2. Over the Hills & Far Away (or Faraway to those in on the joke)
Spring Gentian
We’ve come a little further south working on our
‘once we’re here, not driving too much’ idea and have pitched in an almost
caricature Alpine Village called Heiligenblut.
Set on a steep hillside, surrounded by woods and meadow, snow capped
mountains to the north and a church whose spire looks as if it has had a giant
pencil sharpener used to finish it off.
Oh, and drenched in hot sunshine.
On a walk into town for some supplies we walked through what was the
lower churchyard, full of wild flowers which were in the process of being
strimmed to make a nice green bit of grass.
Bit of a worrying pattern here with us and flowery meadows at the
moment. We had to dull the shock with coffee
and apfel-strudel. Yes, with cream.Heiligenblut
Yet again we feel quite guilty at our lack of local lingo, especially when many of the locals speak English with some proficiency. Not guilty enough to do much about it I have to confess but even we’ve managed to work out things like a rectangular carton in the chiller section of a supermarket marked Halbfett Milch is likely to be the semi-skimmed we’re looking for. Judging by what we’ve seen so far, Austria is so pristine and tidy it’s almost like a cleaned up version of Switzerland. Yesterday, after a week in the country I saw a piece of litter and you would think from the lack of evidence that there were no dogs at all. What they think when they visit litter strewn and dog shitty England I can’t imagine.
As my regular reader, you’ll know that I like to
write about oddities and just plain ridiculous things I see without trying to
seem too negative about the places we visit.
I ought to add that everywhere we’ve been has been enjoyable, some
naturally more than others but we’ve never been anywhere that I remember saying
afterwards that we wished we’d never gone.
However, nowhere disappoints in the oddity stakes. Just outside Heiligenblut we had a walk
through the forest, good path and well waymarked as expected, no litter and
apparently no dogs. There was a story
for children on a set of boards running along the route about the creatures who
lived at one with nature in the area before man came and started cutting down
the trees and farming the land etc… Just
past a lovely old small watermill supplied with water through a series of
hollowed out tree trunks a good couple of miles from the nearest road we came
across a man with a petrol driven leaf blower who was blowing pine needles off
the dirt and stone path. What ! In the
middle of the forest I hear you say.
Yep, in the middle of the forest.
And the mythical creatures, well sod ‘em, obviously.
I have been a bit blasé (see, I do know some
foreign words) about the scenery which is spectacular. We’re in the eastern Alps here, just east of
the Austrian Tyrol and north of the Dolomites in the Italian Tyrol. The Dolomites are proper pointy mountains,
just like a child’s drawing. When we
first visited the Italian Tyrol in our VW Camper in 1978 we hadn’t realised it
was German speaking and found out that unlike their German speaking cousins
further north they didn’t speak English. All we had was an Italian phrase book. Some of you at some time probably had a car
named after one of the bigger towns in the area and hadn’t realised it, just as
the residents of Cortina would have been surprised at how many English people
knew the name of their home town.
There’s still a lot of snow on the tops here with very early flowers at high
up and later flowering ones lower down.
So we’re heading eastwards into Carinthia with no discernible plan
whatsoever, rather like our Government and Brexit.
The 30 degree heat we’d been enjoying gave way to
thunderstorms which cleared things a bit but the following day it was back to
hot sun again and meandering further east we’ve stopped at the Weissensee, a
long thin lake where we plan to take a ski lift to higher ground where we hope
it will be cooler and we can have a walk and see some flowers. Well, the ski lift, one of those like a
fairground ride where you sit down and pull a safety bar down to keep you in
place. Not riding miles in the air like
a cable car but high enough for you not to want to fall off it. At the end you have to lift the bar, get off
and get out of the way before the seats flatten you. So, a ten minute walk from the ski lift we
had lunch at a restaurant where they had vegetarian options and very good it
was too, sitting outside in the shade looking across an alpine meadow. We saw a few orchids but the real flower
treasures were on the walk down, nine different orchid species including one we
had never seen before, the absolutely stunning Lady’s-Slipper Orchid which is
as a big as a tropical orchid flower. I measured it at four inches wide and there it
was just sitting minding its own business right next to the track. Of the nine species we saw, two are not
unusual in Britain, one is definitely uncommon, one is exceedingly rare and the
Lady’s Slipper is as rare as you can get with only one, or possibly none left
in the wild. Heather was kind enough to
say that I’d got my ‘orchid eye’ in although it wasn’t me who spotted all of
them first.
Lady's Slipper Orchid
I apologise now for a story whose whole meaning
will only make any sense to radio listening British readers of a certain age,
although in the old days I seem to remember that was The Wireless. On our walk down from the high alpine meadows
we passed a sign for Nagger Alms and I was immediately transported back to the
1960’s. For this was surely an ailment
straight from the repertoire of Ramblin’ Syd Rumpo. “With a hey nonny no, me deario”. etc etc.
There are few Brits around here, one on our last
campsite, one on tonight’s one.
Tonight’s site has all the signs and instructions in German, Italian and
Dutch and nothing in English so the French and Scandinavians and all those
other nationalities who will have English as a second language will be as
puzzled as us. Except of course many of
them will have a passing knowledge of a third if not a fourth to fall back
on. It is always with a sense of
amazement that we’ll sometimes check in to a campsite and hear a young person
at reception chatting in French and German to other customers and then very
good English to us when it was our turn.
It happened exactly like that to us on a site in Croatia once and the
young woman on reception told us that as well as French, German and English she
could of course speak Croat but also spoke Italian and could ‘get by’ in a
couple of others. So, she spoke five
languages plus a couple to get by in and she was a campsite receptionist. Amazing.
Here’s a true story about the last British Lady’s
Slipper Orchid. Last year I met a woman, late 40’s/early 50’s
(?) whose father had been one of the two people who knew where the single plant
was (the plants had been regularly dug up and transplanted to gardens where
most if not all would have promptly died).
She told me that when her father had taken her to see it, she had been
blindfolded for the last half mile or so, so that she wouldn’t know the
location. It’s always two people so that
if one dies the survivor can tell another person so that the number is back to
two. They say that only two people know
the secret ingredients for Coca-Cola.
That’s two people and anyone who can read the label on the can.
I may have cracked that old joke before but my
defence as I used to someone a couple of weeks ago is that I claim to be firmly
in my anecdotage.
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