Hallstatt to Salzburg

Last night we very much enjoyed an excellent night’s sleep in our lovely bed, but we have noticed that in the hotels we have stayed in, both in Switzerland and Austria, the double beds are always made up of two single beds. Even when the room/bed head would not accommodate two single beds with spaces between, they are two separate beds. Often they have completely separate fitted sheets, which must be a pain to change, and they always have two separate duvets/quilts/doonas. Weird!

See how the bedhead is in two sections? This one has a cover but you can see two separate duvets underneath.

It does make me wonder what things people find strange when they come to Australia.

Despite our room being quite hot last night there was still no cooler option sheet-wise than using either the divested duvet covers or the ornamental spread that covered the whole bed. There was a small Dyson fan but we couldn’t open the windows for a cool breeze as there were no fly screens and, being by a lake, there were plenty of bugs. It feels like a market someone could really capitalise on financially!

There’s two layers of doors and windows, one of which is double-glazed. Excellent for winter but not for summer.

Anyhow, our sleep would’ve been a bit longer but the sun was shining in through the thin white curtains by 5:30am. Fortunately we’re both pretty good at sleeping through daylight. Seeing as how many parts of Europe experience extremely short evenings for at least a quarter of the year, the ineffective curtain situation is also mind boggling. I think I’ve reached the point of the trip where all I’m noticing are problems… sorry! I am actually still really enjoying myself!

Breakfast was a buffet that seemed to be manned by one extremely busy waitress. The selection of food was great and we ended up sitting next to an older American couple who had just finished their fourth biking holiday. They were both retired teachers and we had a good chat about work. One had been a reading teacher and told me how much she had loved the First Steps program, which was developed in Australia.

We left our bags at reception and went to hire a boat!

The small electric boats are hired for 30€ for an hour and it’s a great way to escape the hot streets and noise. Plus I love boats!

We hired one immediately at 11:30am but by the time we got back there was a queue.

The boats have two speeds: slow and stopped. Fine by us, and the electric motor means the lake is very quiet. The town has signs up asking people to keep the noise down and not play music on the street. Also there were signs about not flying drones but we saw one in the air just before we left.

As we had some time before the ferry back to the train, we went back to the hotel and had a drink on the deck.

Several staff members remembered us from the night before and I got to ask one of them about living and working in such a tourist town.

He said they often work 12+ hour shifts and the hotel they work for provides accommodation if they want it nearby, but it does cost them money to stay there. He rents a place in a nearby town and travels to Hallstatt.

He said people in the village had mixed opinions on the value of the tourism and the vast number of visiting cultures had changed the nature of the place, with some people taking photos through peoples’ windows and being more invasive and pushy. Right after he said this a family came in and immediately demanded a particular table, an umbrella (in a huge concrete stand) be moved and then they plonked themselves down despite the manager of the restaurant saying she couldn’t accommodate them.

It’s almost incomprehensible to me, with my reticent Anglo cultural heritage, to argue and demand something in a business then sit down and be perfectly comfortable with people I’ve just upset serving me food and drink. I’d just leave, but according to my Watching the English book, that’s not a trait everyone shares and I guess maybe there’s something to be said for being so much more bold…?

Watching the manager deal with the situation was quite something. She was a very dynamic and direct person, and she came to our table soon after. We told her we admired how well she did her job.

It must be quite the challenge to deal with people from all over the world, all with their own ideas of what is appropriate, what is polite and how to behave. Businesses in such places seem to do all they can to manage people effectively, but when people don’t speak the language (ourselves included, obviously!) it’s not hard for things to go wrong or get very confused. The restaurant had a sign in German and English asking people to wait to be seated but a lot of people just walked right in and sat at a table.

After our drinks we headed to the ferry landing next to the hotel. This might be the smallest non-chihuahua breed I’ve ever seen.

We caught the ferry back across the lake.

It was quite hot inside but better than being on the back of the ferry in the direct sun.

We’d booked dinner and a show in the evening, not thinking about the train cancellations and travel time but it worked out fine.

We sat on the scenic side of the train this time. Apparently the water in this lake is drinking quality!

We took a taxi from the station in Salzburg to our Airbnb place in the old town.

This is the building entrance, not our front door. Pretty imposing though!

The kitchen, note the fold out table and folding chairs and the complete lack of room if you chose to use them.

