3. Onto Salzburg
Heading eastward we find ourselves in an area with
fewer mountains and much more gently rolling countryside, woods, very neat
looking farmland and just about every house with the usual amazingly evenly
stacked woodpiles with nary a stick out of place. As we got to a point roughly north of the
Italian/Slovenian border we turned north ourselves in a vague direction towards
Salzburg which has been highly recommended.
We’d come this far east to see Burg Hochosterwitz
castle. It got a good write up in Lonely
Planet which is to say that it might be good or it might not be. From some way off we could see a huge mound
with the castle on the top and it did not disappoint. We stopped half a mile short in a spotlessly
clean layby picnic area and contemplated the scene. At least I did while Heather put lunch
together. Well I did take some
photographs and while we were there we were only visited by two coach loads of
German tourists who spilled out and milled around us lunching Brits taking
their own photographs. Some were even
photographed while pretending to hold the distant castle in the palm of their
hand – now who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humour. The castle itself was built to repel the
Turks who were obviously making a nuisance of themselves in the late 16th
century in these here parts. The 560
foot hill on which it stands has mostly sheer sides and the top bastion is at
the top of a slope with fourteen defensive gates. According to the previously mentioned Lonely
Planet some of the gatehouses have spikes embedded in them which could be
dropped on unsuspecting invaders but they look like common or garden portcullis
to me. The whole shebang is extremely
impressive and naturally has wonderful views from the top.
One thought about these castles though. They’re often built in a commanding position
(e.g. Corfe Castle in Dorset) but were mainly armed with handheld weapons,
longbows or crossbows. Doubtless there
would have been some fairly primitive cannon but why wouldn’t any invaders have
just blocked the gates from below and carried on with their Turkish Delight or
whatever with the defenders stuck inside ? It wouldn’t be necessary to besiege the castle
and starve the garrison into surrender, just bypass them.
We settled into our nearby campsite in hot
sunshine and then by mid-afternoon we had thunderstorms and persistent heavy
rain so the flat campsite ended up looking like a rice paddy. Fortunately for us it had good drainage. We had had one of those days with a catalogue
of errors beginning with driving off leaving a pair of Heather’s sandals
outside but happily noticing before we left the site. We nearly emptied our grey water (washing up
and washing water) in the wrong place.
Went into a supermarket, found it didn’t have half of what we wanted so
we put what we had got back on the shelves, then went to another supermarket
that turned out to be so busy we couldn’t park.
Finally we found a suspicious looking wet patch on our carpet next to
our kitchen sink. First thought A LEAK !
which is just what we don’t need. Then
on investigation it turned out to be a jar of gherkins with a poorly applied
lid which had fallen over and lightly seasoned our carpet.
Kunsthotel Fuchspalast Hotel in St Veit
In Austria it’s necessary to buy a vignette for
autobahn travel. Our ten day one had run
out and we did get another at about £7 to last until we leave for Switzerland
where they sting you for an annual vignette.
In Austria the fine for not having one is (I believe) £100+. However, the last time we were here driving
to Croatia we knew nothing of vignettes and spent two days driving through the
country including a rather exciting episode where we drove up a mountain road
and at the end drove onto a train which took us through the mountain for us to
drive off at the other end, with no vignette.
We only found out in a conversation with a young Austrian couple in
Croatia when the subject came up and they were horrified that we hadn’t bought
one.
There are many many (yes that’s two many) motorbikes
here, especially roaring up and down mountain passes making a racket. Why do they have to be so loud and why is
there no decibel limit ? Isn’t there a
limit for cars ? We decided that the
excitement of having a motorbike is something to do with getting into bed at
night and realising that you’ve made it through another day.
At our current rate we realise that we’ll arrive
in Salzburg on Sunday with Monday being a day shops seem to stay closed here,
so we stopped for a couple of nights at Hallstatt, a small very touristy place
built on a very narrow strip of land between a sheer mountainside and a
lake. It developed because of huge salt
deposits in the hills behind the town which were known about in bronze age
times. Indeed some way above the top of
the high funicular station a burial ground dating from 800BC to 400BC was found
which contained hundreds of graves. The
salt miners life expectancy was 35 years but the mines made huge profits for
the Emperor, so that was all very satisfactory.
I said it was very touristy and have to add that
aptly named Hallstatt is full of tat.
