Next up on my Europe trip in May after Munich was exploring the Black Forest at the bottom of Germany for two and a half days.

I’d read that Freiburg (a city in Baden-Württemberg) was the one of the best bases for exploring the Black Forest, so I booked an Air BnB there and booked two full day self guided tours through Black Forest Tours (which I’d highly recommend!). There’s sooo many different small cities and towns in the area, that doing one of these tours just seemed easier than trying to work out which to visit in such a short time.
Once you purchase the tours you’re emailed a number of comprehensive PDFs full of everything you could need (almost too much?), and the tour guide Simone was so helpful over email beforehand.

Freiburg is such a nice tourist city, and the view of Schlossberg in the afternoon sun was so pretty.

On day one of the tours I took the train from Freiburg through Hell’s Valley, hiked from Hinterzarten to Lake Titisee (which was incredible), then took the bus to Feldberg Mountain where I saw snow for the first time since I was a kid!

I loved the hike so much that I spent most of the next day hiking around Triberg (it was called the Black Forest Rail Discovery hike, or Schwarzwaldbahn-Erlebnispfad). Triberg was home of the world’s biggest cuckoo clock, some of the best Black Forest cake, Triberg Falls (one of the highest waterfalls in Germany), and just hundreds and hundreds of cuckoo clocks.

Below are some of my favourite shots from the Black Forest in Germany. All photos were shot with my Nikon D800 and Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 lens. If you’d like to see more you can view them on my Flickr.