The best part about this trip is that you can start out right at Miniloft Mitte. We always recommend to rent a bike when you visit Berlin for more than a few days, because you'll instantly feel like a local and you'll be able to get to experience the city close up with all its authentic corners and neighborhoods.
Just down Chausseestrasse, right before Müllerstrasse, you take a right and start out on a little bike path along the river Panke. Along the river at all times, this path leads you through very different neighborhoods until you reach the nature reserve Karower Teiche.
From Mitte to Wedding and Gesundbrunnen, through Pankow with its pretty parks and out the north end of the city. Through a little neighborhood of Kleingarten, the typical German allotments of weekend gardens, the road becomes more open, the apartment buildings disappear and family houses line the way before you notice that you have left the city. The road becomes a little gravel path and you enter nature.
Pretty soon you will be approaching a very green area, right next to river Panke. You've reached Karower Teiche, a small nature reserve named after the four bodies of water (Teiche means ponds) that you'll find within it. Here is where you'll end your ride, enjoy the landscape that is so typical for the Brandenburg area: swampy meadows with birch trees and reeds, green an lush in summer and so colorful in the autumn and winter sun. At Karower Teiche, you'll find many amateur ornithologists as the area is known in the whole region for its vast fauna that includes many endangered species.
By bike, you'll make this trip in about 1 to 1.5 hours. If you'd like to get there walking, you can get on the train S2 at Nordbahnhof and take it to Karow station. You'll be right around the corner from Karower Teiche, about a 15 minute walk away from nature!
