A couple of months ago, while I was trying to find places I could visit with beautiful hiking tracks, lakes, and mountains, I came across this place called Oberstdorf in Allgaü. If you don't already know, Allgaü is the south western region of Bavaria that borders with Switzerland. Oberstdorf is one of it's cities where I found so many things to do so I started making a rough itinerary with places to visit there.
Oberstdorf
Oberstdorf is mostly known for it's skiing slopes, cable cars, lakes, and gorges. A number of high valleys can also be reached from Oberstdorf, which not only have a very attractive landscape, but are also the start of a long mountain hike.
Visiting from Munich
I was visiting Oberstdorf for the first time with friends so I had no idea about the travel time between different places. I had prepared a very tight itinerary that couldn't be done in a single day. Anyway, we started our journey from Munich Hauptbahnof (central station).
We took the train RE 76 from platform 29 to Oberstdorf at 7:20am (You can search DB trains here). We usually pack breakfast and lunch from home or buy from nearest Yorma's at the train station enough sandwiches that lasts till lunch time so we don't have to spend time at the restaurants. We reached at around 09:40am.
Christlesee
First place on our itinerary was the Christlesee lake. It's located to the south east of Oberstdorf. The lake's water has a temperature of four to six degrees in both summer and winter. The water then flows into the Trettach valley.
The lake can be reached via the road to the Trettach Valley or via a hiking trail from Oberstdorf via Gruben to Gottenried. We took Bus number 8 from Oberstdorf bahnof to the lake. The fare of the bus is €4. It took us around 15 minutes to reach the bus stop of Christlesee lake. The lake is around 5 minutes walk from the bus station.
Hike to Gerstruben
Next item in the itinerary was a 2 kilometer hike to the top of the valley, to a place called Gerstruben. The hiking track goes through the valley, slowly gaining altitude, until you reach to the top of the valley.
Difficulty level of the hike is easy. The road is metaled all the way to the top. My kids enjoyed the the hiking track (until my little one gave up and then I had to carry him to the top ;) ).
We stayed for an hour or two at the top and by the time we got back to the bus stop, it was already too late to do anything else in Oberstdorf because buses and cable cars would stop running after ~5 5:30pm. We decided to call it a day and come back another time because we were only able to finish 20 percent of our itinerary.
Getting back to Munich
We took the same train back but unfortunately DB decided to move all the passengers from our train to another train that was going from Buchloe to Munich (with 100% seating capacity reached already). We had to sit on the stairs of the door but still managed to reach Munich almost on time.
I will write a follow-up to this post once I get a chance to visit this beautiful city again.
