The southern end of the Kottenforst lies where the plateau west of Bonn begins to tilt toward the Eifel, and the ground, which is flat and wooded to the north, starts to roll in low hills around Wachtberg and Meckenheim. Anyone who has walked the Kottenforst on a Sunday knows the Professorenweg, a long forest track whose name is thought to come from the university professors of Bonn who took their daily constitutional along it, thinking aloud with a colleague.
This part of the woods is older and more mixed than the northern edge, with big beeches, oaks, some conifer plantations, and boggy hollows where alder and willow grow. The ground holds water, there are small ponds, and frogs and newts breed in spring. Roe deer step out at dusk, and the sound of a woodpecker echoes through the trunks. The air, after rain, smells of leaf mould and wet bark in a way that suddenly makes a day at the office seem remote.
A motorcyclist should treat the forest tracks as off limits, since German law keeps motor vehicles off most unpaved forest paths and fines can be sharp. The public roads around are a different story. From Wachtberg, the lanes drop and climb through orchards and small villages, with views toward the Siebengebirge and the Drachenfels across the Rhine on a clear day. To the south the Ahr valley opens, with its vineyards, red wine and winding road along the river, though parts of the valley are still marked by the catastrophic floods of 2021, and some sections have been rebuilt. Rain and leaf-fall make autumn mornings slippery, and the roads can ice up at dawn in winter.
Wachtberg, three kilometres away, is a municipality of twenty thousand people, with fuel and bakeries, and Bonn and Bad Godesberg are within easy reach for anything more. Bad Godesberg has a hilltop ruined castle and the old diplomatic quarter from the days when Bonn was the capital of West Germany. Local pubs serve Rhineland dishes such as Himmel un Ääd, black pudding with apple and potato, and the beer is Kölsch. Parking at forest car parks is generally free, and the paths are well signed for walkers.