Even though I had been to all WHSs and TWHSs in Germany, upon learning that Germany was offering a 9-Euro, monthly train pass in summer 2022, I decided to take advantage of it and to visit the north-east corner of the country, where I had hardly travelled before, for about 10 days. As such, the final destination for this trip was the Jasmund National Park, which includes the Primeval Beech Forests WHS.

I took a bus from the Sassnitz Busbahnhof straight to Königsstuhl National Park Centre.

At the NP Center I first checked out the multimedia exhibition with an automatic audio guide, which, as you might expect, did not work very well. On the other hand, the 20 min. movie playing continuously titled "Migration of Ancient Beech Forest," produced around the time of its inscription in 2011, was quite good and informative, I thought.

In the early afternoon there were 2 walking tours of the NP, one for families with children and the other for the little more serious-minded. So I decided to join the latter. It turned out that I was the only participant, and the guide, a park ranger, did not speak much of English. My German is certainly not good enough. So what do we do? Consequently, because the first tour had 2 guides, both of whom spoke decent English, one of them decided to join my tour because this woman, not from the UNESCO office but from the German office that takes care of the WH aspect of the NP, said she was eager to improve her English. So suddenly I had 2 guides for myself. The knowledgeable but low-key ranger was the main guide and the woman with such an enthusiasm was more like a German to English interpreter. 

As I remember, the most interesting thing I learned was the difference of shape in the beech trees. The ranger said that until 1990 when the area became the national park, the beech trees in the area were an important commodity in the hands of forestry corporations. Because they wanted to keep the beech trees as highly-prized as possible, they somehow came up with a way to keep the trees grow straight up. He went on to say that all beech trees you see rising straight up are done so artificially. But then after 1990 when forestry got prohibited, trees were allowed to grow naturally and no longer grew straight up. The ranger showed me the area where the trees are still straight and another area where they aren't (photo) and even an area in-between.

The woman from the German WH office occasionally offered supplemental information, such as, "When it's hot, we go to beach or go under beech."

After walking through the forest, talking about all this, we came out to a clearance at the edge of the cliff at Victoriasicht where we had the sweeping view of the Baltic Sea and the iconic Königsstuhl. The tour lasted about 90 minutes. 

With this trip to Jasmund I have visited all 5 Primeval Beech Forests WHSs in Germany at the 4 national parks and at Grumsin but none in the Carpathians or in other countries in Europe, at least consciously. As far as the Beech Forests WHS goes, however, my favorite is the Shirakami Sanchi WHS in Japan, which claims to have even older species of beech trees than the ones in Europe. (This is what I was told by the WH center at Shirakami and has not been independently verified.) At Shirakami the visit can even be capped by a short dip in Onsen right at the village with the trailhead. 

I wish I had time to walk back along the coast to Sassnitz, but instead I decided to spend more time in Binz where I left my luggage at my accommodation earlier in the day, so I just took the bus back to Sassnitz. Stunningly white, Binz, supposedly one of the premier beach resorts in Germany, looked unlike any other cities I have seen in Germany but more like Baltic beach resorts such as Sopot in Poland or Jūrmala in Latvia.