SOAKING UP A
I AM in the land of the Brothers Grimm. Germany’s Black Forest. Home of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and cuckoo clocks.
We have set off on a four-day hike through a western edge of this 6000 square kilometre forest, famous as much for its wine, schnapps, pork and venison as it is for its majestic views across rolling folds of dark mountains, revealing keyhole glimpses of faraway, medieval towns through gaps in the foliage.
We step out on the first morning from the Adler Hotel in the countryside at St Roman into heavy fog and rolling banks of cloud. I am uncertain how this first day will go. We have been warned about how quickly the weather can change and the need to be prepared. I am thinking, too, as we walk beside the high netting fence that is the Adler’s deer farm, about the trail markers. Will they be positioned correctly? Will they be at points where the trail intersects with other trails? One misplaced marker can turn the day upside down. Are we carrying enough warm clothing to keep warm if the weather drops below zero? The weather forecast had been for wet weather all week, which meant packing wet weather gear as well as warm clothing. Fog comes in quickly as we cross a meadow that leads to the forest beyond. We walk on into the land of trees where Hansel and Gretel were lured into the house made of cake and lollies by the cannibal witch. This is the same forest where the innocent child, Little Red Riding Hood, met the predatory wolf disguised as the girl’s grandmother. The wolf had already eaten granny. “What a big mouth you have,” says Little Red Riding Hood to the “woman” she thinks is granny. “The better to eat you with,” says the wolf, which then proceeds to eat the little girl.
Mercifully, the fog begins to lift as quickly as it came.
Our tour company told us deer were plentiful in the forest and warned us about “aggressive” cattle and Black Forest boars. We doubted that the placid cows we had encountered before in Europe would be aggressive, but the boars were another matter. I’d visited a new hunting and fishing museum in Munich two days previously and was staggered by the size of the stuffed boars with tusks like rapiers on display. We certainly didn’t want to stumble upon a cranky boar. We