#2: [25-Jul-10]

#1: [12-Dec-01]

02-Aug-2024 -- We have hiked for 83 days 3121 km on foot starting in Zurich, Switzerland. On our way, we reached this confluence point. The start of this hike was in September 2019, when we began our journey to St. Petersburg. But we hiked only one day in 2019. End of February 2020, we really began to add some steps every weekend. We continued hiking across Germany and Poland in stages. At the beginning, we hiked only for the weekend and travelled back home to Zurich by train. When the next opportunity arose, we took a train to the place we had finished last time and resumed our hike from the same train station. A summary of the trip can be found here. We first had to skip the Russian enclave Kaliningrad due to closed borders during Covid-19. So we continued in the Lithuanian harbour city Klaipeda and continued through the Baltic States first.

Now, in Summer 2024 we were ready to finally close the missing link between Gdansk in Poland and Klaipeda in Lithuania. We started hiking in Gdansk and walked to Elblag. From there, we had to take a bus across the border between Poland and Russia, because walking across is not allowed. But right after the border, we jumped out of the bus and continued our hike. We actually hiked all the way to Kaliningrad city, Selenogradsk into the Curonian Spit. Unfortunately, the border in the Spit between Russia and Lithuania is totally closed. In order to get on the other side of the border in the Spit, we had to take a 9–hour–400km journey by: bus – taxi – walk across the border – taxi – ferry – and hitchhiking.

However, the good thing about this long journey was, that we could easily deviate our taxi between Selenogradsk and Советск (Tilsit) to this confluence point. We actually wanted to walk 1 km from Rakitino (Ракитино) to the confluence, but the taxi driver simply drove his vehicle over the empty, dry and hard-surfaced agricultural field up to a distance of 100m. Then, we had only a little stroll to a meadow on the eastern side of the river Tilse, where we documented this confluence.

CP Visit Details:

• Distance to a road: 1 km
• Time to reach the CP from the raod: 10 minutes
• Time at the CP: 11:00 AM
• Measured height: 20 m
• Minimal distance according to GPS: 3 m
• Position accuracy: 5 m
• Topography: slightly hilly
• Vegetation: high grass, flowers
• Weather: sunny, 24° C (felt temperature)
• Given Name: The Border Deviation Confluence