Sunday, August 2, 2009

Die Wattwanderung, aka the mud hike

So... one of the popular things to do here is go hiking in the mud. But this isn't just any mud, its special mud. Besides being full of bacteria, worms, and other small living things, it is also on the ocean floor. So I can now officially say I've hiked from an island back to the mainland.

We took a ferry over to the Island. This is the North Sea. This is where we will be hiking in a few hours.

We started off by hiking through some sand dunes. I know, it doesn't look that sandy, but under the little bit of green it was very sandy.

More sand dunes... The darker blue line right on the dunes is the ocean... we were on the dunes for close to an hour before we got to the...

MUD!!! Lots and lots of squishy, goopy mud.

We hiked through the mud for about two and a half hours. We got wet (there was still a little water from the ocean to slog through), and dirty...

My feet. I think we had just gone through some water, so they're not very dirty in this picture...

I'm planning on stealing more pictures off of facebook. I didn't take too many because I didn't want to have my camera in my hand in case I slipped, so I only got it out when I was on really secure footing.

We hiked a total of 13 kilometers from the bus at the dunes to the taxi on the beach at the other side, plus whatever walking we did in the city on the island before (which was a lot). That's just over 8 miles. I got home at around 6:45pm, showered, ate a little, and fell asleep by around 8:15pm... and slept about 14 hours. I was a wee bit sleepy. I'm still not dressed, and its about 1pm.

We saw some cool stuff. Besides the million worms per square meter, we also saw some crabs, some fish, and a jelly fish (that our guide picked up and held for us. When asked if it hurt he said he had built up an immunity). Our guide was very good. He could tell us anything we wanted to know about the mud (the little micro-organisms produce iodine when happy), and knew where the waste deep mud was, and thus only took us through the ankle deep mud. He had a compass with him, but never used it. We were quite safely to the other side of the ocean when the tide started to come up.

It was a fun trip, but now I need to put my tennis shoes in the wash... :)

More Garden Pictures

These are just some pretty pictures I took at the garden. The garden was built by one of the dukes to show off how rich and cool he was.