'Last good hiking weekend of the autumn' mark 3...

By the time this hike (officially in November!) came around, it was the third weekend of gorgeous sunny mountain weather in a row. Every time we had rushed out to the hills to make the most of our 'last chance'. This hike represents last chance number three! Gorgeous sunshine at the beginning of November.

This week's hike featured an uncommon piece of technology, the automobile! Although I try to  hike via public transport as much as possible, there are some places it's just not really possible to hike from/to without a car, and I am grateful I also have hiking friends who own this piece of equipment. This hike was up onto a mountain I had never ever been to before, which for an Alp less than 1.5 hours drive from Vienna is quite unusual, and very exciting! The Schneealpe is a large 1700m limestone plateau with some 1900m peaks, situated just a bit west of the Rax plateau. It isn't as popular as the Rax or Schneeberg due to it not being situated directly on a trainline. It is also famed for fierce winds across its flat summit plateau, its highest point is called the Windberg (you guys can translate that for yourseves I hope).

Of course, this year is a charmed hiking year and no such freezing wind was in evidence. We climbed rapidly up to the plateau, passing beautiful bright yellow autumn trees and big sheer limestone cliffs, which showed off some lovely folding in the slanting November sunlight. After the exhausting but short ascent, we reached the plateau itself. There was a quite reasonable amount of snow already, but the sun was so strong that only t-shirts were required. The tiger-striping of partially melted snow added dramatic contrast to the already dramatic landscape, and we headed eagerly across the plain to our destination.

Slipping and sliding a bit on the snowfields we soon reached the peak of the Windberg at 1900m. Because the Schneealpe is set away from the other nearby massifs and the Windberg projects on its own, the summit offers stunning views off in every direction. Far below the fog/low cloud that filled the valleys was visible all around, lending a decidedly mysterious air to the more distant peaks. Closer, the cliffs and pinnacles of the neighbouring Rax plateau were thrown into sharp relief by the bright sun in the absolutely clear mountain air.

We chose to take a long and winding route home, which took us along a fantastic teetering ridge walk down to a pass between two valleys, then along the rapidly darkening valley and back to the car about 15 minutes after sundown. An absolutely amazing walk! Partly because of the weather, but also because the Schneealpe is really a fantastic mountain! I hope to go there again, although I am aware the weather may not always be the same...

Pictures at the link as usual!

bis bald,
der Tom

Autumn in the mist

Somewhat unbelievably, the weekend following the previously reported incredibly sunny autumn hike was forecast to be equally lovely. Feeling more fit than a few weeks before, I immediately sought out the crumpled piece of paper where I had planned several hikes and picked out the one I had formerly felt was too long: Spital am Semmering to the Stuhleck (1785m, 1100m height gain) and then down to Muerzzuschlag (19km measured on the map). A few years ago I climbed the Stuhleck on a slightly unsatisfactory route which involved far too much ski piste, and while at the summit caught sight of a beautiful curving ridge walk. Not knowing where it went at the time, I filed it away for another day. 2 years later, that day finally came!

And what a day! Once again, Vienna was a foggy mess but the sun was really beaming by the time we neared the Alps. Our joy was short lived as we entered the valley near Muerzzuschlag however, as the sun disappeared under a low cloud blanket. All we could hope was that it wouldn't reach all the way to the peak... The start of the hike took us straight into the clouds, through pine forest dripping with condensation and muffled in fog. As we climbed higher in the slightly eerie stillness, something wonderful began to happen. The cloud began to thin out, but the air was still filled with water droplets.

The sun began to be visible as a bright disk in the mist, and the whole effect was like the most incredible smoke machine and lighting combo you ever saw! The bright sun sent thick and thin shafts of light spearing down through the small gaps in the branches of the conifers. Light beams and shadows became something three dimensional and solid, hanging in the air and remaining fixed to the sun as one moved one's head to take it all in. Moving up through the cloud we were treated to maybe 15 or 20 minutes of this spectacle, changing all the time as the density of the cloud changed. I have literally never seen anything like it.

Once above the cloud we had another spectacle to admire, the valley below filled with a veritable river of cloud. As the day wore on we made it to the top of Stuhleck in good spirits, sitting down to lunch to overlook the hazy mountains in the distance. The clouds in the valleys had thinned, but there was still a line of haze bisecting the blue peaks in the distance. We curved down the wide ridge drenched in sunshine, and after an undulating ridge walk headed down towards the valley past towering wind turbines. The sun was sinking as we got to the valley floor, lighting up the autumn leaves with yet more colour.

We arrived at the train station rather tired, having covered 24km according to the GPS! After a bit of a look round the exhibition about the new tunnel being built in the area (ooh, 3D geology!) we caught the train home for a well deserved meal in a Bulgarian restaurant then bed...

The photos can't quite do the clouds justice, but they still came out really well, please do have a look and check out some of the hi-res versions too!

