Back to Austria and Home

We awoke to another wet day. The stone mason and his staff were already hard at work, vans were coming and going, and we discussed what to do. Officially we had another day to go, so we could ride off and see more passes, get wet, take pics, find somewhere to sleep. Except that my DB had had enough and was a bit concerned about the bike.

I agreed that it might be best to go back to Au and return to Montpellier the next day, and that would give us a day to recover on Sunday before I had to go back to work. He rang the hotel, found they had room, so we packed up and headed off after giving back the ice bucket, and eating a reasonable breakfast that gave me no opportunity to make sarnies.

St Moritz

As we were so close to St Moritz, we went there first even though it necessitated a slight detour. The above picture does not show it at its best, I'm sure. It was wet and there was a lot of building and work going on. The centre looked a lot better, sort of like a Nice of the mountains with very smart shops, expensive cars and well-dressed people walking about carrying bags that had names like Prada on them.

We idled through St Moritz admiring the buildings, and I noticed more of the stark industrial raw concrete look, then rode back to Celerina and on north towards the Austrian border.

Road passing through the gorge of this fantastic blue river

Whaddya know, another castle

Bridge for bungy jumping?

Just love the curves

Road goes through a tunnel with windows

 We went over several passes that day, this is the col of the Flexenpass at a modest 1773m.

Col of the Flexenpass

Mini glaciers or just unmelted snow?

We went through a number of rather snazzy ski stations, like St Anton. They were delightful, and very clean and smart.

Ski lifts and runs in the background

St Anton (I think)

At lunch time we conveniently reached the border with Austria and in the first town we came to, Landeck, found a biker friendly place for lunch. I had mushroom soup which was insufficient so added an apple strudel which turned out to be very stodgy and probably the industrial equivalent of the tartes au pommes you get in restaurants in France. Anyway, it filled a hole. What was great was that we could pay in Euros!

We went over a couple of other passes in glorious sunshine. Typical.

Rolling hillsides and pretty prairie flowers

Rollin' on one side, escarped on t'other

We arrived back in Au at about 5pm in time to jump into the pool and get pummelled by the jacuzzi bubbles.

Au: Duckhouse paid through expenses, do you think?

Au: Look at the fancy woodwork, so many tiny fish scales

Village of Au

I had a mooch in the village, bought a postcard for my mum that came with a stamp in a shop that sold natural products for face, body and health. I was looking for something for the boys but I was sure they wouldn't be interested in anything from there. I went further and found a little supermarket where I bought some wine, some of the delicious räss cheese which I asked for in halting German and lots of sign language, and some chocolate for the boys. As the post office was opposite the hotel, I wrote my postcard and could post it straight away.

That evening we had an enoooormous dinner at the hotel, and boy was it good. The entree was a tiny patty of beef tartare, then came a consommé soup, then we helped ourselves to salad from the buffet, then came the main course of a pork chop with potatoes, and then we finished up with dessert of a creamy fruity terrine. I waddled back to our room happy.

The next day I made some sarnies as we did not want to have to stop in a Swiss service station and buy some, loaded up the car and trailer and drove all the way back home which took about 10hrs.

Total distance travelled was 3200km - 1700 doing the return trip to Au, the rest around Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. We had a terrific time, saw some fantastic scenery and rode some amazing roads. We visited the regions of Bavaria, Dolomites, Voralberg, Haut Adige and Carinthie. I'd love to go back.

Here is the list of passes we went over:
Riedbergpass
Achenpass
Grossglockner pass (€22)
Plöcken pass
Passo di Falzarego
Passo di Gardena/Grödner Joch
Passo di Pennes/Penserjoch
Passo di M Griovo/Jaufenpass
Passo del Stelvio
Pass Umbrail
Passo des Bernina
Finstermünz pass
Arlbergpass
Flexenpass
Hochtannberg pass

From Austria into the Italian Dolomites

After a hearty breakfast which included smoked bacon and fried eggs and provided ample material with which to make lunch's sarnies, we headed off south into the Dolomites.

We kept to the small green roads which were often in poor repair but pretty nonetheless.

We went past villages with sometimes colourful roofs (note the green section in the middle of one of the buildings).

From clean, picture perfect Austria, we crossed the border into a much grubbier Italy. The contrast on the other side of the border was remarkable, with half-finished houses, unkempt buildings, corrugated iron roofs instead of tiles and general air of careless disregard for their surroundings.

