4. Staying In Austria longer than we expected

I forgot to mention, difficult though may seem, but at one campsite we returned after an afternoon trip into town to find someone practising their Alpenhorn playing on the site.  Maybe he wasn’t a virtuoso but it was a bit monotonous, just one deep rather mournful note, repeated, repeated and repeated.  Still it didn’t go on for too long,  it was well away from us and it reminded me of one reader of this very set of notes who when we went on holiday together (rather disturbingly nearly fifty years ago), took his trombone with him and was generous enough to surprise other holidaymakers by playing it.

Anyway as we left Salzburg it was a brilliantly sunny day and we could have stayed longer after all but our heads had already moved on and so we followed them.  Westwards now and heading back into the Austrian Tyrol.  We stopped on the way for a view over a lake alongside the autobahn and a little behind us was a Chinese van.  It had a big map on the side with their route marked which started and ended in Beijing, came right across overland through all those dangerous places ending in ‘Stan, right through Europe including a circle through Great Britain (these two words carefully chosen as it covered England, Wales and Scotland but nowhere in Ireland) and taking a more northerly route home.  I would have asked them about the trip (in my fluent Mandarin, facts ! folks, facts!) but all four of them were constantly taking selfies.  No photos of each other, just selfies.

The best way to get to our destination was into Germany and then south back into Austria, heading for a place SE of Innsbruck called Mayrhofen with cable cars and mountain walks.  To be fair mountain walks are not difficult to find around here and at the moment I can’t think of any particular reason why we chose the Mayrhofen area.   Personally I don’t care much for cable cars, not that they’ve ever slighted me in any way but I don’t like the sudden swinging when they pass over a support tower or the plunging hillside dropping away if you pass over a sharp edged ridge.  However, I do set this dislike aside in favour of getting up a big hill quickly rather than having to trek the equivalent of up Snowden merely to get started on the walk I want to do.  So you see I can be flexible.  Mind you I always look out at the mountainside imagining how far we’d go and whereabouts we would end up after bouncing down the hill if we did drop off.  I accept that this is probably not the most positive thought process to be running whilst in a moving cable car but it passes the time.

cable car from Mayrhofen

above Mayrhofen

At Mayrhofen we cycled in to town for the first cable car of the morning to find about sixty or seventy old Germans or Austrians milling about, clearly with the same intention.  By old I probably mean our age and I think they were part of a group waiting for the leader to tell them what to do, hence the milling.  However, by not milling about and walking up the stairs we got pretty well to the front without trying too hard and were on our way pretty quickly and feeling just a little bit smug.  At the top, we had spectacular clear views of snow and mountains disappearing into the distance but again not a great variety of flowers.   We did see our first Nutcrackers of the trip though, not the metal objects that lurk in bowls of Christmas nuts until Easter when the nuts finally get thrown away but a bird.  Nutcrackers are about a foot long, that’s about half again as big as a Starling, chunky and with a heavy and strong beak, brown plumage with white spots.  Pleased to see them.

We’ve been wondering about the lack of flowers, are we too early, too high and we haven’t seen a lot of the old style grazing, is that it.  We have read that artificial snow has an effect on the flora and flowers are definitely thinner on the ground around the skiing resorts.  It does seem though that at the time we’re here an altitude of around 1500m to 1800m is best but the quantity and variety is poor compared what we’ve seen in the past.  We’ve only had one walk where we saw more than one species of orchid.

Taking a slight mental digression here.  Those of you who know the USA even just in passing will be familiar with the widespread use of cinnamon (or cinnamon flavour, sorry flavor) which appears in what seem to be unlikely consumables.  Cinnamon buns I enjoy but cinnamon dusted coffee, no thanks.  Anyway, here in Austria, their equivalent is Caraway which every loaf seems to taste of.  I quite like it but occasionally would like some plain bread.

Back on the Mayrhofen walk, which in time-honoured style wasn’t actually decided on until an hour or so after we got off the cable car, we broke one of our cardinal rules which is ‘always walk back to your vehicle’.  This time we chose a walk which took us down from the high ground into a valley more than five miles from our bikes waiting at the cable car station.  This was merely on the basis of the leaflet we had saying that we could catch a bus back to Mayrhofen.  Well there was bit of alpine grazing with cow bells, there were some decent flowers, my goodness it was a lot of down, we saw a few more nice flowers.  Oh and ten minutes after we got to the bus stop we were satisfyingly and relieved to be sat on the bus back to town.  As part of my supporting local industry outlook I was forced to buy an ice-cream in town and then it was downhill rolling almost the whole way back to our campsite.

Opposite us on the site was what these days is a bit of a rarity, a home conversion.  This one wasn’t a sort of thrown together heap of rusty van but a clearly well thought out job, although it was small.  It was a quite old Range Rover Defender style vehicle.  That’s a small SUV for my hundreds if not thousands of US readers (that’s my facts anyway).  Cooking was from outside at the back under a canvas awning and the kitchen bit slid backwards and forwards.  Without investigating, it looked as if the kitchen had space underneath for feet because the bed appeared to be behind the front seats with feet to the back and therefore under the kitchen.  It was all very ingenious and the Austrian couple (older than us) were quite small.  Well, of course we could have expressed an interest and find out for sure but for goodness sake, we’re British, that’s not what we do.

The peeing statue 

Arrived at our site in Innsbruck, which although a lovely place with an amazingly swish shower block is very busy and still filling up.  It’s really much too full for the facilities but is extremely clean and very handy for the city.  We get a free bus pass to get into town which is about five miles away and that is our destination for tomorrow.  In the UK we try to park on a site with the sliding door and awning facing west so we can catch any late sun with a little bit of overhead cover but that doesn’t work here.  It is so hot when the sun is out we have to park with the awning facing east so that we can sit in the shade and of course have breakfast in the morning sun.  The evenings are warm enough to sit out reasonably late, well very late by English standards unless you’re wearing a woolly or a full set of thermals.

I’ve just realised that it’s forty years since we bought our first camper van, a VW Caravanette, for £1900 and remember that 8 years or so later, sold it for £1450.  For some reason we called it Mungo.  In those days caravans outnumbered motorhomes by a huge number and we were easily the youngest people almost every time.  Now caravans are definitely in the minority and you can work out for yourselves how often we’re the youngest on site now.  A number of continental sites also had the habit in those days of parking campers from each nationality together so all the Brits would be in one part of a site, the Dutch in another and so on.  Fortunately that camping ghetto idea seems to be disappeared.   We took Mungo to Northumberland for three weeks on our first trip where we kept arriving at towns and villages the day after the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Celebrations.  The year after that for our first foreign trip in it we went to the Italian Tyrol, just south of where we are now, where I learned how to nearly burn out the brakes by going down an Alp using them.

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