A Day Trip to Lake Ammer (October 12, 2026)
Presently I am sitting out at a table at Andechser Monastery atop a hill overlooking several large green fields—M. informed me it is just past harvest-time here—and I’ve just finished the meal that the monks have made for me.
I’ve taken the day out of Munich to head to a lakeside village ~1 hour away by bus. Munich itself (though I’ve also only been there a day) is like other cities I’ve been to so far, and the architectural sites that would’ve normally differentiated it are beautiful, though there are only so many spires I can see before they all start to look indistinguishable from each other. So, realizing I needed to be in the countryside (which is becoming a recurring theme) I took the train out here.
On the way I passed around half a dozen red-clay roofed villages punctuating the green countryside. Unlike similar spots I saw in Greece, these ones seemed to have people in them. And though I read my new book on the way, most of my attention was spent wondering what life would be like had I grown up in such a village. Would I be any happier? Would I be simpler? Probably neither I concluded—maybe just blonde-er.
(Just now I’m watching an older couple across from me take a picture of their meal: a pretzel the size of a hubcap and basically what looks to be half an entire chicken, fried whole. I wonder how people ate meals before the age of smartphones. Did we just eat our food? How boring. And yes of course I took a picture of my meal as well; it was just too good looking.)
And so I finally arrived at the town of Herrsching, which at first glance before I saw the lake looked like the towns I’d passed on the train: small, white walled and red-roofed houses, wide streets, and a lot of greenery in-between. I watched an older couple with hiking gear exit the train and head down a forested path; I followed, assuming they were headed to the water. Again, the town was quite idyllic, but my business was with the lake.
The path widened up into a clearing and I watched the blue expanse expand in front of me. Far off in the distance on the southwest aspect of the lake were the alps, jagged and high, very much unlike the softly rolling appearance of the smokies (thank god our national mountain ranges have names like the smokies or the rockies—America is great sometimes). Thought to be honest I didn’t even notice the horizon until the sun began to set and they began to contrast deeply against the very periwinkle sky. To return to this.
At this point the sun was still high and white as a seagull and the water very calm. I started southwards and followed a stone trail that began to sport up hotels and restaurants, like a little resort town. It gave me a certain Hamptons feeling. Meanwhile as I worked my way towards the southern tip of the lake I began to see the sailboats all anchored and sitting pretty and mansions far off in the distance and if I squinted a little it could’ve been the Great Neck Sound. I squatted down at the shore and combed through the rocky sand—which was not really sand at all but rather large pebbles. A couple million more years and it’d be perfect though. “Old world” my ass.
Many of the rocks had stops of white quartz that ran through them and I wondered if there was some kind of large layer of quartz running through the topography. (Two of my hostel-mates are geologists; ex-minters from Perth who quit their jobs to travel the world—I should consult them later with the stones I picked up today, one for me and one for H.)
I continued down the shore and debated whether or not I should swim. I had brought a bathing suit but the water was cold and I had no towel (this has come up again as an issue in my hostel. I can't shower as it is—I’ll try and find a cheap one tomorrow). Eventually though I decided against swimming, and as I continued ahead I spotted a couple in the water together. I yelled to them:
“How’s the water?”
“Cold!” They responded back in English.
“Is it swim-able?” I was worried they wouldn’t understand this but then I remembered how good Germans are at combining words.
The woman of the two raised up her arms out of the water and deflected her hands downwards: “We’re in here, aren’t we?” Turns out they also understood sarcasm.
Though still I walked past them, smiling, and continued to go back and forth in my mind. When I reached the base of the lake however, my choice was either to turn back or continue south towards the monastery. The pro argument: “well, this is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You’ll airdry,” and finally and inevitably competition factoring in, “and they were swimming, why won’t you?”
The cons were obviously as follows: “the water is ice cold, you’ve got no towel, and you have yet to go on your hour-long hike to the monastery. Plus, all swimming is the same anyway—it’s really not the swimming that’s one-in-a-lifetime, it’s the location.” Therefore, I need not necessarily swim.
Finally I determined that not all swimming was in fact alike, and there may actually be a truly special experience here that may indeed be irreplaceable. And who was I to deny myself of that? Nevertheless, I chose.
So I found a bathroom inside a fancy restaurant, quickly changed into my new red bathing suit (which still had some new world sand in it from the Rockaways), and went back to the spot where I’d seen the two bathers. “Badestelle,” I think the German was for the spots one was allowed to swim in. There was no-one enforcing this rule though.
The two of them were now on the shore having already dried off and changed back into their clothes and watched me approach with glee, with some kind of real human glimmer in their eyes (hers, specifically). Real advice from other humans is as rare as gold these days; rarer even.
(Side note: Biergarten are this city’s best third-space, from what I’ve observed so far. I say this as I journal at one back in Munich. I've got a beer and another lone traveller with me at this long wooden table, all third-spacing out together.)
So I undressed, planted all of my things by a children’s toy-crane, and waded into the water. It was cold—numbingly so, but of course invigorating. I walked on slippery moss-covered rocks util a steep drop-off, and then swam swam. Always always the most interesting part of swimming in cold water is lifting up your arms and feeling the water rush underneath/around your armpits. Why—I think it’s how close the surface is to one’s heart, and so fragile and vulnerable the thin surface.
