Der Bastei!

On Sunday, we hiked the second stage (Malerweg 2) of the Sächsische-Schweiz Nationalpark, also known as Der Bastei. WOW. One of the most amazing hikes I’ve ever been on. If you haven’t seen it, you should Google pictures of Der Bastei – the rock formations are amazing. Strangely, the topography was kind of like northwestern Arkansas, just stretched high up into the sky. The first leg of the hike, around half an hour, was very steep, but we caught a brief respite at a small café at the top of a hill. The setting was cute, but my favorite part was a small sign that read “Hand in Hand zum Gluweinstand!” Adorable!! By the time we reached Der Bastei itself, the low-hung clouds had started to lightly snow – it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. We harassed a German couple into taking a polaroid picture of us and headed back down the forest floor. The trees were the greenest things I’d seen in months, and it stayed snowing – amazing. We walked through an adorable village, rolled down a field of frozen kale, and made it to the end of the Malerweg half an hour after sunset. Only, it wasn’t…the end? We’d stopped at a lookout point with views of a sweeping valley, but we couldn’t figure out how to down. It turns out that the only way to get off the mountain was to walk through it, meaning a winding jaunt down metal stairs in the pitch black, in a secluded forest with no one around. The mood was lightened, however, by Jules and Katie absolutely launching a banana peel down into the darkness and screaming. We made it to the real end of the hike, only to discover that Katie’s phone was missing (for the second time that day, I might add.) We scrambled to find it before the bus came, and did, but not before I realized that we were at the wrong bus stop. The right one was three minutes away…the bus was coming in two…and that was the last bus for more than an hour. So we sprinted – I mean really tear-assed it – to the next stop, just in time to see bus lights shining through the trees. The relief I felt and the snow falling around us made it feel really cinematic.

We made it back to Dresden, safe and sound, but not before making a new friend – a Brazilian man named Raphael! He heard us speaking English on the bus and told us that he was lost and totally devoid of any German-language skills – we invited him to come eat with us. However, that later proved to be my demise, as I'm pretty sure he gave me covid. My book for the week was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which I read in high school and loved. I had the same feeling this time around – it was great! I think the exploration of what makes a war story a good/true war story is fascinating, and I still am thinking about the chapter where Norman Bowker can’t escape his drive around a lake in Iowa. 9/10 book:

“I was a coward. I went to the war.”

-Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried