Mould, Mud and a Very Long Staircase: Camping in Saxon Switzerland

I had a plan, and it was a good one. In October 2022, I would start a hiking and camping community in Munich, organise trips, and eventually rent out tents, sleeping bags and sleeping mats to people who don't own any. Every start-up needs a pilot, so I picked one: three days in Saxon Switzerland National Park, by train, with nine numbered stops on Saturday and nine on Sunday.

The itinerary covered trains, campsites, stairs and snack breaks. It did not cover the weather, my old tent, or the headcount.

The test run that cost us a friend

A week before the trip we went to Oberstdorf to test one of the new tents. We were met by a thunderstorm. The campsite owner spent a good part of the evening trying to talk us out of camping at all, which is not what you want to hear from the person who is renting you the grass.

We camped anyway. The group did less well: afterwards, one of our friends suddenly remembered something important they had to do the following week, and withdrew from Saxon Switzerland.

I blame myself. I regret nothing about the tent, and everything about the headcount.

Saturday: wet, heavy and uphill

Three of us left Munich on 1 October. The plan was to meet the friends coming from Berlin at Dresden Hauptbahnhof, buy pizza for lunch and dinner, because we would be hiking all afternoon and nobody was going to cook, and ride the S-Bahn to Rathen together.

We were carrying a lot of gear, and it was raining when we got to Rathen. Then it turned out our campsite, the canoe club's tent site at Wehlen, was on the other side of the river, so the gear and the three of us boarded a ferry. By the time we reached the campsite we were soaking wet.

The campsite was the garden of somebody's old house. It had two toilets and what I will politely call limited facilities.

Then I unpacked the old tent, the one I had carried over from my home country. It had developed mould patches, because I had forgotten to dry it after its last outing. It can't get no worse, I told myself. It was a reasonable thing to say, and I recommend never saying it near a tent.

After lunch we went for the hike, which was supposed to cover everything on the Day 1 list, Basteibrücke included. The stairs up to the Bastei were exhausting, and nowhere in the itinerary does "nine stops" mention stairs. The caves along the way were haunting, in the sense that I kept waiting for something to come out of them. Nothing did.

What we got instead was a sunset. It was getting better, and then it was properly good.

It went dark before we got back. We walked a long way to the campsite in pitch black. The itinerary did carry a note that one waterfall was "probably closed". It did not carry a note about the dark.

Sunday: a river on both sides

In the morning we left for Bad Schandau. The plan was groceries first, so we bought breakfast and supplies from a shop nearby, then headed for Campingplatz und Pension Ostrauer Mühle.

Finding two pitches was hard. Everything was soaking wet from the rain, and the tent area was a little strange: the spot where we finally pitched had a flowing river on both sides. I would like to say we chose it for the view.

Then we went on the hikes and the sightseeing, and I will tell you honestly that we skipped a few stops, because daylight and buses both have timetables. We still got Kuhstall, with its rock gateway framing a single tree, and the Himmelsleiter, a stairway so narrow that two-way traffic is a theoretical concept.

Right next to our campsite ran a very old tram, a yellow electric one that, as far as I can tell, has been doing this since 1898. I am told it runs every half hour. It was the nicest thing in the valley.

We ate lunch and dinner at the campsite's restaurant, which was properly fancy.

Monday: down from the rocks

Monday started before sunrise, because the Falkenstein hike begins at the campsite. After that and a few small hikes, we packed up the tents and the damp and headed for Dresden. We took the Suspension Railway to get an aerial view of the city, which was a relief after two days of looking at it all from the bottom of a staircase.

Then everyone went back to their own boring lives: some to Berlin, the rest of us to Munich.

Soon after I got home, I became seriously ill. It was later diagnosed as Ramsay Hunt Syndrome. That story is for another day.

The boring but useful bit

• Trains, Saturday: Munich Hbf 06:44, Hof 10:18, then the regional train to Dresden Hbf at 13:07 (these are the times from our plan). From Dresden, take the S1 to Rathen.
• The Wehlen campsite is across the river from Rathen. Check the ferry before you set off with your gear. It had no cooking utensils, but the host provided mugs and an electric kettle.
• Contact the owner of the Bad Schandau campsite beforehand. When we arrived at around 11, nobody was there and we picked our own spot.
• The Kirnitzschtal tram runs along the valley to the Lichtenhainer Wasserfall.
• Dry your tent before you pack it. I cannot stress this enough.