Hallerbos (Halle Forest in Dutch) is the “Blue Forest” of Belgium in the Halle village. It’s one of the secret spots in Belgium not widely known. I was traveling this time with Subha and Srinivas, both experienced solo travellers. Thus the three although traveling together for the first time, had a lot of experiences to hold interesting conversations.
Surprisingly I had never been to Belgium before even though I have been living in the 200km radius for 4+ years. The moment I arrived Brussels station for switching trains, there was this ecstasy within me of looking around the new architectures and language I don’t understand: It was Dutch. People here speak mostly Dutch and French. I knew about the language Flemish, but later found out it is more of a culture than a language. A dialect that is softer manifestation of Dutch!
Hallerbos is famous for the beautiful purple carpet of bluebells which usually bloom around mid of April. This forest is covered with giant Sequoia trees. I haven’t been to a forest with taller trees before.
Now as you can already imagine from the photograph above, that I don’t have a single photograph of the amazing lilac carpet. Because we were of-course before time when the Spring would set in. But Im happy this weekend turned out to be a pretty amazing one because of two reasons: 1. Traveling along with solo travellers enriches the conversations, and 2. The pretty cottage we spent in the weekend with lovely hosts!\
Because I don’t have photographs of the Lilac bloom, treat your eyes with your imagination from these images.. how heavenly can it get during the season.
On Saturday evening after checking into our pretty cottage, we hiked around 15km in the forest. Very rarely did we find interesting flowers blooming amidst the dry forest with humongous tree. So, all we did was mostly utilise our imagination! 🙂
European Windflower, the early-spring flowering plant in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae!
In a pre-spring barren forest, when you find such few tiny Windflower flowers blooming by the floor, you could pass by a million stories in your head once you kneel down to observe them.
The beautiful Hyacinth flower by the street side ahead of the forest!
Getting lunch was indeed a challenge here. Strong suggestion: Be prepared with food in this remote village if you plan to visit!
After some rabbit with beer, sea-food and pasta, we were off to wander around the forest.
Not often do we raise our head to look above us. You would expect to see the cloudy sky, but what I saw was a frame that will be etched for a while.
These amazingly tall Sequoia trees creates a silhouette that could give you possible goosebumps!
The forest did surprise us with little details such as these.
If you want more information for visiting the forest, the we have this amazingly nice dedicated website for Hallerbos! Not only do you get to read the interesting history of Hallerbos here, but also a daily updated video feed of the flowering status.
That evening we came back to our lovely cottage to find our host, Ives playing mouthorgan in the living room under the glass roof while it drizzled.
It took us a while to just wait outside and enjoy the moment. Once we were in, we ended up having really good time till the next day. We didn’t know we were coming back to a lovely evening after the hike.
I went around looking at the detailing and could never have enough of it.
I had good time basking by the sun in the beautiful backyard.
Soon there was Ives introducing us to his donkey, Kancha!!!! This is the first time I was meeting a pet donkey. Well, the Kancha was super cute and at the same time super stupid. She would go round and round eating grass till she would entangle herself onto the ropes!
Ives told us a lot stories about Kancha. He described how Kancha came into their house when his daughter was 8. And today her daughter is 37. So basically Kancha was 3yrs older to me! We sat and heard stories about Kancha from Ives like a child. It was some experience.
Later that morning, we bid goodbye to Ives, Susanne and Kancha. Ives again dropped us till the station in his car.
Interesting how we came for hiking in the blooming bluebells, and instead ended up meeting two amazing human beings who were complete strangers before.. and ended up bonding with colleagues as solo travellers with bag full of experiences!
