Wednesday 16 August 2000. The trip back down the mountain was again one that left some of the passengers unable to look outside at the steep drop!
The water that flows out from under the glacier at first takes on a muddy appearance as it is full of bits of rock and frozen detritus that the glacier has scraped away over the centuries. It collects in a lake which overflows here and which in turn fills a lower lake where the rubbish sinks to the bottom leaving the water to purify a bit.
Here you can see the difference in height between the two bodies of water and the difference in colour of the water.
At the bottom end of this lower lake are two enormous dams, built to withstand ice as well as water. The brighter patch above the lake in the top right corner is a glimpse of white water cascading from the lake at the lower edge of the glacier whilst at the left of the picture large patches of ice can be seen even in August.
The road winds down the pass in a snaking series of hairpin bends. Some people refused to look. Others kept up a less-than-soothing running commentary.
As it happened there was no need to make up horror stories - at one bend we passed a few cars stopped next to a motorbike that had run off the road. The biker looked in a bad way, flat on his back with someone pumping his chest...
We came through a short tunnel and to a patch of snow. Chris stopped the coach and the younger passengers shot out to play for 2 minutes.
12 year old Sarah was most indignant because Chris told her to wipe her pants clean before getting on the coach - she had fallen on her behind!
After our meal at the hotel that night, we set out to walk to Zell for an Austrian beer festival. We got half a mile and the heavens opened. Thunder and lightning flashed around us and we sheltered under the eaves of a small shed between the local and main railway lines.
"It'll slacken off in a minute," said Miss Franny confidently. The storm moved from the mountains to directly overhead. The rain got harder and harder and it went dark.
The shed was no shelter now. We got to the road running alongside the railway and sheltered under the porch of someone's house. They must have heard us talking because the door opened and an elderly couple, after realising we didn't speak German, motioned us to step inside. We were soaked and dripping by now so I declined - we would have wet their carpets and their porch was keeping the worst off us. We thanked them and, bless them, they went back in and then came back with an umbrella for us.
An hour later we were still there. It had now gone fully dark as night approached... The rain was so hard that the train signals shone red beams across the sky.
I took a photo using flash. The flashgun lit the drops of rain up and on the screen of the digital camera we saw just how many drops were in the air in whatever very small fraction of a second the flash fired for (somwhere between 1/200 and 1/1,000th of a second).
This photo became the cause of much hilarity amongst the other passengers for the rest of the holiday! Every time rain splashed the coach windows or we passed a puddle there came cries of "Quick! Are you going to photograph it???"
Eventually we gave up, knocked on the door to give the umbrella back and thank the owners and then we just ran for it back to the hotel. One good thing came out of it though - the lightning hit and stopped the church clock opposite our bedroom window. We had a blissful bell-free morning! Oh... and the beer festival was called off due to the storm.
