Hiking: Sports, nature and tourism

If you hike a beautiful area with a lot of historic cultural sites along with beautiful outlooks on nature, it is hard to maintain the athletic aspects only. Sports physicians define hiking as walking through nature with different type of tracks and at a minimum speed of 5-6 km. It can range from an easy paved road to paved forest trails, rougher track area, different types of soil up to slippery extremely steep serpentines.In most cases the distance ranges between 10 and 30 km per day.

However, there will always be the touristic side of the hike. This means that we need to count sightseeing  ancient castles and other historic cultural sites, different photo stops which shouldn't be missed or just enjoying the scenery. These non-sports activities add  some extra time to the planned hike. We always have to go for compromises because if we want to enjoy nature and culture to the fullest,  the minimum cardiovascular workout cannot be maintained throughout the whole hike. A stretch of app 20 km can easily take around 6-7 hours including all breaks.

This is another part of the Rheinsteig between Braubach and Filsen, alongside the Rhine including steep ascends and descends, partly slippery, partly in forested areas and the other stretch in the hot sunny part along the Rhine

I fell in love with Kalbarri

As the bus entered Kalbarri, my heart was instantly beating faster. It was early evening, the weather somewhat cloudly but I could see the breathtaking view of the Murchison River flowing into the ocean. The surrounding hills and islands seem to welcome me straight away.

I spent 7 days in Kalbarri, Western Australia, enjoyed every single day of it. A lot of fishing with not much more luck than in Cervantes, kanoeing, hiking and leisure walks along the beach. It was the first time that I heard that the name Kalbarri stemmed from the kalba tree. Apart from this I learnt a lot about different types of banksia, learnt about their petals closing when heat was missing and saw quite a few kangaroos which I could never capture in a photo.

It was extraordinary impressive to see a caterpillar formation which I would have run over without the ranger who guided us through the park. I volunteered in the feeding the pelicans attraction and felt that I could imagine living here for a longer period.