Monday, August 25, 2008

Hiking in the woods!

I had an interesting weekend last week. I was enjoying a beautiful evening with barbecue and some new friends on Saturday and to burn all that fat, I accompanied a bunch of people for a hike in the woods of Netherlands.

I had an early Sunday morning and an eventful journey ahead of me. We were to meet at the Driebergen Ziest station to commence our hike. It took me two hours and three trains to reach my first destination. Having said that, I must add that the trains in Holland are incredibly comfortable and fast and very unlike the local trains of Mumbai. I did witness a strange sight in my train from Rotterdam to Utrecht central though. There was a girl with a Mohawk for a hairstyle and if that was not radical enough, she had tricolor hair – blue, shocking pink and black. Little did I know that this was just the beginning of strange visuals for the day!

We were eight of us and a truly international bunch – Danish, Scottish, Indian (yours truly), Dutch, Finnish and New Zealand. We were to walk in the Utrechtse Heuvelrug - an interesting area which has numerous hiking and cycling routes. Armed with maps and apparently a very detailed description, we set out on our beautiful journey. We crossed forests, sands and wide open spaces in our path. We were blessed by great weather during the entire trek. We did have some rain, but this time it felt wonderful. The sound of raindrops falling on the trees was surreal. It felt as if the tall trees were sheltering us against the rain knowing that we were walking underneath them. We did have some strange encounters, like at one point of time, we found ourselves on a queer, rather narrow concrete bridge in the middle of the forest, standing over what looked like a dried up and dirty canal of sorts.

The terrain of our hike was quite diverse. At one moment we will be surrounded by trees and at the next we will suddenly come upon a clearing with sand under our feet and lavender flowers all around. At one such clearing we saw benches strewn around on the sand with placards saying “BAR” or “DANSCIE” on the benches. Just when we thought that this was absolutely crazy, we saw something crazier. A troupe of girls dressed in fancy dress. We wanted to imagine that they were natives of this area – considering many were dressed in animal prints and red Indian clothes. We could not let our imaginations run wild because we realized that we were gatecrashing a student orientation programme. I have never seen an orientation like this in my life.

We were a fun group. Some of us were very imaginative and would think that we were crossing a perilous jungle infested with poisonous mushrooms and green lagoons. What fun! Add to that, we had blueberries, fresh from the shrubs into our mouths – I presume to give us energy! We had an environmentalist amongst us, so many a time, we would stop to look at ants, mushrooms of all kinds and other tiny animal life in the woods.


The berries were not a sustainable source of energy so we had to stop for lunch. We stopped at a small and very dutch town on our way. Very dutch = beautiful homes with large glass windows adorned with plants and knickknacks and no curtains off course. Our lunch was at Lunchen bij de Jonckvrouw. I had a vegetable pie (vegagroente taartje as it was called in the menu) and it was quite something. The portion was huge and the pie was delicious. As we left the eetcafe to resume our hike, we saw another unusual visual. A troupe of bikers, this time, with HUGE Harley Davidson bikes which had equally huge side cars for some reason. Albeit, we were not the only ones in the mood to explore the Netherlands.

The second half of our hike saw us searching for a pyramid. No, the walking had not gone to our heads and we were not imagining that we were in Egypt. Our very detailed description said that there should be a pyramid in our path and we had missed it. So, enterprising as we were, a few of us decided that we will unearth the pyramid of Netherlands. We did find the pyramid and the picture says it all. It was a huge structure in the middle of nowhere and you had to pay to climb it. We decided to pass the climbing and were happy only to discover the pyramid of Netherlands.

We walked from 11 in the morning to about 5:15 in the evening that Sunday and me and one of the ladies from the hike also sprinted briefly to catch our train to Rotterdam. For me, it was a Sunday well spent and I am looking forward to doing something like this again.

For those of you who would want to try the hike, check out this link – http://www.eropuit.nl/uitje/title/UtrechtseHeuvelrugwandeltocht/id/1000037/. The information is in dutch, but then what is google translate for.

So, this time, Happy Hiking people!

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the write up is simply amazing. what makes it all the more appetizing is your soulful usage of words. am sure those who have been folling your blogs would be in complete agreement with me when i say that you have a distinguised syle of potraying your thoughts,some of it so mesmerizing that it actually trasports you and makes you feel as if the reader was a part of it himself....a prodigious piece of work once again....take care and keep writing...luv, partho

Anonymous said...

Hey buddy, it's been a long time since your blog got updated. hoping to see u back soon .. best rgds,partho

package holidays italy said...

Thanks for the great read. I’m getting “Reise Fieber” as they say in German, just watching the gorgeous pictures … such a beautiful world !