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This page describes the neoliet climbing gym in Bochum. These are my personal impressions based on (so far) one visit to the gym. The gym’s official web site is at www.neoliet.de; go there for more information ;)

The gym is located in an old industrial building in the northern part of Bochum, almost in Herne. To get there, you can take the subway and after a few minutes of walking (see the description on the neoliet web site), you end up in a small industrial district. The first picture shows the outside view of the gym building.

The building is huge (the gym is one of the largest climbing gyms in Germany, according to neoliet), and that is more or less the first thing you notice when you’re at the top of the stairs leading up to the main area. At the bottom of the stairs are the changing rooms, which weren’t finished at the time I was there. The drawing shows an overview of the interior of the building. Red lines show the areas with routes; blue arrows show the perspectives of the pictures (see below).

There are heaps of routes with grades ranging from 3- to at least 8 (Germany uses the UIAA grading system — the second picture shows a comparison to other systems). Most of them are labeled with the grade, and they seemed to be in the process of putting up the rest of the labels (I was there on the opening day). The holds are new, so of course they’re clean. There are top ropes for all of the climbs, and I’ve seen a few carabiners for lead climbing, but I didn’t see too many (not that I looked too closely) — all that I’ve seen are at the wall that’s on top of the drawing. The top ropes don’t have any carabiners, so the climber has to tie in and the belayer has to use some sort of belaying device. There are Figure Eights and carabiners for rent, and the belaying styles explained by the staff seem to use either the Figure Eight or just a carabiner.

The wall on top of the drawing and the left side of the long central wall are overhanging, and there are a few smaller overhangs in the “rooms” on the left of the drawing. Some of the walls in those rooms are leaning inward.

The big rectangle labeled “boulder” in the drawing is the big block shown in picture 3 below. I didn’t look at it since there were quite a few children around.

In addition to the belay devices mentioned above, you can of course rent shoes and harnesses. They use really nice Boreal shoes, and the harnesses are also very good compared to those in the other climbing gyms I’ve been to, and they even have them in different sizes. Watch out with the size of the shoes you rent, the shoes are quite small (I usually have a European size 38, and used 5 1/2 here which translates to 38 1/2). On the opening day, the largest shoes they had were European 46 1/2, which means people with large feet better bring their own shoes… It seems to be planned to have chalk bag for rent, but they hadn’t arrived on the day I was there so I was allowed to borrow the owner’s private chalk bag :)

There are quite a lot of people working there, even though probably they won’t all be around all the time. The staff members I’ve talked to were very friendly and enthusiastic, even though it’s hard to get used to being called “Sie” in a climbing gym…

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