At the start of November the weather was clear and sunny and Autumn was still brightening up the countryside, the perfect time for my second Düsseldorf hike! This time I picked a hike starting from within the city itself, sticking quite close to its edges but nonetheless taking in some proper countryside. I love the feeling of walking out of a place on foot and arriving in somewhere that feels completely different, sometimes within a few minutes.
After a 10 minute S-Bahn journey I reached my start point in Gerresheim, now an outer district of Düsseldorf, though once its own town/village. The station is located next to the rather desolate-looking building site where a huge old glassworks is being torn down. But after 5 minutes of walking along a main road I turned off east and was immediately looking over fields, with the bright (if low) late autumn sun highlighting the golden clumps of trees on the high ground across the valley. I took so many photos in the first hour of my walk, slightly drunk on all that nature (well, very cultivated, but still alive) after a while away.
I wound on, passing forest, then railway, then horses, then a skate park, then an old castle, a patchwork of town and country where Düsseldorf peters out. Eventually I reached the Rotthaeuser Bachtal, a valley just over the hill from Düsseldorf but already a different world, winding along through yellow-orange beech forests, passing serene fishing ponds, old farmhouses, cows and fields. There was also a lot of mud, but I'm well used to that. As I may have said before, walking near Düsseldorf is much more like Buckinghamshire than Austria was, and I know deep black muddy woodland paths well from my youth as a scout.
My route finally led me over a blustery, scrubby hill and back into town proper, passing a petrol station and some houses before turning outwards again, threading past a golf course and over an area used as a glider launching site. The clouds had rolled in by this time and the wind turned cold and biting as I walked over the featureless grass, with the windsock on the horizon. Eventually I found myself back in autumnal forest, albeit on paved roads. This was the park-like Stadtwald (or Aaper Wald), full of families, joggers and dog walkers enjoying a slightly less muddy dose of the almost-natural.
I got a bit lost looking for a geological site of interest marked on my map. Although I was led to expect a dramatic boulder, I eventually found a small, mossy and overgrown pile of damp rocks, little bigger than a meter across. Lucky I'm a geologist, otherwise I would have been disappointed! As it started to rain as forecast, I walked briskly downhill, luckily discovering a tram stop practically inside the woods, leading directly back to my flat!
As always, my favourite pictures are uploaded and
can be found by clicking on these words that I am writing here.
Happy new year and bis bald!
Der Tom
