Schwarzwald

    Before you ask, yes, we tried the Black Forest Cake.  Our day trip to the Schwarzwald, the large region in southwestern Germany that consists of the heavily forested foothills of the Swiss and Austrian Alps, was part of a quest for all things authentically south German, and that included the cake of questionable origin.  Of course, to get off the beaten path took a little extra work. It was a long day trip: the slow trains winding through mountains and tunnels made for a scenic ride on the way there, and a long slog on the way back.  Our train had mostly emptied out by the team we reached our destination, but this was not some untouched backwater.  In the summer the trains are packed with Germans armed with retractable ski poles for Nordic walking and oversized digital cameras.  Luckily, we went on a cool late spring day rather than the height of the tourist season - it would appear the would-be naturists are afraid of a little cloud.

   However, upon disembarking in Triberg with an Indian tour group and a family of indeterminate origins but with at least three languages among them, we realized that the village was already preparing for what must be a considerable tourist deluge.  At the foot of the forested hills, the paved road turned into pressure-cleaned cobblestones,  the clothing and sports stores gave way to restaurants hung with gigantic swinging teddy bear cuckoo clocks and postcard kiosks with canned folk music.  A cashier in a dirndl spoke German with a very thick English accent. 

    But we quickly took off hiking up and away from the collection of World’s Largest Cuckoo Clocks and Germany’s pitifully small highest waterfall (at the foot of which were posted apologies that this year it was not quite up to snuff).  We climbed and climbed through the forest, where the trees, if not quite black, were still dark and tall enough to have strangled out most ground cover, which made it pretty eery compared to the lush leafy green West Coast rainforests I’m used to. 

    At the top of the mountain there were, of course, the traditional hooded Black Forest farmhouses with cubed roofs that reach almost to the ground.  Not so traditionally, almost all of them were covered with solar panels.  Cows, grassy fields, intermittent forests, and finally a lookout tower and a little log cabin snack bar where a group of old men were drinking schnapps and smoking the hell out of some kind of meat.  The word “Vegetarisch” was a totally foreign concept. 

    While from the top of the lookout tower there were sadly no Alps to be seen, we could look down into nearby valleys and towns.  Apparently on a clear day you could even have seen Stuttgart’s famous (?) TV tower, the first all-concrete structure of its type.  Ah, nature.