Day Six: Doing No Reservations in Wachau

 

This a late post for day six (Thursday) but there's a couple of good reasons for the delay. We left Melk quite late since we were trying to figure out how get cheap train tickets from Vienna to Prague for the next day evening. The Czech railway website wasn't behaving and after an hour of trying to book the super cheap tickets we gave up and started riding.

The plan, like the day before, was to take it easy, and depending on where we reached by 5pm find a place to stay for the night.

The Donau route took us through the Wachau valley, Austria,s wine growing region which is littered with vineyards and wineries and little outlets selling their own produce. 

 

It was therefore a day on which we put aside riding rule #5 (the one about not mixing drinking and riding) and stopped in at several places to sample wine, even buy a bottle(which was quickly polished off later in the evening), learn about why cheese and wine go together so well, and sit under apricot trees and sip the Wachau local. 

 

By 5pm we had done a measly 45km and reached Krems where we managed to bag a cheap room at the second hotel we knocked on. The fact that it was cheap, was located bang in the middle of town and offered complementary breakfast and offered a safe place to store cycles (even if it was where Count Dracula also slept) far outweighed the fact that the place was run by the most crotchety set of old women and that it looked like the hotel that Hans Christian Andersen and Dracula would have designed had they run a partnership in the hospitality industry. 

For dinner we decided to give pigs and the local cuisine a break and do what all good Indians do when they miss home food – go find a Chinese restaurant and get some chilli chicken and fried rice. 

 

Maybe it was the Chinese, maybe it was the Wachau brew or maybe it was just the weird statues and dolls displayed around our room, but we all had strange dreams, mostly involving ghostly medieval Chucky-like dolls getting up to no good.

 

Tomorrow - Vienna waits for you.

Day Three: The Three Lakes and Lessons in German

The morning in Salzburg started with some bike servicing. The previous day's ride from Zell am See had been mostly off-road on gravel and rough surfaces. As a result the derailleur on my Brompton was jammed with mud and needed cleaning, and Naveen’s bike had a puncture, but thankfully the tire had deflated slowly and gave in only once we reached the doors of the hotel we were staying at in Salzburg. 

We were sad to be leaving Salzburg having seen so little of this beautiful medieval town. The narrow lanes and tall buildings, the castle atop the hill, the Mirabell gardens is what we managed to experience as we ride through the town on our way out towards Mondsee.

The list of things we didn't see is much longer – Mozart’s house, the many museums and palaces, Hellbrun palace, Salzburg Cathedral, the Von Trapp house. But we were sure that better things awaited us on the route to the three lakes. 

The weather forecast for the second day's 95km ride from Salzburg to Gmunden was grim but not severe, so we thought we would be ok with multiple layers and waterproof gear. The first 20km was a constant and gentle but unrelenting climb through meadows and villages. As we emerged from the climb and joined a road it started to drizzle so we thought that would be a good time to stop for coffee or anything hot.

We found a little café that we initially thought was a church. As we crossed the road to investigate a lady emerged from the café and smiled at us. She asked us if we were going inside, and when we said ‘yes’ and that we were going in for some coffee she seemed a little disappointed, but as she walked away she encouraged us to try the local food “Ees fery gut,fery fresch,  allso fery cheep. Ja?”

Walking into the restaurant was a little bit of like one of those scenes from an old western. As the strangers walks into the bar everyone goes quiet. All eyes turn towards you. No one smiles. Everyone just stares, wondering who you are, where you're from, and why you're here and if you're going to mess up their cosy hangout. 

We eventually were given a table in the corner, and although the service was a little slow to start with, it picked up speed and got a lot friendlier once the waitress figured that our efforts at translating the menu wasn't just to practice our German. What followed, was without a doubt, one of the best meals of our lives.

After a very heavy lunch we were blessed with a series of long downhill stretches, but our going was slowed down by the search for toilets. We luckily found one at a small café. It was here we got our next serious lesson in German. 

As Naveen walked out of the café he was murmuring to himself ‘Bach gaye’ (‘that was a close one’). I won't go into the details of what happened next but it's just important to clarify the following. Damen in German doesn't mean ‘The Men’,  and Herr in German doesn't mean ‘Hers’. 

We soon reach the first of the three lakes we going to be crossing starting with Mondsee which was beautiful. 

This was followed by Attersee which was stunning and this section involved the highlight of the day. Transecting the 1.1km cycle tunnel at Sankt Gilgen. 

As we got closer to Gmunden the rain starting coming down harder and harder. With the phone stored in the waterproof case we struggled to find the right direction and eventually too shelter in a petrol pump convenience store. Stepping inside and seeing the small crowd of men who drinking and smoking it seemed that this place also doubled up as the local pub. We loaded up with drinks and snacks, but seeing that the light was fading fast we decided to make a last dash for the hotel which was barely 5km away. 

We reached the hotel soaked, shivering and sore from a long days ride in the rain. Thankful that the room was cosy and warm, we unpacked and settled down to enjoy a tasting of the local wine, and then slightly drunk and very tired, I wandered of to sleep. Dreaming of the days ride and the adventures to come tomorrow as we would finally reach the blue waters of the Danube. 

 

Dinner in Zell am See

After a long journey on trains from Munich to Salzburg and then again changing trains to get to Zell am See, the big topic of discussion, once we have checked into our hotel, was what we were going to do for dinner. 

There are many options. One option was to head out to the local bar where clearly it seemed everyone who was awake at 9pm was hanging out and there was loud music playing and the kitchen promised to be open till midnight. The second option was to go to the Basmati restaurant and savour the local version of Indian cuisine served out for Europeans by people from the Middle East. And then there was the option of going down to the local Billa convenience store and picking up a couple of bottles of wine some sandwiches, some salads and yoghurt, and heading back to the room to enjoy dinner in the lap of luxury the warmth of being  amongst friends. 

We thought about what might be expensive and what might be cheap, we thought about what might be tiring and what might be relaxing, we thought about what might be fast and what might take a long time, but most importantly we thought about what would help to get our bowels moving in the morning. And so as we sprawled on the carpet in our room sharing a salad and eating it with our hands because we couldn’t find a fork, and sipping wine from from tea cups because there were no wineglasses, we marvelled at the fact that we were enjoying Bavarian wine at Rs.500 a bottle, that roughing-it-out could be so relaxing.

As we all turned in for the night in under the fresh duvet covers we looked forward to the ride from Zell to Salzburg that promised to be “mostly downhill , and to the outcome of chewing lots of green leafy vegetables early next morning.