Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 49-51: Salzburg

I have no memory of getting on the train to go to Salzburg, but I have a great many notes about the trip there. (Correction: I have very few.) I seem to have noted the “cute houses,” whatever that means, and the churches that have bulb-like steeples (called, I believe, onion bulbs, or something like that). I do not particularly remember the landscapes, I am afraid, but I am pretty sure that they were visually pleasing (as were those near Salzburg, which I have also mostly forgotten). I noted the awful, expensive fruit in Salzburg; like any other German or Austrian town, it has a public market once a week (on Thursdays, I believe), and the market features all manner of food and crafts, including overpriced nectarines that could crack someone’s skull (perhaps meant to be used as hammers) and gooseberries like something that the cat dragged in. Food was overpriced in Salzburg, but I am getting ahead of myself, as, in this letter’s time, I have not yet even arrived there.

I started my trip in Salzburg, apparently, by seeing a girl sitting by the restraining bar next to the railway tracks and thinking of our shared humanity. While this seemed like an auspicious beginning, the first thing that I did in Salzburg was to be duped. To make a long story short, instead of checking into my hostel and then planning my day-trips to Salzkammergut and Konigssee, I went straight to the tourist office, which was in the train station, and booked a day-trip for 40 Euros. When I got to the hostel, I learned that I could get to Konigssee and back on public transit for only 9.75 Euros, which would also give me more freedom to explore it. I went back to the tourist office, complained, and got my money back, but not without putting out an employee, who claimed that she was making a major exception for me. I felt, afterward, like washing my hands of both my and the tourist agent’s fault: while I should have been smart enough not to visit the tourist office when I was tired from a long train ride and disinclined to explore my options in depth, the woman working there ought to have told me about all of my options, as she putatively works for the city, not the tour companies themselves. My backpack is in tatters and has worn a giant hole in the back of my shorts, which are stained in nectarine juice (from Munich, where the fruit was overpriced but at least passable) and god knows what else. I do not look like the kind of person who goes on 40-Euro tours.

I did not bother to explore much of Salzburg, having been there before, on my first day but went running along the river in the evening. One forgets, not having been there in a while, how much of a fairytale the city is. Its streets are well-ordered and are lined with clean, eighteenth-century buildings; it is full of baroque castles and little side streets; it has the remains of a fortress, with defensive walls and turrets; and its crowning feature is a white hilltop castle, complete, I am afraid, with the stains on one wall from its positioning under a primitive sort of outhouse for hundreds of years. The paths along the river are well-marked and separate bikers from walkers; the riverbank has plenty of green space, where people gather in the evenings to watch outdoor movies and walk tightropes between trees; and the castle catches the golden evening light in such a way that one does not even notice the stains on its wall. I suppose that running along the river showed Salzburg to me in a different light from walking through its city center, much as it has done with many other cities, as it enabled me to see it from a distance as an outside observer.

I decided, on my second day in Salzburg, to visit Konigssee rather than Salzkammergut, as the former has better mountains, while the latter is largely just a lake. I must have spent the morning doing something or other—perhaps relaxing in the hostel or walking through the new town—whatever the case, getting to Konigssee was trivial, though I left a little later than I should. I passed a lot of the same sorts of stone buildings, churches with onion-like cupolas or stick-thin, black spires, and neat little guesthouses with bunches of flowers on the windowsills. Many of the towns had whimsical statues near benches or near their town squares, such as of people talking, scarecrows, or smirking gremlins—Germanic statuary reflects a real sense of fun. Some of the countryside that we passed was more agricultural; I even saw a man threshing wheat—the poor sucker was working! Gas, I noted, cost $1.52/litre, two lower prices, and $1.32/litre just outside of Salzburg (from fancy gas to diesel), while, farther outside of town, the prices ranged from $1.39/litre for fancy gas and $1.15/litre for diesel, which surprised me, as I could not fathom its being cheaper in Austria than in any part of Italy, where people appear to have exponentially less money.

