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| Beautiful green Black Forest valley |
This morning we headed back to the Black Forest. Our goal was a 1hr walk to Germany’s highest waterfall, which could be accessed from the little village of Triberg, less than one hour’s drive away. We arrived there late morning to find the village stuffed with tourist buses and plenty of sight-seers, here mainly to view the extremely quaint village and buy one of the hundreds of cuckoo clocks which seem to grow on trees here. The world’s original largest cuckoo clock, along with the current world’s largest cuckoo clock, are both located only a few km from Triberg. We saw the first one from the road and thought that was enough cuckoo clocking for us.
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| A friendly squirrel |
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| Waterfall track, Triberg |
We parked in the carpark for the waterfall track, checked we had enough food and water supplies and set off. We were immensely disappointed only 10 mins later to find the track blocked by a manned tariff box, and the requirement to pay a number of euros each to proceed to see the water. However, we could see from the track that the waterfall, in fact a series of small cascades (as shown in a picture on the wall of the tariff box) were only just around the corner, and the 1hr trek was more likely to be only 15mins one way, i.e. only 5min further on. The brook bubbling beside the tariff box did not give the impression of massive cascades upstream so we gave the whole thing away and wandered down the path to the village a bit further below. We did however see a squirrel, and what we realised later were three cuckoos!
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| Appalling tackiness of Triberg |
Triberg village was basically one big cuckoo clock so, after filling up on bread rolls and then a falafel each for the men, we decided to head for a longer track in a nearby town. However, once we arrived there, we decided we may as well keep going to Lake Titisee, the other planned destination for the day, and go for a walk around the lake. It was not to be. Despite following our faithful GPS, and our best efforts of following roadsigns, we seem to have gone in every direction around about Titisee/Neustadt without actually finding the lake. We were getting somewhat frustrated by this time, so we just headed back to Freiberg for a well deserved beer.
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| Monster house-barn |
It is a public holiday today and the supermarkets are all shut. We are virtually out of food so tried a pizza place just down the road for dinner tonight. The pizzas were extremely tasty so we may well go back there again before we leave. Spent quite a while talking over our plans for the next two years, e.g. ferrying some of AJ’s gear from Nelson over to Munich or Sweden, and other logistics between J/K and AJ and Europe/NZ. All great fun.