The kitchen is so tiny it reminds me of our Camden flat but the lounge and bedroom are quite spacious. We would’ve really appreciated all this room when there were four of us!

The flat has windows on two opposite sides so the evening breeze is nice but the amount of noise from people walking past is quite high. The stone walls of the buildings means that it echoes a lot. Also there are no fly screens and the owner had left the windows open so there were heaps of flies zooming around.

Still, the mattress is decent and it’s nice to have cooking facilities and a washing machine.

We had a lie down for an hour then changed for our dinner and classical music evening at the St Peter Stifskulinarium, the oldest restaurant in the world.

How old??

It’s been in operation since at least 803 AD. 1220 years!

It’s huge too, over 600 seats in 11 rooms. All the rooms are different colours and themes. The main restaurant looks like this:

We had a drink here before the show, which was in a large room upstairs. Parts of the restaurant are carved straight into the cliff face.

One the way to our concert we saw some pretty amazing wallpaper.

Also some fancy lighting fixtures.

Our concert room was more traditional.

We were sat at a table with two lovely ladies, one from Delhi, one from New York, who had become friends because their husbands were childhood friends and now they go on trips without the husbands! I love that! These lovely ladies told us about an organ performance that happens at the cathedral each day at midday so we said we might see them there.

The concert was all Mozart, mostly songs from operas but some instrumental pieces. There were only two singers, one man and one woman, and they were quite incredible! The volume and notes they could reach were something I don’t think I’ve heard in person before.

I do wish there’s been more instrumental pieces though, they were Luke’s and my favourite.

A very interesting way of laying the table!

The only food I photographed was the dessert, nockerl, a local dish that I think is supposed to represent three mountains. It is served with raspberry sauce underneath and basically tastes like undercooked meringue, very sweet and soft.

A short walk home afterwards and straight to bed, although it was still warm inside. We opened up the windows for some airflow but noisy passers-by meant closing them, then putting in my noise-cancelling earplugs and playing rain sounds.

In the morning (6:30ish) a sewerage truck parked almost under our window and ran some kind of pipe down every sewerage line in the area for about two hours with a loud motor running. Not our best night’s sleep!

Tomorrow: the cathedral concert and back to our new favourite coffee shop. Also, lavender flavoured cheese!

18Jun2023

Hallstatt

by Miss Penny Black

Our trip to Hallstatt was supposed to be two trains then a short ferry ride. When we got to Salzburg train station our first train had been cancelled.

How annoying.

Luke managed to work out which train and platform we needed to get to and soon we were on our way.

The countryside between Salzburg and Hallstatt is supposedly Austria’s Lake District – not such huge mountains as the Alps and lots of lakes and rivers between gentle green hills.

It was indeed green but it’s no Cumbria;-)

The trains weren’t very crowded, although we managed to sit right by a woman who talked loudly and non-stop for the whole first half of the journey.

On the second train trip we had a bunch of teenage girls sit at the table across the aisle and they managed to be quieter than the woman on the previous train.

After a couple of hours we reached the ferry landing. It’s possible to get to Hallstatt by bus and road but it’s more fun to go by train then take the short ferry ride over.

It also provides a water view of this fairytale-like hamlet.

We were very lucky with the weather too.

We had booked one night at a lovely hotel called the Seehotel Grüner Baum, right on the waterfront. It was our one really fancy hotel for the trip (well, that we’d planned in advance) and so we were really looking forward to it.

The view from the water is lovely and very quiet but when you get off the ferry the number of tourists is quite astonishing.

Fortunately our hotel was right by the ferry landing and on the waterfront so we went down to their restaurant area and had a drink in the shade.

We had a cocktail called a Hugo, apparently popular in this region.

We spent a couple of hours waiting for the crowds to die down a bit – not a hardship with this view!

Then we took a walk through town. The square outside the hotel was extremely picturesque.

The front of the hotel is the orange building on the right.

Many of the building were covered with stunning climbing roses.

After a walk around town, down some of the back alleys and along the main street, we checked into our room at precisely 3pm, very keen for a shower and change of clothes.

A lovely bathroom but the shortest shower screen I’ve ever seen, water went everywhere.

The view from our balcony was pretty spectacular

Refreshed, we walked to the viewing point which is crowded all day. We got there at about 5:30pm when it was relatively quiet.

If you’ve only seen one picture of Hallstatt, it’ll be something like this.