The highlight of my trip to Konigssee may have been the bus ride there, not because the hiking there was bad, but because the ride itself was so out of the ordinary for me. The first bus that I took deposited passengers at the bottom of the road leading up to Koniggsee (the “king’s sea,” a large mountain lake), where a great many people had already assembled when my bus stopped. By the time the bus up to the lake arrived, there were so many of us that we ended up standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder, breathing one another’s breath, each person’s chest pressed to the back of someone else. The fun part of the bus ride began when we started on the winding mountain road. None of us was initially prepared for the bends in the road, as a result of which the whole sweating, writhing, squirming mass of us pressed, like a wave, against the seats closest to us, and I felt as though I were in a rollercoaster (oddly, as rollercoasters have nothing to do with such close physical contact). This continued for a while, all of us holding our breath when we came up to curves and swaying like sea lettuce, until a few people got out, freeing up a bit of space for us all. At that point, an adolescent girl who had stepped out to allow others to exit started crying hysterically (or maybe she had been crying for some time), perhaps from claustrophibia, which sobered all of us. The rest of the ride was mostly quiet, and we were all quite releaved to step off of the bus and breathe again. (I was thinking, as I rode the bus, of India, where, if I end up travelling there, I will surely take many such buses.)

I did not hike much at Konigssee, as I did not have much time, energy, or water, and I had not bothered to wear hiking boots, as I did not realize that the hiking would be so good. While the Bavarian Alps are nothing like the Dolomites, French Alps, or Swiss Alps, they have some peaks over 2,000 metres, and the lake itself is at something like 600 metres, if I am not mistaken. Trails there are well-marked; there are plenty of other people around; and the lake is ringed by souvenir shops and cafes, just the type of development that I find so reassuring (to the certain disdain of more serious hikers, or those who prefer wilder conditions). I took a short walk through the woods that gave me a bit of a view of the lake—I did not want to risk missing the bus back to Salzburg, and I had a lot of writing to do that night, I expect. On the way to the bus stop, I stopped by some men looking through a stationary pair of binoculars (for which one had to pay), and they pointed out the Eagle’s Nest, Adolf Hitler’s favorite mountain residence, which sat at the top of one of the nearby peaks.

While Salzburg has fewer reminders of World War II than many German towns, one comes across occasional possible relics of the war, such as a section of barbed wire near a monastery in the nearby hills and a U.S. Post mailbox nearby. The hills of Salzburg make for good walking: they are full of placards about the flora, fauna, and geology of the region, and they are home to medieval fortifications and a residence near one of their tops. I saw little, in Salzburg, more interesting than the hills: I spent my second evening walking through them, my third day relaxing and selling my old computer, and my third evening eating a phenomenal meal at an alehouse. The Austrian ethos for cooking seems to be, “If in doubt, add more calories.” They make phenomenal bread dumplings, the best that I have ever had—they are very rich (in eggs, one presumes) and are cooked in soup, making them tender and rich in the taste of the broth and herbs. Austrians take pork very seriously, often making fatty cuts of meat (again, cooking them in soup), from which the fat itself is quite easy to separate, which have some of the most tender meat that I have had. Finally, they are fond of sauerkraut, which they often serve with bacon bits, ensuring that one at least get a little bit of greens with one’s meal. I reflected, as I ate my meal, that it would go perfectly with the apple juice-carbonated water mix of which Austrians are fond, but Austrians’ preferred drink is, of course, beer. (They also like to smoke cigarettes with their meals; the restaurant at which I ate had no non-smoking section.)

I noted that Salzburg, like Lindau, had a great many cafes and restaurants, as opposed to Genoa, which, while it had a lot of those, proportionally had many more stores selling food that one could cook oneself—the cities appear to cater to different populations. I saw another amusing tee-shirt, which read, “I never liked you anyway,” and remembered a bit of the church rhetoric of which I had been thinking of late, which is both that we are all ignoble sinners and that we should believe in the power of one person—i.e., a king or other ruler—to save us and make everything right. Of Ljubljana I will have to say but little, as I have, again, been putting off working on my travel blog and have thus fallen behind. I do not know what has made me so reluctant to write except that I am tired, have a lot of other work to attend to (which I am also putting off, of course), and feel, having fallen behind in the first place, that the blog has become a bit of a burden, though I hope not to feel that way if I take another long trip. I will be headed to Dubrovnik, where I hope to finish up most of the rest of my blog, tomorrow, after which I will be flying to Prague and, I hope, finally writing about my tour of the Dolomites.