The Gisela Express to Kitzbühel

Tuesday 15 August 2000. We are at Zell-am-See railway station where we are about to board the Gisela Express to Kitzbühel.

The train was one of the first electric trains in the world. Most of it dates from the 1930s but the original mail sorting room housed in a 1920s carriage is attached to the train.

The coach, with John driving, will meet us at Kitzbühel.

Keith is on his day off and so in civvies as he cheerfully waves us onto the train. He'll jump onto the Leger coach with John for the day.

We have a reserved carriage and get to know a few more people during the journey. The carriage is full, it's just that everyone else is crowded up to the windows! However, on the left, Barbara sticks her elbow out for the camera...

Once the train has got going lunch is served by costumed waitress service. Hot dog in a bun.

Well, nearly all in a bun as can be seen here! Barbara laughs as her hubby (whose name I didn't get, sorry!) wonders why the bun isn't bigger... The buns weren't cut in half, there was just a hole in them. People kept wandering down to the buffet car to see how it was done whilst everybody hoped it wasn't the same implement used to put holes in the doughnuts...

Lunch over, there was time to go out to view the mountains. The carriages were too old to be fully enclosed at the couplings and we had a great time standing on the footplates, taking photos of the scenery.

These little wooden bits of decking were safe enough for intelligent people. I have to wonder whether they would be considered so now after decades of people expecting to sue because they are too stupid to keep themselves safe without being told explicitly not to chop their own hand off with an axe... Common sense is pretty rare these days I find.

"I just wanted to see if I could stand on it..." Well, who could have guessed?

Meanwhile we are approaching a stop. This was to be a photo stop for people to take photos of the train and costumed staff and to have a look at the 1920s postal sorting office in the specialised carriage.

Here it is - dear me, there's not been a lot of mail to sort on this particular journey!

The guard and stewardesses pose outside the postal carriage.

The locomotive was an electric locomotive 1020.44 dating from 1945. The Giselabahn railway was opened in 1876 by Emperor Franz Joseph and was named after his second daughter with his wife, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary,Elizabeth, nicknamed Sisi. The opening of the railway made it possible to travel from London to Istanbul by train for the first time and it thus started the almost legendary Orient Express.

"Bo-o-o-o-a-rd!" It's time to take a last photo and get back onto the train as we carry on into Kitzbühel. We take our seats for a good minute or two before it's back to looking out of the windows and standing on the footplates. As we pull into the station at Kitzbühel we can see the coach waiting in the car park. We have a couple of hours free time to look around the town first though.

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Cable Car to the Hahnenkamm

Friday 15 August 2003. We have travelled independently from Niederau to Kitzbühel by train and rain and before lunching have decided on a bold course of action...

This is the Hahnenkamm Bahn - the station for the cable car up the Hahnenkamm mountain. The obvious thing to do in pouring rain is to try to get above it, right? Mum is strangely reluctant. It turned out she was thinking more of a chair lift than a cable car...

Once inside the tiny cabin she calms down and starts to enjoy the views.

The Hahnenkamm reaches upwards to 1,712 metres (5,617 ft) above sea level. To get a decent photo of our ascent I need to open a window and lean out a bit. Or perhaps I just poked the camera out...

Without resorting to this, the view would have been somewhat different... Somehow I don't think we are going to get above the clouds and rain!

We reach the top, where hundreds of cyclists - with bikes - are waiting to go down again. We realise that some of the cable car pods have hooks on the outside and the bicycles can be hung out to get wet whilst going up or down.

From the summit we can look across Kitzbühel to the Kitzbühellerhorn - another mountain. The Alps are full of them! In winter the Hahnenkamm hosts a race meeting for people daft enough to strap planks to their feet and shove themselves off into the snow. There are both steep downhill and slalom courses to challenge skiers and the internet is full of videos of folks coming to grief on them. Just after the start of the downhill is a drop over which they free fall for 40 metres (100 feet) landing with care not to squish themselves to half their normal height before immediately being confronted by a sharp turn to the left which they enter at some 60 miles per hour.

And that, dear readers, is why I don't strap planks to my feet...