Not even one souvenir shop with anything tasteful. Lots of salt products though, like salt for
instance.
Heather on the viewing platform
Hallstatt from the viewing platform
As we checked in to the campsite there was an
Oriental cyclist in front of Heather who turned out to be Japanese and called
Robert. I don’t know if the receptionist
was anti-oriental but his and Robert’s conversation (in English) went something
like this. “Have you got a a shop ?”
“No.” “Is there a shop in town ?” “Yes.”
“Have you got a restaurant ?
“No.” Is there a restaurant in
town ?” “Yes.” “Can I get a beer.” “The bar is closed.” WELCOME TO AUSTRIA. No, I made the last bit up. The receptionist told Heather there was a TV
room showing football and when she said somewhat jokingly that she wasn’t going
to tell me, he actually ran out of reception to the van and told me about the
TV room showing football. This of
course was the first I’d heard of any of the conversation so once again I
didn’t have a clue what was going on. So
once we’d got parked Heather took Robert a beer but then they both came back
because he didn’t have a bottle opener.
How could he possibly travel without at the very least a Swiss Army
Knife ? He turned out to be a retired IT
Consultant from Yokohama, just touring around by himself in Europe with a bike.
Hallstatt had more oriental tourists than
westerners with the young women often looking like tiny fourteen year olds,
often in very elegant dresses. Some we
saw posing for photos in dirndls from ‘Rent a Dirndl’ (true). It’s a shop on the waterfront at
Hallstatt. Dirndls are traditional dresses regularly seen
in Austria but more familiar to brits from beer keller adverts where they’re
shown worn by a buxom barmaid carrying a handful of glasses of beer each side
of a pair of what can only be described as improbably sized breasts. That is very unlike most of the oriental
girls who can be fairly described as wispy.
Eventually we arrived in Salzburg on the morning
of a Monday which turned out to be a national holiday. We found a lovely wooded and hedged campsite
only three miles or so from the city centre with a bike route along a small
stream all the way into town. We even
had the right of way at the one road we had to cross. If we didn’t want to cycle there was a bus
from 100 yards from the site right into the centre of the city.
Salzburg is a very Baroque city although much of
it was rebuilt after heavy second world war bombing so a lot is not as old as
it looks. Bearing that in mind, Lonely
Planet’s joke (even beneath me) “If it’s Baroque, don’t fix it” doesn’t even
make sense. The city seems to have lots
of traffic free areas which add tremendously to its appeal and bicycles and
traffic are kept apart a lot of the time, which is good for bikes and driver’s
blood pressure. The place makes as much as it can out of Mozart and The Sound
of Music, allegedly the only film in history which can make you sympathetic
towards the Nazis.
From our own empirical evidence I know that you
get thunderstorms on 50% of days and rain on 100% of days in Salzburg and
although we know we should have seen a lot more, wandering around a city in the
rain doesn’t help with the appeal of the place, so we only stayed a couple of
days. In fact just before one of the
thunderstorms there was a sudden heavy hail shower which left the ground
completely covered by large hailstones with the biggest about an inch in
diameter. Actually just the right size
for a gin and tonic if only I’d had one to hand. As well as the buildings, old and not so old,
Salzburg is full of museums and one we missed was the Bible Museum where “you
can meet Jesus of Nazareth”. A case for
the Trade Descriptions Act I would have thought. Now, any of you who have visited a city in
the last few years would have seen people dressed as statues and the now
ubiquitous ‘levitating person’. I think
I first saw one of these as an Indian Snake Charmer chappie with a support
disguised as a rope or similar. I
remember it well because another tourist told me that he was “really just
floating there” and wouldn’t accept my rational explanation. Rational explanation dismissed for the
unbelievable was surely a portent for recent political events. Here in Salzburg we had a levitating Mozart. Who else ?
It is nothing to do with this trip but mentioning
Mozart reminded me of a visit to a Poole record shop (remember those ?) many
years ago where I asked the young woman shop assistant (remember those ?) for a
record by Mahler. Apparently struck dumb
by this astounding request in a record shop, I could almost hear the cogs
grinding behind what could only be described as a pair of eyes with little life
behind them. (“It’s life Jim but not as
we know it.”). Almost able to speak the
one language she finally said “Did e write it or does e do it ?”
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