A couple of days ago I got to tick off one of the very first items I added to my Google Map when I started thinking about this trip. And that was to see the Bastei Bridge.

I went along with Genaro, Yavuz, Patricia and Boci. It was only a 40min train trip to get there. But from there we had to take a ferry across the river, the trip being a total of about 10 seconds to get across. Then we wandered around the little village on the other side for a bit trying to figure out where to go. Then we discovered the tourist information place was way over the other side, so we walked there only to find it was closed. But they had some maps and stuff so we finally figured out which path to take.

The one that we did take was about a 3 hour hike in total all along the river and then back through to forest up to the bridge and back to the start. It was a great walk (except for all the bugs along the river) and the forest was really nice and there were some awesome sandstone structures along the way.

After a certain point we were starting to wonder if the bridge existed at all. Every time we passed a sign the time it listed to the bridge seemed to be barely decreasing. After about 2 hours we were walking along a dirt path and about 50m away through the trees we saw a bus. Turns out the bridge wasn't as far in the wilderness as we were expecting. There was even a hotel about 100m from it.

But we finally did make it and it was pretty awesome. There were some great views around. But really the walk itself was probably as good as the bridge. When we got back to the town we grabbed some hotdogs and beer and then went home exhausted.