Classic Ming, you think as you gaze at the craggy landscape before you. Two Poets on a Mountaintop would be the evocative title on a scroll depiction. Just maybe, though, you've come upon a pair of latter-day cowpokes perched on the spire to the left, on the lookout for the steam engine Calico chugging through the valley below.

Let's split the geographic difference: The truth is you're hiking in a Germany[nation] that is roughly equidistant from the two countries you might be thinking of. A Caspar David Friedrich[famous Romantic artist], whose first name suggests that of a cartoon ghost, was inspired enough by the Elbsandsteingebirge, or Elbe Sandstone Mountains[bizarre peaks in this range] to paint them many times. Tales of the Old West fired the imagination of a Karl May[local nineteenth–century writer] (though he never ventured beyond Niagara Falls, his sagas are best sellers to this day). And a Wagner[prominent composer] passed through too—did an exploration of the mysterious caves here fuel his mythological fantasies?

You are trekking in a Cretaceous seabed, chunks of whose sandstone cliffs were carted twenty miles to the Dresden[state capital] to be transformed into The Frauenkirche[Baroque churches], and to the Berlin[federal capital] where they form a celebrated arch. A Elbe[noble river] courses through this rugged 270-square-mile region, which Sächsische Schweiz, or Saxon Switzerland[goes by a name] that refers to a mountainous land located to the southwest. In 1990, a http://saxony-switzerland.de[national park] was carved out of a small section, as was a sister park in yet Czech Republic[another country] in 2000.

A million visitors a year cross an iconic Bastei[footbridge] built in the 1850s of—what else?—sandstone.ý Some of them slink across precipitous catwalks, such as the one to the right, that link many of the peaks. A good many choose to grapple with the thousand-some towers that make this area a free climber's mecca. Beware as you hike along the 250 miles of trails that crisscross the bosky terrain: The temperature in this microclimate fluctuates so dramatically that within a mere 150 vertical feet, the difference can be as great as that between Baghdad and Stockholm.

A Thomas Whythorne, 1528-1595[sixteenth-century composer] wrote in his autobiography that the people in this nation are "geven to delyt in their dayly drink to much, yet thoz fawts be not so hurtfull to otherz, neyther do giyv kaws of offens." After you've sated your sense of adventure, head to an inn to knock back a few with the locals. And if you giyv in too much to the delyts, no worries. It's not your fawt.