We leave the mountain and the other members of the family leisurely get onto the first available cable car. So leisurely in fact that the pod - which doesn't stop, but just trundles around a semi-circular platform - is about to launch into space again before I just manage to leap aboard at the last moment before it leaves. We get back to Kitzbühel to find that most people have folded their umbrellas and the rain has stopped - or at least, paused. It is now time for a bit of lunch.

After that we decide to squelch our way back to the station to get the train back to Wörgle. We are stopped by the train in question crossing our path. As it's a public holiday the next train isn't running so we have an hour to wait. We decide we might as well walk along to the next station but by some strange quirk of fate we don't reach it as quickly as I thought we should and, turning the map the upside down, I realise we have been going the wrong way... About turn!

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A Rainy Day In Kitzbühel

Friday, 15 August 2003. It's our last day in Austria and it dawns both wet and misty.

We can see down the road, but the cows high up on the hills above us can only be located by the tinkle of their alpine cow bells. The Austrians were suffering the same sort of luck that we are used to in the north west of England. It was a public holiday and chucking it down!

We hadn't fancied the coach trip for today and instead we got a taxi to the station in Wörgle, (pronounced "Vurgle") the nearest large town, and then a train to Kitzbühel.

When we got to Kitzbühel, it was just as wet and miserable as Niederau had been. But worth a look round anyway, with its multi-coloured buildings, shops and pavement cafes.

After the train ride we started off with a warming coffee under awnings at one of the cafes. There seemed to be a lot of cyclists in town.

It being a public holiday, many of the locals had been to church in their best clothes and despite the umbrellas and the rain, gave big smiles for the camera.

Ah... We have found out why there are a lot of cyclists around the town as a loud siren heralds a fire service vehicle leading a crowd of peddling wet people charging at speed behind them!

Blimey! There's a lot of them! Excuse me... can I just cross...? That would be a "no" then...

Watching them racing round and round the town, following some sort of circuit is exhausting... we go for another brew.

The multi-coloured buildings as mentioned before. They do look a bit better in sunshine perhaps! We ponder on lunch but decide to do something daft before eating. Onto the next exciting (daft) episode...

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Fire and Ice: Flåm Railway Tour, Norway

First, a pause for quiet reflection. This is it. The final instalment of our cruise. Our final port of call is in Flåm, in Norway. Tomorrow will be a day at sea and the day after is an early rise and leaving the ship to drive home.

But before we get despondent too soon, we have one amazing day before us. The Flåm Railway is one of those experiences that they say should be on everyone's bucket list. I'm not really sure I have a bucket list as such, but we came here in 2013 and didn't get on the train so we thought we'd give it a go this time.

The excursion we are on includes a trip on the Flåm Railway for an hour (one-way) then an hour on the mainline train from Oslo to Bergen which brings you to a hotel in Voss for lunch and then a coach trip from Voss and down the hairpin road from Stalheim back to Flåm. Others on the same excursion will do the same thing in reverse order. Unfortunately John and Sue are on this itinerary so we miss out on a final day together.

There's scenery a-plenty from the train, but to be sure of the best views, choose a seat on the left hand side of the train but facing backwards going up (right hand side facing forwards if going down). The guides call out any major features and they tell you the spooky tale of a mountain spirit, the beautiful Hulda, who entices men into the mountains, never to be seen again!

The train stops at this magnificent waterfall for a photo stop. And then... Beware the enchantment of Hulda! Note a tiny red spot above the chap spoiling everyone else's photos by holding his phone above his head. There is a video of this on YouTube but be warned - it's a spoiler, if you ever intend to visit yourself. So you'll need to search instead of me providing a link!

We reach the end of the line from Flåm and cross to another platform to get on the train from Oslo. On both trains we have a reserved coach - not that it stops a few others from trying to get on... If anything I actually enjoyed this train ride more than the Flåm one - but we didn't have the best of views from our seats on that.

There are views of snow and waterfalls and mountain streams and rivers. Oh... and of train track whizzing below a toilet that doesn't so much flush as empty out downwards to the open air!

We arrive in Voss ahead of schedule and have around 40 minutes to kill before we are due at a local hotel for lunch.

