Wow! Golly Gosh! Cripes! and Yaroo! Perhaps I resort to this language because we're having a Boy's Own Adventure here. (And Girl's too, of course!). This is us at the Hotel Post, Ebensee after six days walking. Click this or any other photo for the full, wrinkly version.On a walk like this, what we do every day is walk. We stop for food,
drinks, beds - but they are all breaks in this nomadic existence. But we're not slumming it - the food is good and the beds are comfy. We're "bourgeois nomads". And the country is just gorgeous, it uplifts the soul. This pic is Fuschl, and everything in the Salzkammergut is more beautiful than it should be. And if something dirty appears, a man comes along and cleans it up.
a beautiful mountain, seen first from the bottom and then from our Hotel room at the top. All that a mountain should be - pine forests, upland pastures, and of course places for drinks.But after that we tried to traverse the Hollengebirgemassif - horrible name for a horrible mountain! We walked and scrambled up one end for about five hours to reach the Hochlecken Hutte. I was so exhausted I could only drink gallons of orange soda - couldn't even manage a goulash soup, which those who know me will agree is very unusual. When we saw it was billed as another five hours to the next hut we bailed o
ut, and descended 3,000 feet to go round the side. I've started a 'Stress Level' rating for each day, out of ten. It's a complex calculation of physical and emotional effort counting plus, and exhilaration and wonder counting minus. That day came to 9.5; had it been 10, I wouldn't be here writing this!
I took just one photo that day, of Di reaching the hut. It just looks perfectly ordinary. The best piece of music I've found of communicating the actual feelings we've been going through is the Strauss Alpine Symphony. We listened to it the other night on my iPod, and I find myself humming appropriate bits at different psarts of the walk, depending on what's happening. We haven't had a storm yet - the weather is being very kind - but I've experienced confusion, excitement, pleasure, confidence, doubt, exhaustion and joy, and they are all in that piece. We've got the cheapo Naxos version, which is basically fine, though the cowbells are wrong.
Not forgetting Mozart, weve been visi
ting him and his Mum at St Gilgin. I'll talk more about him next time; I'm trying to get him on the EtherealNet, but for now that's it.
The next step is to Waidhoven an der Ybbs. Seven days, and I'll try to write again. Grüss Gott!
2 comments:
Your trip looks absolutely lovely, and you've obviously both got fantastically stong legs: congratulations on both counts! Have you booked all your accommodation in advance, or do you just turn up at the huts? Hope the good weather holds up.
All the best,
Althea & Andrew
Hi Althea and Andrew,
Well, our legs got stronger as the trip went on, and now back in London, walking is a doddle! There's nothing like being active all day - not the same as a quick visit to the gym.
As to booking accomodation, it is a problem. What we did was book most of the places in the first two weeks, then trust to luck. If you book you've got to get there whatever the weather, etc; also a Gasthof might turn out to be two or three miles out of town - fine if you've got a car but a real pain if you've just walked 12 miles!
If you don't book there are other problems. Gasthofs usually close one or two days a week, and sometimes you don't know which days until you get to their door. Even the smaller mountain huts (Shutshausen) close on one or two days.
Then there are the self-inflicted problems: I only discovered on the trip itself that an 'H' on the map was not a Hotel but a Bus Stop! Also, that the proper hotel symbol also covers restaurants with no rooms.
So we did have problems sometimes at the end of the days; but we never actually had to sleep in the open. Carrying a tent etc would have made our packs much heavier, and Austria doesn't encourage camping anyway - it spoils the neatness of the place.
All the best, Jeremy
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