Section Hike: E10, Kap Arkona → Stralsund, Day Four

Hiking along the Baltic Coast on the Island of Rügen

By this point of the hike I’ve reached the southeastern coast of Muttland, and so the Baltic Sea was now visible in the distance to my left, across the fields, for the remainder of the hike.

One of the things I noticed over the last few days of my hike was that my cooker—this really clever cooker that uses stones soaked with ethanol, made by a craftsman on Etsy—was using almost twice as much fuel as I was expecting. I still haven’t figured out why it’s burning so inefficiently, but the consequence of this was that my fuel supplies were almost out by the morning of the fourth day, and so I needed to head into the town of Putbus, where I bought a bottle of burning alcohol (I’m not sure if it was ethanol or methanol, which might be part of the problem) from the hardware store.

The store happened to be right next to the train station, where they were running a few steam locomotives around the yard, so I (also a hobbyist railfan) spent a bit of time resting at the bus stop, filling up the fuel can for my cooker, watching the locomotives huffing and puffing.

Once I was loaded back up and back on the trail, I passed through the town’s large urban park (including a somewhat unsettling doll museum), and then onto a bike path along the road heading out of town. My route is here.

From the bike trail, I passed through a small stretch of marshland, over a bridge crossing the inlet to a small bay, and then through farmland near the coast. The village of Wreechen, for which the bay is named, featured a collection of some really beautiful thatched-roof houses.

These kinds of houses are characteristic of the ones I saw all over the island. Note the horse motif at the roof’s peak, in the top-right corner.

After crossing the bridge, it was only a few kilometers along farmland to reach my camp for the night: a sprawling organic orchard for apples, pears, and cherries at the settlement of Altkamp. On the approach to Altkamp, I managed to shoot an even more slanted video than my previous one, though the weather is now much nicer.

The orchard itself was lovely, with some friendly farm laborers who helped me get in touch with the owner and sort out my arrangements.

Really pleasant and quiet spot for a tent, perfectly flat and with soft ground. Not pictured: the massive HVAC system on the storehouse right behind, that switched on every half hour throughout the night.

Dinner was my second round of pemmican-potato stew, which I ate early and then spent the rest of the fading sunlight enjoying the orchard.

The fields across from my campsite, with a windbreak of what I think are Italian Aspen (my favorite trees for a windbreak, because they evoke Classical Rome or Greece).

Almost as soon as the sun went down, I headed to bed.