We walked back through the graveyard, where graves are rented for a few years at a time. If no one pays you get dug up and your skull moved to the charnel house. The graves were probably the best-maintained I’ve ever seen.

All had very neat and colourful flower gardens on top.

There are two churches in the centre of the village, the one higher up offers an excellent view from the path around the outside.

We had a drink before dinner and soaked up the peace and quiet of the lake, while at the same time watching the staff of the hotel work with the constant flow of tourists wandering in without bookings and expecting a table. Also we noticed a cat had been asleep in a palm pot the whole time we had been sitting right by it.

I had fish caught from the lake for my dinner. There are only two people licenced to fish from the lake to protect their stocks, which is reassuring, what with the complete disregard for fish numbers in most other places. I know the risotto doesn’t look amazing but it was delicious!

Luke had the pork, which looked much more appetising.

We asked if we could take a bottle of Prosecco and our desserts up to our balcony and were told ‘you can take whatever you want!’ So we did.

Our balcony neighbours were all out but being very quiet, and so were we, except for when I took the cage off the Prosecco and let it sit and then the cork popped all by itself, making us both jump.

Goodnight, Hallstatt!

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 6: Imst to Innsbruck

by Miss Penny Black

I’ve taken a lot more photos of tractors than I anticipated. I didn’t even mean to take this one, it just rolled into the shot.

Today was going to be our longest day yet (65km) and initially I’d been dreading it as the road surfaces of the first few days had been steep and gravel. However, yesterday was mostly asphalt and it seemed like the closer we got to Innsbruck, the better the road would be. Being well stocked with medication to combat itchy eyes made me feel more confident too. If I can be indelicate, the previous day had also not been quite as torturous in the seat, so that was a bonus too.

After a massive ten hours of sleep (for me anyway) we got down to breakfast at about 7am. Breakfast at this hotel started at 6:30am, the previous hotel was 8am. There really should be a standardisation of breakfast hours in hotels and when I am elected president of the world it will be one of my first ten new laws*.

Jane and Rutherford sat next to us at breakfast and I am proud to say I won the wordle challenge for the day (fastest *and* fewest guesses). I forgot to post the photo I took of the four of us the previous day so here it is.

Right after our guardian angels pointed us to the nearest pharmacy.

This hotel had champagne on offer with the breakfast buffet but since 90% of the clientele were about to mount up for a day of cycling, I can’t imagine much of it was drunk.

Farewell, Hotel Neuner, your meals were excellent and not eye-wateringly priced.

Our hotel was right by the bike trail and so it was a matter of moments to be on our bikes and heading out of town. There were a few short, steep hills to begin with, then a lovely section of dappled forest riding.

The majority of the day was spent going between 20 and 35kph and so we made it to Innsbruck a bit before 3pm. Here’s a few sights from the trail.

We rode alongside this river most of the day.

A small herd of cows blocked the road and we looked at them for a short while until a guy on a bike came towards them from the other direction and shouted at them and pushed them out of the way. Not a tactic I would’ve tried!

The valley floor was very flat and mostly farmland.

While he loved the forest sections and some of the farmland with all its vegetation, Luke said it was the most boring day, scenery-wise. I felt it was a relief not to have a sheer drop right next to me at any point.

Luke stopped by Innsbruck airport but sadly no planes flew low overhead. Behind us was the local beach – giant pebbles and freezing cold water.

We stopped in Innsbruck to check how far away our hotel was and it just so happened to be right across the road from the point at which we’d stopped. The tour app directs you to the middle of town and we hadn’t thought about precisely where the hotel was. Lucky we checked!

The hotel is called ‘Rufi’s’ which doesn’t translate well into English. The guy at the front desk was lovely and we put away our bikes then availed ourselves of our complementary drinks.

So there you go, we finished our bike tour from St Moritz to Innsbruck. Approximately 250km across two countries. The route had been rated ‘moderate’ but we’d thought that having e-bikes would compensate for our lack of fitness or experience. Although we made it, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy to anyone else! It was more mentally draining than physically problematic for me, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so scary – although the worst part was the detour on day 3.

In summary!

