Toon Hezemans

As is well-known, there are no mountains in the (continental) Netherlands. In most of the country, the only relief comes from sand-dunes and banks of terminal moraine, and visitors from non-flat places will have to let their eyes get accustomed to the altitude for a year or two before they even start noticing these.

But there is also South Limburg, the anomalous bit of the Netherlands that squeezes itself in between the Belgian and German borders around the city of Maastricht. Here you find actual geology, with rolling hills, pretty river valleys, outcrops of chalk, flint mines, and all sorts of other things that would be completely normal anywhere else but are a source of delight and wonderment in the Netherlands. Hardly mountains: most of the hilltops are around 200m above sea-level, and the highest point is only 322.4m (the three-nation point outside Vaals).

The Dutch Mountain Film Festival, based in Heerlen and Aachen, has been making ironic play with the "mountainous" nature of the region for ten years. To celebrate their anniversary, they came up with the idea of devising a hiking route that would make the most of all that terrain. It started as a sort of one-off joke, but a team of enthusiastic volunteers has turned it into a serious project that has become very popular since the guidebook appeared a couple of years ago.

The route is about 100km long and involves something like 1700m of ascent: not exactly alpine, but still quite an appreciable amount of up and down. You start at Eygelshoven station, near Kerkrade, and walk clockwise around South Limburg to Maastricht, sometimes on the Dutch side of the border, and sometimes in Germany or Belgium.

There is a long-standing official regional hiking trail, the Krijtlandpad, which does a similar circuit of South Limburg and is 90km long, but the two only have a few km of overlap, mostly around Vaals and Eijsden. The DMT evidently has a different design philosophy — as well as seeking out gratuitous climbs here and there, it also ignores the basic principle that official hiking trails have to satisfy, the obligation to pass the front door of every café or restaurant in the district. As a result, the DMT route has far less asphalt than the Krijtlandpad, and avoids most village centres. When you do want to stop off in a village, it's always possible to diverge from the route slightly, of course.

The route is only partially marked at the moment, but there are clear maps and (Dutch) route descriptions in the book, and there is a downloadable GPS route. I had no real navigation problems along the way. There was one point where a path was temporarily closed because of roadworks, but I knew about that in advance from the DMT Facebook group.

The guide suggests doing the walk in four stages, but there are plenty of other points where you can find accommodation or public transport connections. I did it in six lazy stages, the first four from a base-camp in Aachen and the last two as day-trips from home.

Also included in the book are a set of short circular walks to take you up each of the "Seven Summits" of the DMT route. Most of these summits are rather anticlimactic, as they tend to be covered in trees. The best views are from the Wilhelminaberg, a mining spoil-heap in Kerkrade near the start of the walk. For most of the other summits, you get far more interesting views on the way up and down than you do at the top. But the walks would certainly be worth doing if you don't have time to do the DMT in full.… (meer)