I swam around a few anchored sailboats, back and forth floating on my back, and then just treaded mostly, watching the going-ons on shore. The water warmed up and I—overthinking as I am accustomed to—tried to focus on the immediate, specifically my hands as I breast-stroked, and the way that the sun illuminated them and the waves and vortices they created in front of my face. Somehow maybe, because of the clearness of the water, the dappled sunlight looked brighter than usual, almost as if the light were not merely reflecting off of the surface at all but rather like I were moulding a ball of light in my hands as I breast-stroke through it; radiating outwards from within. This also gave me the impression that my hands were very holy.
A piece of the ‘pro-argument’ went haywire in my head and I probably swam for too long, because when I came out of the water I was thoroughly chilled, through and through. I grabbed my things and lay on a nearby wooden palate in the sunlight, desperately hoping it’d be warm. I lay down and tried to be still but I began to shiver, the shakes beginning in my legs and traveling all the way up to my jaw.
There was a lady sitting next to me and she turned and asked in a German accent, “you must be freezing.” (Clearly today all of us were having difficulty intuiting the obvious about temperature. Either way, I was cold, but like I experienced while bathing in the lake, it wasn’t necessarily an unpleasant kind of cold. Coldness and the reeling-away from coldness can be decoupled… Once I told this to J. and he jokingly snapped at me: “wait, wait wait. Cold is our oldest nemesis as a warm blooded species—don’t start telling me you can mindfulness your way out of that.”)
The woman added: “You were in there for a long time. Usually people go in and come right out. I kept watching you waiting to see when you would, but you spent at least—“ she looked down at her coffee mug, “—half a cappuccino swimming in there!” I realized that she was measuring time by how long it took her to finish her coffee, and got the feeling that she may be very wise.
I put my shirt and jacket on over my still wet skin and lay back down in the sunlight. My legs continued to shake and after a minute the woman turned to me again:
“Your foot is bleeding.”
“I looked down and saw a trickle of blood down the lateral aspect of my left foot. I wiped at it and saw a small but deep incision, and increasingly noticed the pain. The cold had numbed it in the lake. Quickly the woman pulled out a bandaid from her purse and gave it to me.
I thanked her and we began to chat: her name was Julia, she was born in the alps just south of the lake, lived in Munich for a while, and had recently to Herrsching. She had no children, and I also intuited that she was not married. She’d worked at “this company and that company” doing vaguely HR-related work (I forget now exactly what she did for work, she’d spoken so unenthusiastically about it), until she made her “new life goal […] to sit in this spot right here and watch the sunset every night.” My suspicions were correct: she was indeed very wise. I had chosen the right day and place and time to cut my foot.
She added, “by the way this place—“ she pointed to a little wooden shack directly behind us “—has a very good cappuccino.” I watched her sip hers and she told me how the monastery at the top of the nearby mountain sold cheap food and beer. “It’s very plain Bavarian food,” she said offhandedly while looking into the horizon, “but they’ll give you a whole lot of it.” That’s all she had to say about the monastary. We chatted for a while longer, she gave some additional recommendations for my Munich stay which I knew I didn’t have time for but accepted politely anyway, and then I parted. Not before I bought a cappuccino and drank it with her, however.
As I walked away she continued to stare off into the horizon as if waiting for something world-ending to happen, but I also knew that she wasn’t waiting for anybody or anything of the sort. In fact I knew she wasn’t waiting on anything at all.
I rode the bus up to the mountainside to the monastery. Though I initially planned to walk my foot was still sore and Julia had told me it was an hour-and-a-half long hike. So again I watched the little red-roofed houses pass by and shortly arrived: the monastery was a massive white complex atop a great hill; a jumbled mass of stucco towers and walls.
I was attracted immediately to the cafeteria—which was drawing in too a mass of older German folks—and once inside I grabbed a tray and approached the counter. It was full of cheeses, meats, fishes, bread, pickles, etc. and I ordered pickled herring with onion, potato salad, a pretzel, and cheese. When I asked for some cheese (something called ‘mountain cheese,’ which tasted like Manchego) they without hesitation dropped an entire block of it onto my plate. The whole tray cost twelve Euro. Then I bought a pint of “dark beer” for another five Euro and I drank and ate everything overlooking several large green fields. Julia was right, though not in the way I think she meant the word ‘plain'—it was simple, hearty food.
I got back on the bus without even going into the main cathedral; I was cathedral-ed out at that point and Id've rather been back down at the lake. After another quick ride I was, and walked along the shore until sunset, all the while circling the wooden palate where Julia said she’d be, but was not. I guess her goal was still aspirational: I just hope she didn’t get caught up in work.
At another dock further up the lake I sat underneath a very yellow tree trying to watch the little sparkling leaves glimmer all at once. Just as the sun was about to disappear over the horizon I turned to take a video of two seagulls screaming at each other, and when I was finished, the sun was gone. Damn. Julia and me both.
At this point though the alps were fully illuminated and stood out along the periwinkle sky like a page in a popup book (here I was reminded of A. when he smokes and says the trees "pop"). I could also start to see the stars come out. I watched all of this for a while, got back on the train, and got back to Munich around a dozen cappuccinos later. Then I went out and ate Yemeni stewed okra for dinner and went to a bar where I drank an espresso martini and wrote a handful of these lines. Finally I returned to the hostel and fell asleep.
Two days later while on the plane to Casablanca I took a picture of the lake from the sky and wondered if anyone was looking up at me.