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Friday 22
ndMay. I am conscious that I am now in the last week of my vacation, and the low clouds every day, and rain most of the time here in Salzburg, are frustrating. I am not seeing the mountain-scape.
My plan for the day was to take the train from Obertraun as far as Bad Ischl, the railway station there has luggage lockers, then to leave my suitcase there and take the bus to St Wolfgang to ride the Schafbergbahn rack railway to the top of the mountain. On arriving in Bad Ischl, I discovered all the luggage lockers were out of service, and the weather was deteriorating. I phoned the Schafbergbahn and they told me that it was very cold, windy, snowing and raining at the top and they had cancelled some of their trains, it was not a good day to travel. So I made the decision to skip the train ride, and instead to travel the length of the Wolfgangsee on the boat, replacing a rack train trip to the top in the clouds with a scenic boat trip, picking up the bus to Salzburg again at the other end of the lake.
The bus stop
in Strobl was about 1 km from the wharf, which was a bit annoying, but I did get a quick tour of the village. Very quiet and picturesque in the morning. There were only four passengers for the first half of the boat trip, as far as St Wolfgang, and the scenery was extremely pretty. This is Sound of Music country – much of the film was shot around this lake, I believe. St Wolfgang is a storybook village – and I could see the 11 o’clock rack train heading up the unbelievably steep track into the cloud. Had I made the right decision? Oh well, the train ride would cost 33 euro, and the boat ride was only 10. The boat is public transport, but they could call it a lake cruise and charge 30 euro for the same thing! The boat ride finished at St Gilgen at the other end of the lake. I once applied for a job here at an international school, would have been great to live here for a while!
The bus from St Gilgen to Salzburg was packed, quite a lot of school kids too, they must have a half-day on Fridays
or something. More nice scenery all the way to Salzburg. In Salzburg there was an extraordinary amount of young people around, especially at the station, hordes of them, even more than in Toulouse. I found out later that this weekend they are having a Catholic youth festival in Salzburg, expecting 7,000 youth from Austria and surrounding countries. Walking around the city later, which is loaded with churches, most of them had youth around and events going on inside.
I headed out in the steady rain, with a golf umbrella loaned by the hotel, and took the trolley bus over to the town centre. The rain stopped for an hour or so, which was good, and I was able to explore the extraordinary old city. The river was rushing with stormwater, the crowds had thinned out due to the rain, and although all the mountains in the background were invisible, perhaps this brought the city itself into focus. Many beautiful churches, open squares, statues, fountains, and hanging above it all the fortress on the hill. Since I am here for just a short time, I basically just took heaps of photos!
I have discovered that just across the border
in Germany (but still on the Salzburg public transport system) there is a small railway museum, so I am going to visit that in the morning, then I am off to Jenbach, near Innsbruck, and a bit of a rail fan centre, with the Aachenseebahn steam cog railway and the Zillertahlbahn narrow gauge railway, which also sometimes runs steam.
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