Having said goodbye to our Scottish neighbours and Rodney’s German man, who he had befriended the night before, we left the campsite-with-the-longest-name. It only took us an hour to drive to Salzburg and arriving at 10:45am at Panorama Camping Stadtblick, must be the earliest check-in we have done yet! The campsite is high on a hill on the edge of Salzburg and we’ve parked Eileen so that we have a view over the city to the Hohensalzburg Fortress. We sat and ate our lunch in the sunshine and read for a while, then around 2:30pm we walked the 3kms into the city centre. A market was spread out along the Salzach River, which I naturally took a stroll along, while Rodney sat in the long grass and watched the passing boats.
Being a Sunday, there seemed to be mainly tourists wandering around all the scenic spots and we heard so many different languages as we roamed around the Mirabel Gardens and the old part of the city. Around 5pm, we stumbled upon an Irish Pub; isn’t there one in every city of the world now? The Wimbledon Men’s Tennis Final was on and in the dark basement rooms of the pub they were playing it on three screens, so we pulled up a couple of bar stools and settled down to watch the game which was already half-way through the second set. We enjoyed a couple of drinks and lots of conversation with the friendly barman from Auckland and a geologist couple from Ireland. By the third set, it seemed that the Aussies, the Kiwi, the Irish and everybody else in the pub were all barracking for Mr Murray. It was wonderful when he did win and we’re glad that we managed to see such a bit of history played out, though it did seem a little strange to be watching it in an Irish pub in Austria…..!
We celebrated the win with a slap-up dinner at McDonalds, half way back to the campsite, there really wasn’t much else open on a Sunday night in Salzburg. We’ll try and do a bit more of Salzburg tomorrow, with a bit more style.
Rodney wants it noted that he didn’t mention the war to the German man, so he thinks he got away with it; however the German man did mention the war…..
I wish I was ‘Sixteen Going On Seventeen’ because Monday was an exhausting day. We purchased Salzburg Cards at the campsite, which meant we could catch the bus in to the city for free. We then got discount on a ‘Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Trip’, so we boarded the next one heading out on its circuit around Salzburg and enjoyed the audio tour. We chose the ‘Sound of Music’ option and between the information segments, we sang along to the memorable tunes; not too loud, I might add. Our first hop-off was at Schloss Leopoldskron, which is a private palace where the boating scene was filmed on the lake for ‘The Sound Of Music’. Our next stop was at Schloss Hellbrunn and our card gave us free entry to the lovely small palace, the park and also to the Wasserspiele, the trick fountains, where we had a wonderful time.
We were in a large group of people, but the tour guide was brilliant, explaining everything in German and then in English. He played tricks on the children to start with, but by the end of the tour the adults were also getting pretty wet. The Archbishop Markus Sittikus had the palace built in the 17th century and he must have been a quirky chap as he apparently liked to play tricks on his guests out in the gardens. There are grottos and fountains, tiny marionettes and theatres, all powered by water from the streams. Each time you stopped to view the next attraction, you quickly got in to the habit of looking around to see if you could spot where the water would come from and some were so well hidden, inside deer antlers or minute brass holes in the ground, it was impossible not to get wet at some point. But it was a hot sunny day and even the children that were soaked through, seemed to dry off pretty quickly afterwards. I think the smiles on their faces lasted longer; I know I’m still grinning just thinking about it a day later.
After a lovely wander around inside the palace, we strolled over to the Pavilion which featured in ‘The Sound Of Music’, unfortunately its locked so we couldn’t go in and prance around; thanks goodness said Rodney….
The big yellow bus then took us past Gwandhaus, Schloss Frohnburg and Schloss Freisaal, one of which was used in ‘The Sound Of Music’ and we hopped off at Nonnberg Abbey back in Salzburg. This too was used in the movie and you’re probably realising by now that our whole day seemed to revolve around that one big movie….
