Eisriesenwelt (Ice Caves)

On any vacation there are things you are never likely to forget.  When you pay out the money you anticipate (perhaps over optimistically) that the thing(s) you will never forget will be good.  The reality of vacations: long distance travel, unfamiliar food, different climates, different insect life etc. suggest that this optimism needs qualifying.

 

One thing I will never forget from this vacation was an announcement.

 

It is probably true that there have been several Church Services in which an announcement has stolen the show, notwithstanding the preparatory efforts of the musicians, the preacher and other participants.  That day the announcement somewhat stole the show.  The Eisreisenwelt are lauded as one of Austria's most spectacular places.  That is quite something in an alpine nation that is filled with amazing landscapes and an enormous historical significance over many centuries of culture, politics and the arts.

 

Certainly these ice caves are amazing - though possibly less so than the hype and world recognition suggest.  A cave is, after all, a cave.  And every cave I have ever visited has shapes and clever lighting shows them up.  Whatever.

 

The announcement that my daughter and I will not forget was memorable for its context as well as its content.

The caves are high, high up the mountain.  There was a bus to start with which (together with its amazingly grumpy driver - isn't it strange how you can tell that someone is grumpy and swearing at every passing car even when you can't speak his language?) took us to the car park.  The car park is itself a steep slope, then a facility building, and another uphill walk of some minutes to the cable car.

 

I mentally associate cable cars with going up mountains from bottom to top but this one turned out to go up from about 6/10ths of the way up to 7/10ths.  It left us with a further climb, the following photo being taken about a third of the way up that last climb.  You can see the entrance to the cave in the middle.

 



 

Even at the cave entrance the temperature, on the day we climbed, was in the mid 20s.  The English language has several words available for how we felt on getting to the entrance (how everyone arriving at the entrance seemed to feel).  I'll choose this one: knackered.

 

That was the context of the announcement. 

 

The content of the announcement?  At the entrance tired climbers were offered a Deutsch or Englisch queue each with fit-looking young guides in very warm-looking coats.  And ours, in decent English, made this announcement;

 

"I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that there are 700 steps up and 700 steps down.  The good news is that although it is freezing you will not feel cold with all those steps to climb!"  On the cheerful delivery of which he led us to light our lamps and on into the caves.

 

My inadequacy of language means I cannot accurately convey the experience of arriving with exhausted relief at a destination to find that the destination is a 1400 step climb.  The best I can do is that it felt like my body remained at several thousand feet up but my heart sank back to the shuttle bus stop at the valley bottom.

 

I wonder how many people climb their way through life without realising what they are climbing towards.  I wonder whether they would so climb if they knew.  I wonder if there is a whole different Way that ends with rest?

 



Berchtesgaden

Alongside the beauty of the Austrian landscape lies the beauty of the Bavarian Alps.  There, at the foot of one Germany's highest mountains, is the town of Berchtesgaden.  We arrived by train.

Berchtesgaden is not tiny, but neither is it a large town.  It is very picturesque, offering ice creams that you could die for - or more accurately die of.  To be fair to Berchtesgaden its most extraordinary feature is its setting and probably its second-most amazing feature is its palace complex where the Bavarian princes lived.

 

 

Yet right up there with the word amazing is the railway station.  Trundled would be the word to describe the winding, single track journey through the mountains that brought us to the town.  Winding and stunningly beautiful.  The trains ran every hour which, given the isolation of the line, was relatively remarkable.  Finally the three coaches clattered over some points (US: switches) and came to a halt in Berchtesgaden station, the end of the line.  There, one could deduce from the timetable, the train stopped for 20 minutes before setting off back through the mountains on its return journey.

 

I think it was on platform (line) 4 that we stopped on.  Platform 4.  But wasn't there only one train at a time?  Why ever would you need four platforms?  And then there is the station buildings themselves.  They are absolutely huge.  Befitting a large town or moderate city perhaps - but a mountain town at the end of a single track railway?

 

It was not always like this.  Berchtesgaden had its railway for many decades in humbler surroundings until, in the mid 1930s a man called Hitler bought a country retreat in the hills a few miles away.  The date on the station says 1937.  It was actually completed in 1938 and here the likes of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were welcomed for meetings of state.  The meetings kept the world leaders abreast with the plans and developments of the Third Reich.  The meetings were about as much use as the monumental station is today - all outward importance, no true function.

 

It reminded me of that other World War 2 railway monument at Auschwitz.  There a bleak track leads to a dead end.  Here in the mountains of Bavaria a beautiful track and a magnificent station are part of the same great dead end that is man's inhumanity to man.

 

Mozart

Salzburg is very proud of Mozart.  I had no wish to avoid him, but even if I had so wished I could not have done.  As the story unfolded I started to find this quite amusing.

 

Poor Wolfgang Amadeus himself did not like Salzburg anything like as much as Salzburg has come to like him.  As far as the story can be understood, he spent a great deal of energy trying to extricate himself from the mediocre Salzburg Court to become more widely rich and famous in Vienna or Munich or the like.

 

It is nearly as ironic that to do almost anything truly Mozartian in Salzburg will cost a small fortune.  Some people somewhere are making a lot of money when an opera ticket costs over £300.00.  Mozart himself made a decent amount of money but spent an indecent amount leaving him indecently in debt: a few forward royalties might have helped as I imagine his link to the city adds up to 20% to the cost.

 

One might imagine that no-one is more empowered to control their legacy than a genius composer or artist.  Hundreds of years on their work is still being enjoyed, their locations remembered.  Yet human beings are not like that.  They take up legacies and shape them in the way that suits them.

 

The only way to ultimately control your legacy would be to rise again from the dead.

Austria

Mountains are amazingly emotive.  This despite them being nowhere near as alive as Julie Andrews implied in The Sound of Music.  In the average lowland marsh there are countless more living things, so what is it that makes the traveller gooey eyed about mountains?  Why do we climb them, leaving ourselves exhausted?

 

Long before the Victorians were sea-dipping people were heading for the hills and I suppose it is about perspective.  The greatness of the view, the greatness of the mountain itself, somehow St Gilgan looks attractive in the photograph even though you cannot really see it.  It's beauty is made by the mountain perspective.

 

Isn't that what faith in God does too?