Never mind, we were not there to wonder at the houses but to gaze at the much more spectacular Dolomite mountains. They are one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites for their highly distinctive mountain landscape and exceptional beauty.

They also look slightly ephemeral with the effect of the scree slopes suggesting frequent landslides and heavy weathering. How long would they last...

We had our picnic lunch on the balcony of what looked like an abandoned holiday home. It obviously hadn't been used for a long time looking at the overgrown garden, but provided the perfect spot by a quiet road, and offered protection from the predictable storm. After it had passed, we carried on and came across this stunningly blue reservoir.

Fantastic mountains. Note corrugated roof and shutters badly in need of paint

 

After a glorious day's ride, we arrived at Cortina d'Ampezzo and, for some reason, fixed on a modest biker hotel which had a poky bedroom and huge white bathroom. The owner was a very amenable jolly guy but we didn't really get to appreciate the 'ambiance Cortina'. After a shower and a rest, we mooched into the centre all of 100m away and found a pizzeria to test the Italian pizzas.

My DB has rarely had a great or even good pizza experience in Italy and our meal was no exception. I found the base while lovely and thin and crisp had no taste, and the veggie topping needed a lot of help too. However, we followed it with a delicious dessert of lemon sorbet with vodka and white wine. I think they also managed to dredge up a bottle of rosé for us. We were considered a little peculiar I think for not wanting red (or even white).

View down the busy street from the hotel

View looking the other way from the hotel

Naturally, that evening there was storm which kindly stopped just as we were walking back to the hotel. 

To be continued.

Over the Grossglockner Pass

What we didn't see because of being in low cloud

There are only 3 ways you can leave Bavaria and go south to reach the Dolomites in that part of Austria. Two of them involve tunnels, and not any old poxy tunnel of a couple of hundred metres, no, we're talking 8km's worth of underground carbon monoxide pit. That is bad news on a bike.

The third option is to go over the Alps which means taking the Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse (great link by the way). We were looking forward to this. The views are supposed to be stunning and the road is a fantastic challenge for bikers. Unfortunately, being a mountainous region it's also subjected to the vagaries of the weather, and when we arrived at the bottom all we could see when we looked up was low cloud cover. Great. Added to that the price of €22 for the privilege of seeing nothing except dense water vapour and perhaps the odd Alpine monster lunging out of the fog, we hesitated over lunch before finally deciding we had no choice really.

Poky hotel had not been able to furnish us with sarnies discreetly and I'm not brazen enough to make them in full view, so we stopped at a tourist trap restaurant (bikers welcome) for a quick meal. The consolation for parting with €22 was that we got a nice sticker to go on the bike.

The history of the road is fascinating. It was built in 1935 at phenomenal cost:

The Grossglockner High Alpine Road was officially opened on 3 August 1935. 870,000 cubic metres of earth and rock were moved in the 26 months of building, 15,750 cubic metres of walling was created, 67 bridges built and a road telephone with 24 facilities was installed. 3,200 workers undertook 1.8 million work shifts.

The total building costs, according to the final calculations from 16 April 1936, amounted to the 53.5 million euro at the currency of today for the road building, 3.3 million euro for improvement of the approach roads, the telephone facilities and various details.

Previous to the road:

Trails over the Hochtor: the Celts-, Romans and Pack-animal Routes
The road over the Hochtor follows ancient trails. People crossed the Hochtor almost two-thousand years before Christ.

Such finds as pre-Celtic bronze knives, Celtic gold jewellery, a Roman Hercules statue, medieval pack-animal bridles and the chains of galley slaves from the 17th century are proof.

Until the highpoint of trade in the 17th century, after the Brenner and the Radstadt Tauern, the Hochtor was the third most important trade route carrying almost ten per cent of the trade goods over the eastern Alps. 

"It might be a lovely day at the top" I suggested, ever the little optimist. It wasn't. It looked like this at the top:

It wasn't all bad though. Before we got into the clouds we enjoyed scenery like this:

Note low clouds hiding views of peaks

On the other side of the col you can turn off to visit the Pasterze Glacier at Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe.

Glacier pool

Dirty looking glacier. You can walk the steps down for a better look.

There is a visitors' centre here.

The Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe is named after the visit Kaiser Franz-Josef made here in 1856. Upon arrival you stand directly before Austria´s highest mountain, the Grossglockner (3,798m), with a view of the longest glacier in the eastern Alps, the Pasterze.

A few of the bikes at the visitors' centre

The storm caught us up - it's raining on the right

We got wet several times that day. It started raining as we came off the pass at which point we decided to give up and look for a nice hotel. We found one thanks to the Tourist Information Office - the Schlank Schlemmer Kürschner Hotel in Kötschach-Mauthen at the bottom of the pass. They had an indoor/outdoor pool which we relaxed in, followed by a good, copious dinner accompanied by this delicious wine (love the name too).

To be continued.

In and Out of Austria

"Bikers Welcome" read sign after sign, on hotels, pensions, gasthofs. We could not be in France though. Bikers in France are not welcome in many places. They are tolerated because they spend money - the average age of a biker in France is 44. At that age, people have money to spend on a good bike, nice hotels, restaurants and equipment.Are you welcomed with a garage to house the bike and a power hose to clean up after a hard day's drive? No. For that you have to go to Austria, Switzerland, Germany or Italy.

Germany has a very successful motorbike industry. BMW is making huge profits from its motorbike production - the GS1200 is one of the most widely sold bikes in the world. As a result, bikers are recognised as a real market and are treated well. You don't get suspicious looks when you turn up with a helmet, you get "Will you need a garage, sir?".

We have just come back from a week of fantastic scenery, thrills and spills (not literally...) in and out of Austria, popping into Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Our base in Austrian Au (there's one in Switzerland and also one in Germany!) is a long way from Montpellier - 750km. The bike was driven in style on a trailer so we could concentrate on being there rather than getting there.

At our first port of call, a 4* hotel - the Alpen Hotel Post, Au - was just what we needed after leaving Grenoble and crossing Switzerland. The Swiss had charged us twice for the autoroute vignette - once for the car and once for trailer - 70CF, and given change in useless (for us) CF for Euros spent on an expensive couple of sandwiches. We were happy to leave and enter Austria, land of the Euro and no charge on credit card transactions.

In all our hotel rooms, we had single duvets on double beds rather than double duvets, and they were always nicely folded. The most original folding was in the Alpen Hotel Post rooms.

Cute!

This was the view from our bedroom:

We enjoyed relaxing in the warm waters of the inside hotel pool and cosy pool nook, had a delicious dinner with a nice Austrian rosé - only one on offer, but it was very good followed by some gorgeously strong Räss cheese, and slept like logs in the comfy bed. The staff were dressed in traditional costumes and were helpful and friendly.

The next day we left both car and trailer snug as bugs in the garage (car €5 per night, trailer free) and rode off with a light heart and a bag of sandwiches made sneakily from goodies selected from the copious breakfast buffet.

Buffet sarnies by a river of the palest blue - hair and helmets do not mix well...

The aim of the holiday was to ride over as many mountain passes as we could including the famous Stelvio Pass; visit the Dolomites, and stay in places like Cortina (Italy). We headed east, popping in and out of Germany (my phone buzzed busily in my pocket as Orange told me I could count on them to make calls each time we crossed a border), passing through Garmisch-Partenkirchen which was absolutely full of BMW bikers. We were not surprised to see that BMW Motorrad had organised a weekend meeting and this delightful town was awash with GS1200s. We felt very at home.

Our route took us into nature reserves where we rumbled through this bridge (Bridges of Madison County anyone?):

with views of Alpen scenery like this (taken from a moving bike hence blurred grassy foreground):

We had previously made a hotel reservation at Reit im Winkl, a small Bavarian town not far from Salzburg, and had to plough on until we got there, some 400km from Au. It was too far really and made for a very long ride thus missing out on seeing some of the more spectacular Bavarian castles, and we should have cancelled - you live and learn (except we tend to fall into the same hotel trap a bit too regularly - booking when we don't need to!).

Upon arrival we found that it was a modest (bikers welcome) establishment and a bit poky. Dinner was excellent though. I had a Weiner schnitzel (as you do, being in the region) and roast spuds to die for. That evening we warily watched a storm develop as we dashed out to a cash-point as they only took cash (!) and then watched it crash from our window which, in the event, turned out to be a regular occurrence.

Not poky view from poky hotel

Bikers très welcome

To be continued.