Join us for a 9-day holiday trip by coach to Austria, staying at Schüttdorf, close to Zell-am-See, 12-20 August 2000. We'll be touring the sights and musical box chalets of both Austria and Germany as we venture into Bavaria and the Tyrol.
Each article can be accessed by clicking/tapping the fourteen photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Monday 14 August 2000. After our morning in Berchtesgaden, we got back to the coach and motored on for another while before coming to Königsee.
We passed several of these wonderful chalet style buidings both large and small, but always exquisitely decked out in blooms of colour. We learned that the "see" part of Königsee's name meant "lake".
In the case of Königsee it was a crystal clear turquoise lake with tiny fish darting from underneath at any bread thrown to the ducks. Towering over the lake were several mountains.
We had a couple of hours free time and we had at first thought to go for a cruise on the lake.
However the long line of people who had all had similar thoughts put us off a wee bit and we stood for a while drinking in the sights and sounds. Before we found our drink though, Fran saw a notice for a cable car and we set off to find out if the queue was any less than for the boats. It was! In fact there was no queue whatsoever! The man in the kiosk told us that the car took 30 minutes to go up plus another 30 to come down again - plenty of time for us to take the trip and to spend a bit of time at the top.
So we walked through the turnstiles and got straight into a small two-person cable car which after a short pause launched us off up the mountain on the Jennerbahn. Again by way of explanation, Jenner was the name of the mountain and bahn means train or in this case a linked series of little cabins, suspended from the cable above.
The cable car was glazed with plastic and the door was locked. It very soon got boiling hot in there! The cable car opened in 1953 and due to the length of the cable (4.2km or 2.6 miles) it has to pass through a middle station where the gradient changes.
We approached, passed through, and left the middle station without any bother and the cable began to rise more steeply. The upper section of the cable was not only steeper but longer than that from the lake to the middle station.
And here we are, arriving at the top station. The Jenner mountain stands 1874m tall (6148ft) and the cable car travels 4.2 kilometers to get to the top.
The view from the top. We looked for the lake far below but were not able to spot it. Possibly because the cable car route takes a bt of a dog-leg bend at the middle station and also because the lower portion of the mountain is heavily forested.
We checked the time and decided there was plenty of time to sit and have a drink at the top of the mountain before climbing back into another oven for the journey back down!
The journey back down was as scenic if not more so than the jouney up. We had the added excitement of watching out for the lake to come into view. As we left the Jennerbahn we took a last look at the lake then back to the coach. A family of four are missing.
After half an hour they tumbled into the coach, breathless. They had been told that the boat trip would get them back in time but in fact they had had to get off at the first stop and then had to apologise and beg to queue-jump a line of 100 people to get back. "Was it worth it though?" one of the others asked. "No - we spent all the time worrying that the coach would have gone!"
Monday 14 August 2000. We are startled awake on the first morning of our stay in Austria. Is it an avalanche? Is it the jangle of cowbells from the cattle on the hills? Is it the yodelling of a herdsman high on the hills above Schüttdorf?
No... it's the church bells of this church directly opposite our window! It started at 6:00am with four bongs for the hour then six bongs for the time then every 15 minutes, a bong for each quarter hour, i.e. one bong at quarter past the hour, two bongs at half past and three bongs at quarter to the hour. Hence the four bongs at six o'clock denoting the hour had been reached then another six bongs for six o'clock. At 7:00am the bell ringer took out all of his frustrations on yet another bell... After four for the hour and seven for the time, he rang out three sets of twenty bongs presumably to call people for morning prayer. There was a bit of moaning at breakfast from some sleepy tourists, though I always take the view that if you travel in foreign climes you don't start off by complaining about their traditions.
This was our hotel: the Pinzgauhof in Shüttdorff. I learned another important fact to bear in mind when using a back-to-front toilet (see first article in this series). Gentlemen with dangly bits should stand before flushing as the jet of water slides everything behind you forwards. A collision can be traumatic...
Ok, first excursion time. It took a while to find the coach - Driver John told us to look for and go down an alley. He must have had a different definition of an alley to me! They must be a lot bigger in Kent and Essex to Lancashire... The coach had brought holidaymakers on two trips. The other was a walking holiday so the coach had a few spare seats! We allowed ourselves to spread out a bit.
First stop was Berchtesgaden for which we crossed back into Germany - Bavaria. We hadn't brought any German money out with us (this was before the Euro came in), not realising that we were going to be leaving Austria but in the event it didn't matter as we shall see.
From here you could take an optional extra trip to see Hitler's wartime bunker which is nearby - just about where the von Trapps would have been arrested had they really attempted to walk over the mountains as depicted in The Sound of Music. We opted to look around the town. Wartime coal storage bins hold no interest for me...
Picturesque views were on all sides! Each house or hotel had its own colour scheme for the flowers and we seldom saw two the same next to each other. We saw many roadside shrines and some buildings also had saintly figures cast in relief on walls or corners or over porches.
Fran and I on the hill overlooking the lower part of the town and with a splendid backdrop of mountains. It was now getting towards lunch!
We went into a cafe and, apologising for my terrible German, I asked if Austrian schillings were acceptable. I was pleased when without even a flinch the proprietess answered back in German that they were. She turned out to speak excellent English, as did her staff. So, as she had answered me in German, I presumed I must have got it right!
We had a light snack then went berserk and undid all the good dietary self-denial with a slice of apfel strudel with ice cream. Iss gute... iss fielen gute!
Then feeling suitably guilty we had an urge to walk it off! We had another quick turn around the town and then decided that we had enough time to venture a bit further.
As the coach had come into the town earlier, the road went alongside one of the wonderfully clear pastel blue-green rivers. The river had passed under a covered bridge - just about unknown in England - and I fancied a photo of it. The hill was steeper and longer than I had thought! However, we made it down to the bottom and just look at the colour of that wonderfully pure meltwater from high in the Alps. Then back up to the coach in time where we fondly imagined - wrongly - that we had made up for the apple strudel...
