Home from the hills. Après les alps, le deluge. Or so it feels. Coming-home blues is a real thing, as hard a come-down as anything ever sung of in the Mississippi river delta. 

To alleviate my ills, I turn to friend Florian, a man so well-travelled he makes Magellan look like a kid playing with his toy boat in a tub. His journeys are so many and far-reaching it’s as if Marco Polo popped out for a quart of milk at the corner shop by comparison. He suggests the Haute Fagne, or High Moor, as a best place in Belgium for a day trip, and who am to disagree?

Located in the easternmost part of Belgium, straddling the border to Germany, it’s a peculiar highland, more akin to the Scottish peat bogs than anything else. A big bog to take my mind off things? Well, I’ll give it a try. Maybe seeking out the antithesis to what you miss is the way to go? And so off I, well, go. I don’t pack hiking gear, figuring I can run the 30k trail F suggests. Famous last words…

When I get there, looking out across the moor, the landscape looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic dystopia: nothing but a few stunted shrubs and dead trees. The nuclear heat of the day does nothing to detract from this illusion. Once out there, running along the duckboards, it’s a different matter. The marshland is home to hundreds of plants, mainly grasses and flowers, and it’s quite pretty in a low key way. 

There isn’t much time to look out across the landscape, however. The duckboards prove to be quite difficult to run on, in spite of being perfectly dry. The bog swallows everything eventually, but since it isn’t happening equally fast everywhere, this means one part may be perfectly stable, and the next one might tip to the side as you step on it, bounce, or simply break. It makes for a rollercoaster run. 

 This feature of the bog landscape is of course the main reason it has been a borderland for as long as can be remembered. The oldest border markers found here date back to the 7th century, and several imposing stone markers still show where the borderline between Prussia and Belgium once ran. Much like marshlands elsewhere, they were simply too difficult to traverse, and of too little economic interest for countries to fight for. 

Unfortunately, Belgian budgetary authorities share this view. Many paths through the moors are being abandoned, and only a few kept open – the others are allowed to sink into the boggy ground and disappear. I run along the main route towards Germany, and after only four kilometres I am suddenly off the beaten path. No longer able to run, I walk along a brook. It’s hard going, but very pretty, reminiscent of Swedish forests, with ferns and firs growing high, and not a living soul around. Pieces of abandoned duckboards appear intermittently, but it’s clear that not many people come here any more. 

I have long since left Florian’s suggested route behind, and decide to turn around before I walk back into Germany, and there, suddenly, I’m no longer alone. A photographer and his two nude models are hard at work under a tree! 

It’s difficult to know what to do in certain situations. Do you say “hi”? Stop and admire an artist’s work? I briefly consider asking if they need another model, but I figure this blog has seen enough of me in a state of undress recently, and besides, the couple are twenty years and twenty kilos each past attractive. I get back to running instead.

I run back through ferns and grasses and dead trees, the ground muddy and slippery and mostly hidden by the undergrowth. It’s a hard slog, the ground either sucking at my shoes or sliding away and a couple of times I come close to wiping out. After a painful misstep and a near face plant, I slow down to a walk again, but once back on the duckboards I force myself to run once more – mainly to get out of the sun. 

After two hours I’m back where I started, at the one inn on the one road leading across the moors. The Baraque Michel (or the Obama Inn, as I like to think of it) has been a beacon to weary wanderers for well over two hundred years, and it’s easy to see why the family-run establishment is doing brisk business: my feet are wet and hurt, my shins and calves will require at least two showers to just be dirty again, my clothes are soaked through with sweat – I can’t bring myself to leave. 

I’ve done about half the suggested route, but I’m quite done. Properly bogged down by Belgium.