Home again

I have never been walking in the Austrian Alps before so I was not ready for quite how stunningly beautiful it is.  This is the Lunersee, glowing like a turquoise far below us on our first day.

Neither was I ready for quite how hard much of the walking was. When you look at this picture and think that you have to get over some of these mountains, it is not really surprising.  I think I had just forgotten what real mountains are like, or put my head in the sand, overwhelmed by life before we went and just closing my eyes to the scale of the task.

Also we were carrying these:

although mine was much smaller than Ian's.  I had hoped for that magical moment which came on about day five of my Offa's Dyke Path walk last year when you lift your rucksack and it suddenly seems lighter and you start walking and think you could go on for ever.  Sadly it never came and I carried on grunting and puffing my way up the high hills. it is just the most extraordinary thing to be in such a landscape, slow or not.  To be honest, things did get easier as we went but I never achieved tripping around like one of these

This is one of Ian's photographs of a group of ibex which we found startlingly close to our path when we climbed Sulzfluh.  We came round a corner and found a small group.  I thought they would run as deer in Scotland would at the first hint of human contact.  But they stayed, wary but still, within camera range.  It is astonishing to see creatures so large and so strong surviving on what seems to be a landscape of stone.

The flowers are amazing.  I have hundreds of flower pictures but I don't want to bore you rigid.  To see so many things which you clearly recognise from your garden at home growing high and wild in alpine meadows is a revelation.  I am going to try lupins and doronicum up here on my own much lower hills now that I have seen them growing in their natural environment.

It is a world away from planes and trains and cities.  It is a world where humans have learnt to survive but where they seem to cling on to the edges, home not to men but to the ibex and the marmot, although there were plenty of Austrian and German walkers in the mountains: old folk and children as well as the superfit young, all tripping up and down the high paths and leaping streams.  They weren't yodelling.  The only yodelling we heard was here

on a sunny deck on top of a mountain by the cable car in the pretty village of Gargellan.  Here we also stayed in a small pension where the hospitality and the food were simply wonderful.  If you are ever in the Vorarlberg in Austria and want somewhere to stay, try the Wulfenia haus, run by the familie Bachman, just the perfect example of a small family run hotel.  They did our washing and gave us marvellous meals and comfortable beds, all with easy and genuine hospitality.

We didn't lose any weight, although we both got fitter over the fortnight.  I suspect that, just as the Offa's Dyke walk was powered by chips which led to my walking 180 miles and putting on two pounds, this one was powered by beer, not generally calorie free. Mostly we stayed in huts high in the mountains and all the huts also offer huge meals called "bergsteigeressen" (mountainclimbers' food) which are supposed to provide you with a guaranteed number of calories.  Spaghetti bolognaise was a favourite with me.  I was less keen on meals involving dumplings although the quality of food coming out of these high, isolated kitchens far away from roads and shops, where supplies came in on rickety pulley cars, was generally astonishingly good.

The paths are marked like this, from stone to stone, and those are my walking poles.  I have never used them before but am a complete convert now.  I am amazed, looking at this picture and wanting to walk right back into it, that I did it.
Now I need a holiday, perhaps a kitchen, and someone to help in the overgrown and overflowing garden.
It was good to go and it is good to be home.