During the past weeks, I made two photo walks with my friends and one hike.

Yesterday I made this hike in the Wachau. It's partly identical with the Welterbesteig part 11 which I had already made a few years ago, I think like four. Time flies. Only the ascent to the Seekopfwarte is different, well almost. I wanted to see the view from the Seekopfwarte at this time of the year, when nature has the most beautiful colors.

I remembered that the Welterbesteig part 11 was difficult, and I would say that this hike is even more difficult, at least the descent.

This is a detail of the hike I made yesterday:

An this is the same map detail, but the actual Welterbesteig part 11:

Now if you are interested in this hike, you need to know that the first version is not for normal hikers, it's more like rock climbing. And it's definitely not intermediate, as the website advertises. When I arrived at the junction Fahnenwand/Friendeskreuz I panicked a bit. The arrow on the rock pointed to the left, but I didn't see any trail towards that direction, only huge rocks leading very steeply downhill. There was also a seemingly walkable trail to the right, but the sign didn't point to that direction and neither did my map. As far as I could see there was a walkable trail to the right but I didn't know for how long it was walkable and I didn't remember that I had already walked that way a few years ago. So I stopped for a while to think a bit. Walking all the way back to the Seekopfwarte and from there back to Rossatz was not an option, it was too difficult and too long. But luckily a woman with a dog came along and she was a local, so I asked her. She was going to the Friendenskreuz, and I asked her if she would mind if I went with her. She gave me a huge grin and said: "But it's very steep and I am in a hurry. Go to the right, that's the normal trail." First I hesitated a bit but eventually she could convince me that there was no danger at all if I go to the left. And that was exactly what I did and pretty soon I saw the Welterbesteig signs on the trees and on the rocks again.

Well, the part between the Seekopfwarte and the junction Fahnenwand/Friendenskreuz is as difficult and unpleasent as I remembered. It's one of those parts of a hike that you just whish to be over. Today I have quite serious muscle pain. The ascent to the Seekopfwarte, however, is actually easy. I almost missed the bus that took me to Melk. I had already bought the ticket for the ride back to Vienna in advance, but I kind of underesimated this hike. If I hadn't had caught the bus, I would have had to take the bus to Krems and buy an new ticket. But I was lucky because the bus was delayed by like three minutes. I was like 10 meters away from the bus stop when the bus departed but the driver saw my face and stopped.

Landscape and photography wise, this hike is really very nice and spectacular. However, taking photos with a real camera during the descent from the Seekopfwarte is practically impossible.

I think I was already quite close to the Seekopfwarte when I took this pic.

I still remember that my dad said that overexhaustion was not healthy after I had made the Welterbesteig 11 hike.

Last week my friends and I made a short excursion to the Jubilämswarte on the Gallitzinberg. This is the view from there towars the city:

And before that, we made a walk at Saint Marx's Cemetery which was a good chance to actually use my little 17/1.8 lens.

Finally I also want to share another pic from the hike that I made at the end of September - it wasn't that popular on Pixelfed so it won't be in the gallery but I like it very much.

By the way, I am writing this post on my 18 year old Amilo laptop. I wrote my doctoral thesis with it. Finding out which OS and which software are best for this device is actually a really interesting project. I hope we will be able to renew the thermal compond successfully on Tuesday.