.

I was wrong. Starting from the amount of up and down to the variety of landscapes, it was a very nice hiking trail. The only one thing is maybe we should have left Aachen more quickly. But Aachen still being an important city, maybe we should be happy that we didn’t have to spend half a day roaming around the city to start hiking.

I know that the border isn’t well marked around this area, but still I hoped there’d be a “welcome” sign on the way. On my phone, I knew that we crossed the border to Belgium at some point, but there was nothing on the trail. Well, when we crossed the border to the Netherlands last time, there was only a sign which enlisted things that are forbidden in the Netherlands. Maybe it’s better not to have a sign at all.

In contrast to the quiet forest, there was a mass of people at the triple point, which of course is also a famous touristic point. As far as I know, there are toilets only in the two restaurants there. On the door of one of them, it was written that the toilets are only for customers, but it looked very much like everyone was simply using it.

There’s also one tower at the triple point, which you can climb up for 4€. It’s just a tower, but for this price it might be worth visiting it.

The way back to Aachen was more pastoral. There was even a vending machine of fresh milk.

By the time we arrived at Aachen, the group was stretched in every direction. This group being so large, a priori it wasn’t a surprise that we ended up with fewer people… I just hope everyone went back home correctly. Anyway, the city of Aachen is also an interesting place. We could do a small sightseeing as well.

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

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