There isn't a great deal of immediate interest - this church and a lake. The church is deceptively old, for it dates from 1277 and stands on a former pagan site.

A number of tour buses are parked on a large car park near to the lake. With them is an older Volvo coach that looks like it has been converted to a mobile home or hotel.

The weather is - shall we say - not promising dryness... We have a brief pause to savour the lakeside view - right, that's enough. I feel a couple of drops. You can trust a bald man to know when it is starting to rain... We head for the hotel despite it still being too early. Ready or not...

Fleischer's Hotel. We find it heaving with people. Those coaches that have done our trip in reverse have got here first and are having their lunch. I buy a drink at the bar and hear a voice behind me say, "I'm from Venezuela, actually."
I turn round, "Andrea!"
"Oh, hi!" says our guide from Bergen. As I turn back to Fran, Sue walks past us without realising we are there. She and John are already at lunch. We catch them coming out.

As it turns out we have lunch downstairs in a different restaurant. The tables were numbered to match our coaches with the idea being that each table went to the buffet in turns. No one told us this however and as we got to the door a waiter said "Sit where you want and then come to the buffet," so we sat right next to it and joined the queue... The elderly owner seeing the size of the resultant queue was panicking badly but calmed down when she saw that it was too late to give us the proper instructions (we were ready to join the queue again for desserts by this time). She told us the hotel had been in her family for generations and she herself had worked there for 57 years. Her son was training to take over.

I went to get a coffee and she said "I'll serve you, I'll serve you! Do you take sugar?"
"No thanks, I'm sweet enough," I said automatically. But this is a joke they had obviously never heard in Norway because she broke out into hysterics and then to my horror shouted loudly, "Listen everyone! I asked this man if he wanted sugar..."

By the time we come out onto the car park to get onto a coach for the rest of the excursion, it is raining. The sights of Voss. Number one, the bank...

The rain persists until we come near to a photo stop at this waterfall. As the coach doors open and we get out, it starts to hammer it down again... Luckily only for a minute or so. The lady in the green coat is a clone of our next door neighbour! I never got her name but she came from Bristol and was travelling with her daughter.

This is Tvindefossen about 12 km or 7 miles from Voss. Somehow it got a reputation in the 1990s for the health-giving properties of its water - namely longevity and enhanced sexual prowess. Visitor numbers have shot up since then with Japanese, American and Russian tourists being fond of filling bottles from the fall. Duh... Enhanced sexual prowess - as if I wasn't awesome enough...

Back on the bus. "Did you fill the bottle?" asks Miss Franny. Dead right!

We pass through the village of Stalheim. In 1943 its hotel became a maternity home for the Lebensborn Nazi organisation where women deemed to be of pure Aryan blood gave birth to children fathered by SS members as part of a programme to spread pure Aryanism. Fanaticism for anything is not a good idea... From here we would descend by the old road, built between 1842-1849, with its 13 hairpin bends.

The Stalheimskleivi road reaches upto a 20% gradient. This is a 1 in 5 slope. A 100% gradient signifies an angle of 45 degrees, meaning the slope rises one unit vertically for each horizontal unit. The waterfall is the Stalheimsfossen with a 126 meter (413 feet) fall.

This waterfall is on the other side of the road half a mile further down and is Sivlefossen, 238 meters (780 feet) over nine drops. We can only see a few of the drops from here. The road is very steep. The coach was literally crawling down and we were thankful that the road these days is one-way only. It is the steepest road in northern Europe.

We get to the bottom of the road and follow the river, heading for Flåm where we find Thomson Celebration waiting patiently for us.

The Flåm train is back as well, waiting to take another party of tourists up the spectacular railway.

Whilst Fran goes for a mooch round the shops, I take a look at the railway's museum. This is to be found at the back of a shop and is free to enter.

I take a seat and watch the passers-by until Fran comes out holding a quite modest bag of goodies. It is drizzling and damp, but fairly warm and not too unpleasant. We get back onboard for the last time this cruise. We spend Friday crossing the North Sea as we head back to Newcastle. Fourteen nights. Five days at sea. Eight ports of call. Two happy people.

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