Hiking in the Danube Region

However, if you want to take a longer time-out and be active in nature, the Danube is the right place for you. The local Danube landscapes offer countless hiking routes, tours and long-distance trails for every preference, for pleasure hikers and long-distance hikers – as well as for pilgrims, families with strollers or short-term excursionists in search of the perfect selfie for Instagram. Along the river, high up on paths or in national parks with alluvial landscapes. These routes don’t always bring you really close to the river: this privilege is reserved for cyclists on the Danube Cycle Path, who always have the sound of the river in their ears while cycling. Hikers sometimes have to earn the pleasure and sight of the Danube: On paths and trails that not infrequently lead through forests that only unexpectedly and suddenly then reveal the view of the Danube.

The Austrian court official Joseph Kyselak crossed the Wachau on his way home from his walking tour through Austria in 1825. The court official was a persistent long-distance hiker who published his experiences on his four-month hiking tour a few years later in writing: “Sketches of a Journey on Foot through Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Berchtesgaden, Tyrol and Bavaria to Vienna – together with a romantically picturesque account of several knight’s castles and their folk tales, mountain regions and ice glaciers on this hike, undertaken in 1825”, as Wikipedia knows.

The interesting and amusing thing for us today is that Kyselak – probably because of a bet – had begun to immortalise his name at the stopovers on his hikes, with a “Kyselak was here”, so to speak, as we still know it today. However, he did it in 1825 and became a bit famous with it, until today – because some original “inscriptions” of his are still preserved – also in the Danube Region.