We wandered around to Festungsgasse, considering a hot dog for lunch and then spotted a Vietnamese restaurant, so that solved our hunger pangs very nicely. We then we wandered on down to the Hohensalzburg Fortress which sits on the top of a hill in the centre of the city. By-passing the queue for tickets by waving our Salzburg Cards, we boarded Austria’s oldest funicular up to Europe’s largest, completely preserved, fortress dating from the 11th C. It is a massive complex and we roamed about for hours, in dungeons, torture chambers, a kitchen, the museum, state rooms, marionette museum, up turrets, down stairs, and up to the top of a tower that provided a spectacular 360° view of Salzburg and all of the surrounding hills and mountains. We could even see Eileen in the campsite from up there.
We rode the funicular back down and then ambled through the cemetery attached to St Peters Cathedral until we were both in need of a long cold drink. There were a few outdoor cafés in one of the squares, so we ordered the biggest drinks on the menu and rested our feet for a short while. Up in the fortress we had seen a sketch of a panorama of Salzburg and the finished product is exhibited in Residenzplatz, so we showed our Salzburg Cards and wandered in for free. It’s an amazingly detailed painting which is 26 metres long by 5 metres high and you walk in to the centre to view it. It was painted in 1829 and toured Europe for ten years as an early version of tourism promotion. There was also an exhibition on the Von Trapp Family, so we got in to the real spirit of the ‘The Sound Of Music’ and read all about the real family that it was based on.
Next stop was at Mozart’s birthplace in Getreidegasse, which though getting quite late, was still very busy. We spent ages looking at all the exhibits and reading all about his life, until we felt completely Mozarted out and stepped back outside to find our way across town, past the Horse Bath (lucky horses, it’s very posh) to the Mönchsbergslift. Before heading over there, I did have to buy some Mozart chocolate in the Spar supermarket under Mozart’s house, just to give me a bit more energy of course.
We flashed our Salzburg Cards again for a free trip up to the Panorama Terrace and yes, they filmed here for ‘The Sound Of Music’ too. I’m not sure there are any bits of Salzburg that didn’t end up in the movie and we have to admit that we now want to watch the movie again, just to spot all the places we’ve roamed around. Too tired to keep walking by now, we grabbed a table overlooking the city and had a big bowl of soup each; goulash soup for Rodney and a noodle soup with frankfurters and a huge cheese dumpling for me; I was trying to be adventurous….
Finally, we dragged ourselves back through the woods to the top of the Mönchsbergslift and rode it back down to the city. We had considered walking back through the Mirabel Gardens for one last blast of ‘Sound of Music’ sites but decided to just walk over the Mozart Bridge and catch the bus outside another residence of the Mozart family, back to our residence in the campsite. There were a lot more things we could have done for free with our Salzburg Cards, but we had run out of time and energy, I felt like we had climbed every mountain. It was definitely time for a warm shower and bed, but first we had to get all the silly songs out of heads. “High On A Hill Was A Lonely Goatherd”…….no, shut up!!!
We left Heidi Land and the campsite full of Scandinavians on Tuesday morning and drove across the border in to Germany. Eileen was settled into a car park on the edge of Berchtesgaden and we walked across to the Salzbergwerk, a salt mine; it was a fun excursion and far less exhausting than yesterday. After buying our tickets we were kitted out with snazzy overalls and then the expedition began. “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go”…….wrong movie!
A little ‘train’ took us deep into the mountain, 1.4kms, to a ‘cathedral’ cavern and from there we shot down a 34-metre wooden slide to a lower level. At the bottom, we walked for a while to a model of the mine and some information about the place and then continued on, strolling past various equipment and mineshafts, to a room full of samples and more information. I would have liked to have lingered longer in there, as there was a lot of interesting stuff about salt, but we were hurried along to whiz down another 40-metre wooden slide to an underground lake. We boarded a boat and travelled 100-metres across to the other end; looking down in to the water created a perfect mirror of the roof of the low cavern. Music played, and lights reflected patterns across the walls and lake, then all too quickly we were off the boat and boarding a funicular railway back up to the train. We were then whisked back up to the surface, with a few small fake mine explosions along the way. The whole trip was just over an hour and had us blinking in the bright sunlight when we came back up to the surface. Unfortunately no photography was allowed inside, so you’ll have to Google or Bing the place to see what it looks like inside!
After a picnic lunch, we drove to Camping Winkl-Landthal, where we checked in for one night and spent the afternoon washing everything and having a thoroughly good catch-up afternoon.
