Hoge Veluwe — A must go nature spot in The Netherlands.
I love exploring new city, feeling lost in the crowd of an unfamiliar market, listening people passing by talking in a language that i don’t understand or just simply walk through the city with a camera in my hand , wallets and phone in my pocket, But nothing excites me more than mother nature. Last month me and couple of my friends decide to drift away from the busy student life of Rotterdam for a quick autumn break to a beautiful Nationale Park de Hoge Valuwe located in between two small cities of Otterloo and Hoenderloo.
We take the Intercity from Station Rotterdam Alexander straight to Apeldoorn, then take the 108 bus towards stations Ede-Wageningen and stop at Hoenderloo Centrum. As we arrive there , the cold cloudy autumn October weather greet us with its beautiful autumn color, within a five-minute walk you can see the eastern entrance to national park. You can enter the park by buying a 8.80 euro tickets which you can buy it online in their website or on the spot, this ticket allows you to explore the whole park excluding the Kröller-Müller Museum and Jachthuis Sint Hubertus building and you also got to use the White-bike they provided , free of charge perfect way to explore the whole area.
This park provide three natural landscape spots which are savanna area (Grassland) , Sand dunes,and forest. If you start from the eastern part of the park you could either start with the savanna or the forest area, all of the three spots are accessible by bikes so you don’t have to explore 5000 hectares of natural landscape area by foot as they provide 43 kilometers cycle path across the whole area.
As we arrived at the Savanna,we were mesmerized by the yellowed tall grass spread across the land with trees on the horizon , small white cycle path that perfectly match the autumn color cutting through the savanna makes me calm and peaceful. as we pedal our bikes a little bit further through a small forest and bridges followed by even bigger grassland area , we then found ourselves in the middle of a sand dune.
As the sun starts to set, took some quick snack break sitting by a big dried white oak tree surround by the sand dunes as we enjoyed the view. We then end our trip by biking through the Douglas fir forest and climb a small hill in the middle of the forest as the sky got darker followed by cold drizzling rain.
