22 June 2016
We left Zell Am See early in the morning, both of us feeling
far better. Zell Am See was the perfect oasis of calm for us to heal our tired
bodies, but it was time to move on. In the train, as we
rumbled through the Austrian countryside, I wrote:
‘I am on my last scraps of paper and this is also my last
pen, but if this is ever to become my version of ‘Travels with Charlie’ or ‘On
the Road’ then this pen will have to do.’
We put our bags in the hostel and set off to explore. We walked over the love lock bridge, where a busker played a glass cup orchestra. Near the love lock bridge was an Art Installation by Maria Abramovic, instructing the observer to ‘Sit on the chair. Close your eyes. Forget yourself. Lose all sense of time.’ Then we got to the Baroque Mirabell gardens, where children play among the gnomes (including the gnome with glasses that was in the 'Sound of Music'). One boy in particular was very animated, giving fierce faces to his playmates, passers-by, and the imaginary enemies he ninja-kicked and chased after.
We also ventured into the roughly 1000 year old Salzburg Cathedral, with its beautiful dome in Baroque style. Outside the Cathedral was a large fountain, and it was so burning hot that the water spray looked like diamonds glittering and dissolving into the cloudless sky. Inside the Cathedral was cool, and we sat in the pews and craned our necks up. In the Cathedral was an art installation by Christian Boltanski, a shadow play called 'Vanitas' which 'forged a vision of ephemerality...People are capable of many things, but they cannot turn back the flow of time. God is the Lord of time.' Against shadowy figures that crawled along the walls was the chilling, looped sound of a German woman's voice. Initially, I didn't understand it, until Nat told me the voice was speaking out time, saying 6 hours 26 minutes 10 seconds, for example. Considering the art was staged in thechir crypt which also served as a burial chamber, it was especially apt.
Then we walked around Altstadt, or ‘Old City’, where we saw Mozart’s birthplace, listened to the dulcet tones of the ‘magic violionist’ and walked past a group of boys who said ‘Hello! Hello…it’s me!’ - that made us laugh so much.
We walked up the Hohensalzburg and down the other side to
get to Schloss Leopoldskron, the palace used in the Sound of Music. It has
large gardens, and we found some odd things inside them – a pair of forgotten
glasses, a swing, and an evil cat trying to kill a shivering mouse that had
wedged itself in a tree trunk’s crevice. I tried my hardest to scare the cat
away, but to no avail – and so we left quickly.
We tried to walk around the lake to see the palace from the
other side, but stumbled upon some wild strawberries, got stung by stinging
nettles (which we healed with doc leaves) and discovered we were walking the wrong way round the
lake, so we turned back, and when we eventually got to a bench on the other
side with the white palace just opposite us, we flopped down and stayed there for a long time.
Barcelona, Pisa, Florence, Naples, Venice, Zell Am See… we’d been in a carnival
of activity since we began but both of us at that moment were really craving
rest. We spent a few quiet moments there, living out the words of Maria
Abramovic’s art piece. A different chair perhaps, but the call to close our
eyes and lose all sense of time was certainly true as we sat across from
Schloss Leopoldskron.
Back in the hostel, we met our roommates – Lauren from California (travelling 2 months), Hayley from Australia (travelling 8 months), and Han from South Korea (she didn’t speak much). Hayley and Lauren told us the tragedy of their stay in Vienna: despite travelling separately, they had both stayed in the same hostel at different times, and had both woken up in the dead of night to the horrible realisation that the beds were crawling with bed bugs! Lauren had the worst of it, because subsequently, while washing her clothes and pack in boiling water to kill off any remaining bed bugs, she’d left her passport inside as well, and the washing machine completely ruined it!
Lauren joined us for today’s adventures, which began with an 8.05am train to Werfen, a place which shares its name with the German word for ‘throw’. We hike up to Gschwandtanger Meadow, where Maria and the children picnicked in The Sound of Music. We brought our own picnic – watermelon, cantaloupe, pesto tabbouleh, hummus and falafel and bread – and sat in a little hut to eat, and talk as we got to know one another better. Lauren unfortunately sat beside me while I tackled the watermelon which meant both of us were often subject to little bursts of watermelon juice when my spoon slipped, but it just meant the picnic was punctuated by laughter (Also, on that 34 degree day, a little cooling juice splash now and then wasn’t too bad!)
Travelling seems to demolish the walls people build up around themselves as a protection from everyday life. The people we meet often end up telling us quite personal stories, which I don’t write down here for the sake of their privacy. I sometimes wonder if that is why Nat and I have grown so close so quickly. Apart from being very similar in our interests and very different in our personalities which means simultaneous balance and shared intention, I feel convinced that having to trust each other to look out for the other as we navigate otherwise unknown places, and the prevailing feeling of openness – to experience, and education, and culture, and people - that accompanies travel, has been something else that has drawn us together.
We caught a bus and then a cable car up to Eisrisenwelt, The Cave of the Ice Giants, which are the biggest Ice Caves – in the world! Nat, Lauren and I were in summer clothing, and the crowds around us were decked in full on winter gear – hats, gloves, heat tech jackets. A couple of men laughed and called us brave. We were given little lamps to hold, and then the cave mouth opened, with a huge rush of wind blowing out towards us. Lauren had to push Nat in, and I can’t remember how I managed to get in – everything was a whirl, as if we were passing through a time machine rather than a simple door. But perhaps it was a time machine, because in the caves it was a whole other world, as if we had transcended space and time. It was dark, lit only by our lamps and the glowing magnesium strip of the guide.
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| Credit |
The Caves were first discovered in 1879 by Anton Posselt, but he only managed to explore the first 200 meters of the cave before a huge ice wall meant he couldn’t go further. And there was mch further to go – the ice caves stretch 40 km into the mountain. Before Posselt, locals in the area had known about the caves but, believing the cave was the door to Hell, they refused to explore it.
After Posselt, Alexander von Mörk led an exhibition to the cave in 1913, and he and other explorers managed to carve ice steps into the ice wall and venture further in. When Von Mörk was killed in World War I in 1914, an urn containing his ashes was brought back to the cave, where it remains today.
The Caves contain ice structures, made naturally by cold air blowing in during winter, where is cools the lower part of the cave to freezing temperatures, and when water from rock fissures drips down, it freezes, causing stalagmites and other sculptures to form. There was an ice elephant and an ice bear, and the homes of the Ice King and Queen, son of Odin. Near the deepest part of the cave that we ventured into, there was an ice lake, which the guide stepped on confidently, the falling sparks from his magnesium strip hissing as it melted the cold surface of the lake, his footsteps forming small puddles as he walked across. The stalactites of the ceiling and the cave walls were perfectly reflected on the ice lake’s surface, with a perfect symmetry that tricked one into believing an expansive ice city dwelled beneath the surface, another impenetrable world within this already hostile environment.
Another rush of wind blew us out of the zero degree caves, back into 34 degree sunlight. We had Bioburgers for dinner, and laughed back in the hostel at Hayley’s pronunciation of German – the funny German symbol β, pronounced ‘SS’, she understandably mistook as ‘B’, and ‘Marienplatz’ became ‘Marien-splatz’!
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