In celebration of the relaunch of GipfelReisen.de I will post seven of my most favorite hiking videos for the coming week.<\/p>\n
I’ll start with a trip in the very South-East of Germany which I consider to probably be the best trip combination I ever did. Combining secret tunnels, a James Bond loft, a golden elevator, Indiana Jones, tobogganing and even Nazis.<\/p>\n
We start in the town of Berchtesgaden where mining has been a big business. You can still visit the shafts with a train, but much more interstingly are some secret (yet still accesible) tunnels<\/strong> I found on my map. We made our way through some of these very narrow tunnels (minute 2:00) leading up to a rather\u00a0forgotten German valley where we stayed at a mafia-like villa<\/strong> on the hillside. I still don’t know how I was able to book that thing for pretty much nothing (4:30). It was so spooky staying in it for the night (5:30).<\/p>\n As it was raining the next day, we combine the upcoming trip by both walking and taking the bus for one trip to the highest bus stop<\/strong> of Germany (7:00). It is a spectacular road, built during the Hitler era. The bus stop is right on another tunnel entrance that leads into a mountain, once used by Nazis (7:45). Right in the middle of the entrance there is a golden elevator<\/strong>, that takes\u00a0you straight up through the mountain massif to the top of the so-called Eagle’s Nest<\/strong> (8:00).<\/p>\n The building on top was the secondary seat of Hitler’s government. The fog on that day does not do it’s position on the top of everything justice, but it underlines the dark past of this place. A lot of more strange things can be found at „Obersalzberg“ but for now, we decided to talk a walk towards Buchenh\u00f6he, which was like a spooky ghost town and the road used for the motorbike scene in Indiana Jones 3, none of which I unfortunately caught on camera.<\/p>\n Even more overgrown passages lead us more and more towards „Zinkenkopf“, a mountain top right at the Austrian border (10:00) where we finally find\u00a0a place to eat. We need to catch a train on the Austrian side to get back and it is\u00a0still a long hike, so we are\u00a0able to shorten it by using a steep Toboggan <\/strong>right to the city of Hallein (11:00). I LOVE this system by the company Brandauer as it’s monorail-kind basis is really frightening and fast. Sadly, they’re not built anymore. Already afternoon, it was then just a straight walk through a wild and muddy gorge until the trail lead us back to civilized roads into the scenic alleys of Hallein with its train station (13:30).<\/p>\n I don’t think you could combine anything more in a 2 days hiking trip. Fantastic! If only Berchtesgaden would not always welcome us with rain. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n