The best bits were:

The views

The weather

The public pool/spa at Zernez

The local food

The very polite and patient drivers in Austria and Switzerland

The decent route signage

The excellent roadside amenities, in particular the frequent public fountains with pure spring drinking water

The worst aspects were:

The bikes were for city riding, not gravel, the tyres were awful for the conditions

The complete lack of support from Eurobikes and the fact that ‘the natural adventure company’ was just another name for a company we’d actively been trying to avoid

The way hotels did not cater for warm nights by offering a sheet or light blanket, let alone a fan or aircon

The flies – they are everywhere, including indoors

The atrocious smell of manure for about 50% of the ride

The poor performance of the two apps and that day 5 on the app did not allow any route guidance

So, how much did it cost? The seven nights of accommodation plus breakfast, e-bike hire and bag transfers was $5,422K AUD for both of us. Most of the hotels were around $300 to $400 a night ($350×7 = $2450). We paid extra for electric bikes but I shudder to think what the trip would’ve been like without them.

While it is a lot for a week’s travel, this is a very expensive part of the world and the views are tremendous. The entire route has views of snow-capped jagged mountains and fields of flowers. The most scenic part was day 4, between Ardez and Ftan. A cheaper and easier way to enjoy the sights would be to use the local bus system to get about and walk between some of the most picturesque places.

We saved a bit of money by eating large breakfasts, skipping lunch and buying most of our snacks from the supermarket.

We ate our way through several packets of these biscuits over the course of the week.

Anyhow, on to a relaxing day in Innsbruck before catching the train to Hallstatt!

* I’m having a really hard time deciding on my other nine but they will definitely include a standardisation of electrical sockets and better pillows for Europeans.

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 5: Ried to Imst

by Miss Penny Black

After our usual ‘stuff ourselves to the brim’ breakfast we hit the road. I took my strongest hayfever meds and didn’t suffer too badly in the morning. At about 12pm we cycled through Landeck, a larger town than any we’d seen so far.

We cycled past Jane and Rutherford, who stopped for a chat and said they’d just been to a chemist! So I went in and bought two replacement bottles of nasal spray and two bottles of eye drops, which now brings my total quantity of hay fever meds to seven.

We stopped at a cafe for a drink which turned out to be more like a dessert – a very ice cream heavy iced chocolate and iced coffee. They came with three long wafers to scoop up the icecream. Delicious!

Heading out of Landeck was a bit of road riding, then gravel, then a lovely tarmac bike path.

Not far out of Landeck we saw this interesting ruin. Imagine living up there! You certainly wouldn’t be popular with the postman.

Lots of horses around, particularly palominos.

We stopped in a little village to refill our soft water bottles and found this curious religious statue. Is it Mary or Eve? Or is this a commentary on how all the women in the bible are either mothers or of ill repute?

A little further along we decided to stop at what looked like a charming little cafe.

It seemed small but was like the tardis as we went in.

Hundreds of seats and a dozen different shops. From the other side it was clearly a Highway service station. We ended up buying ice cream and sitting outside. Coconut for me, caramel for Luke.

The day’s ride was pretty easy compared to the previous days and, apart from a wrong turn down an extremely low and creepy (probably haunted) tunnel, we made it to our hotel without too many worries.

The path was a lot easier in every way and so we made pretty good time, arriving around 3pm.

Time for a drink at the restaurant.

Most of our discussion over drinks revolved around the excessive number of flies in Switzerland and Austria and the complete lack of flyscreens. No matter where you sit they are landing on your plate and no one else seems terribly bothered by them.

We ended up having dinner at 6, knudels (mac and cheese) and salad for me, cordon Bleu and chips for Luke. mine had dried caramelised onions on top, which I will have to try at home because it was a great combo.

Prices continue to become more reasonable the further we get from St Moritz

I’d like to say we went out partying but I was asleep by 7pm and didn’t wake up until after 5am. I think the relief of having enough medication to make the trip enjoyable was such a great weight of my mind I could properly relax.

Our room at the hotel was nice too, spacious with a balcony lined with purple petunias.

Poor Luke was up until 11 playing games with his headphones in.

Tomorrow our last but longest day at 65km.

13Jun2023

Euro Bike Tour: Day 4: Scuol to Prutz (Crossing to Austria)

by Miss Penny Black

We left the hotel at about 10 after a bit of drama with my phone and Three, the company I got my phone SIM from. Danny, my friend in Northern Ireland (with whom I did the Camino) had been very kindly helping me out with renewing my phone plan (the money has to be paid from a UK account) but the credit he’d added had somehow disappeared while I’d been asleep – Luke thought maybe the hotel wifi had dropped out and apps had been updating. Luke used their online chat to fix it and the company renewed the plan for a month with unlimited data.

