Easter Rambling on the Rocks – Die Bastei

For this year’s Easter Sunday we had a very early start to travel to the “Sächsische Schweiz”, a region in Saxony renowned for its many natural sandstone formations. One of the most visited of those is known as “Die Bastei”, and you have to be early to avoid the masses of visiors flooding this rather easily accessible place every day.

Luckily at 6:00 in the morning there were only very few people, who apparently slept in the nearby hotel. The sun was just rising in a clear sky. The start of a beautiful day.

After a short walk on the Bastei rocks we descended down through a place known as “Schwedenlöcher” (Swedes’ holes), a deep ravine where apparently the population of a whole nearby village hid successfully  from approaching troops in the 30 years war. After some further rambling and climbing one of the highlights was clearly having Easter breakfast on top of one of the more remote rock formations: in perfect weather, with a splendid view and in total solitude.

All in all this was a very nice walk, roughly 10 kilometres, with many ups and downs, some climbing and jumping and some not-so-easy navigation with some dead ends. Some of the area is very easy to reach, other parts are hard to get to. Of course the latter are where the fun is, and where you can have the place all for yourself 

As I did not carry my camera equipment, all images were taken with an iPhone. Not perfect, but better than no images at all! Just lucky that I did not drop the phone on any of the steep bits 😉