You just don’t realise how important internet access is until you don’t have it. We only have one UK phone number between us and it’s on my phone – something to rectify for next time. The delay made me feel a bit anxious as this was our longest day of cycling yet.

On the way out of Scuol was a very scenic bridge and no cars allowed, which makes any path more pleasant to ride!

So picturesque.

Snow melt makes the rivers such an unusual colour with all the minerals washed down from the mountains.

I didn’t take a lot of photos today. Switzerland has experienced really bad storms and some landslides. Trails that were probably fairly smooth a couple of weeks ago were very potholed and rough. Or maybe they were always like that. The day before we had been detoured due to a big landslide.

There were several parts of the ride early on where railings seemed to be missing or edges were more precipitous than they should be. I really don’t like coming down steep and winding gravel roads that have a sharp turn at the bottom and no railing or fence. It made me very tense and I’m surprised, after so much white-knuckled riding today that my arms and shoulders aren’t sore.

The other thing that was making me worried was that my most powerful and fast-acting hayfever medication is getting very low as the bottle has leaked a bit. I’d tried taking it in two half doses the day before with middling success but today I thought I’d wait until I felt the symptoms before I took it. With the wind in my face and a great deal of pollen in the air it didn’t take long for my eyes to become extremely itchy and feel swollen.

We stopped in a tiny hamlet and I felt really overwhelmed by the terrain and how my face felt. It was hard to see with such itchy red eyes and I had a bit of a cry. Luke tried calling the Eurobike help line to see if the bag transport vehicle was anywhere near us. It took them half an hour to get back to us and then they said no, the driver’s van was too full to pick us up.

We had deliberately booked through a company called Natural Adventures in order to avoid Eurobikes as their reviews weren’t good. It turned out that Natural Adventures use Eurobikes anyhow and that their promises of support to riders did not extend to picking us up, knowing anything about local transport services, connecting us to taxis etc or offering any help whatsoever.

After being the very definition of useless, the person at the other end had the temerity to say ‘have a nice day,’ and I replied with ‘unlikely,’ and hung up in a rage.

Since there was nothing for it, I took some of the remaining fast-acting hayfever meds, waited a bit and then kept going.

The next part of the path was pretty dreadful (short, steep, very rocky climbs and narrow paths next to steep edges) but eventually became a decent road which then turned into us riding on the side of a highway.

Initially we were on a bike path next to the highway but after some roadworks the bike lane disappeared and it was just us and cars and trucks all using the same lane. Fortunately due to the roadworks the traffic was slow and Swiss/Austrian drivers all moved over and were very polite. I didn’t feel in any danger and there were other cyclists on the road.

We had to ride through several tunnels. Partway through one I could see what I initially thought was my hair curling around the front of my hat, which was weird because I had put my hair in braids that morning. No, it dawned on me, it wasn’t hair, it was the legs of a huge beetle reaching under the brim of my hat right in front of my face. It was big enough for me to hear the thump as it hit the road when I brushed it off. Ick.

The highway riding was very fast (for us) – we rode between 30 and 40 kph for quite a while and made up for all the time wasted by the call to Eurobikes (world’s worst bike company?). After the highway the rest of the ride was along pretty quiet and well-sealed country roads through small villages until we reached our hotel.

Today’s ride was about 50km. Tomorrow is more like 35km and hopefully the high quality roads continue as we get closer to Innsbruck. The final day is 65km but if my hayfever is worse there’s a train line along that stretch so we can cut some of it out if needed.

Luke has been really supportive and kind about all my suffering and lets me set the pace and take rests when I need them. Technically I guess this is our honeymoon holiday since we’re on our own for a stretch and, even though it hasn’t been perfect, having Luke be so considerate with my challenges and severe discomfort at points has really reminded me what a wonderful human being he is and how lucky I am to have him.

Our hotel for the evening was on a busy road and didn’t look super fancy but the staff were really lovely and our room was a good size as well as having an enclosed balcony.

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, where the food was easily half the price it would’ve been in St Moritz. We had pork schnitzels with cranberry sauce (a great combination) and they served wine in a 240ml carafe for 6€, which cheered me up even more.

We finished the evening drinking our duty free gin and watching from our balcony as the clouds changed colour and listening to music inspired by the restaurant’s playlist of 20 year old trance classics.