Bis bald,

der Tom

Autumn in the sun...

I have been organising pretty much weekly hikes recently. Blog land hasn't seen much evidence of this as the more photos I take, the longer it takes for me to sit down and sort out the ones I like. Also, some weeks its just overcast and grey. This doesn't really spoil the hike in the slightest, or even the views, but it makes for a rubbish photo nonetheless.

Anyway, this hike was chosen specifically due to the weather report. We have had an utterly ridiculous heatwave here that has meant that for 2 weeks in a row mid-october temperatures were nudging up over 20 degrees, and there has been plenty of sun. In the Vienna basin though, autumn is the season of low cloud/fog. It is very common that all of the lowlands are shrouded in miserable fog all day while up abouve 300m the sun beams.

Just such an occurrence was forecast for the Saturday for which I planned this latest hike to the Sonnwendstein (1521m), which has an excellent view over the Vienna basin and is ideal for watching this phenomenon in its full glory. We took a new, longer and more winding route to the summit, prolonging the hike to at least 18km and taking us past the gorgeous autumn foliage. Every so often out of the dark of the conifers you would catch sight of the fiery yellow-orange of solitary deciduous trees. The photos get close, but can't quite get across the sheer intensity of the colours...

Several times during the climb and most spectacularly at the summit (after a well-deserved Gasthaus lunch) the sea of clouds over the plains was visible. You could easily imagine yourself atop some floating island... And chuckle at the misfortune of your Vienna-bound companions while soaking in the constant beaming sunshine! A beautiful curving ridge walk with stunning panoramic views of the Rax and Schneeberg massifs rounded off the hike before a rapid descent in order to catch the train on time.

I hope you enjoy this very autumnal gallery of photos, with the added benefit of some serious cloud-sea action!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Autumn is on its way!

Herr, es ist Zeit, begins the Rilke poem. Well, I'm not quite sure it is officially autumn time for a while yet, but you can certainly feel that it is going to come creeping up soon enough! Perhaps because I spent the whole of August hiding from the heat of Austria in (actually pretty sunny) London and Glasgow, August for those who remained behind was wet and cool. If by cool you mean not over 28 degrees most of the time, of course. All that wetness seems to have given the mushroom life of the mountains a great kickstart though! On my most recent hike the fungi were already in full 'bloom'...

It was a misty day as we started off on the 18 km hike I had invented after an evening's pleasant route planning the week before. This was a huge photographic blessing, as the webs which carpeted the undergrowth everywhere were festooned with water droplets, lending everything an exciting silvery sheen and allowing for some great close ups. As we headed further up more and more of the low bushes were blueberries, and the higher we went the more heavily laden their stubby branches. We stopped frequently to rake the berries off the plants in handfuls, turning our tongues blue and our hands a garish purple from all the juice. Now and again we supplemented our blueberry diet with some raspberries which were also found hanging around in the less wooded spots.

Later into the hike the sun burned though the clouds and it ended up being a wonderful day, although the views down the valley were almost completely obscured in haze. The order of the day really was colour, to the intenese purple of blueberry juice and the mild pinkish-red of the raspberries should be added the deep green of the blueberry leaves, the fiery orange of the stags-horn-like fungi and the spotted red and white of quite a few fly agaric.

I wasn't really in shape after a month of sitting around, but a great hike nonetheless. Sometimes things just seem to work out and a whole bunch of cool photos appear by chance all at once. Check them out here!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Vienna is beautiful

It's not that you forget that the city is beautiful. You don't stop noticing it so much as you forget that not everywhere else looks like it. The picture that springs to mind when you think 'street' becomes something very different from what it used to be. The same with 'park', and many other things. The best thing to counteract this sort of effect is of course travel. You can go somewhere else, then come back and see your city anew. Or you can fly in people from elsewhere, and vicariously enjoy their reactions to things that have become familiar.

Sometimes, nobody even has to travel in real life at all. Seeing your city in a film is a little bit of both, looking at it through new eyes and watching the reactions of others, all wrapped up together. Recently, having known of it for a very long time, I finally got around to watching the film Before Sunrise, probably already on its way to getting called a 'classic'. A great film for many reasons that I won't go into here. One of the things it succeeded at, and the thing that drew me to the film in the first place, is its treatment of its setting, the city of Vienna. It really succeeds in showing off the best of many parts of the city, and it has helped jog me out of my complacency almost as well as a visit from a real person might.

So here are a very few photos from around Vienna in the last few months, to celebrate the fact that once the film had finished, the whole city of Vienna was still waiting for me outside the door!

Bis bald,

der Tom

Scenic railway antics: The Oetschergraben

Today's blog concerns a walk along some deep limestone gorges near the border of Lower Austria and Styria, chief among them the Oetschergraben. This walk was a last hurrah for one of my longtime hiking companions who is now moving to Switzerland. It isn't incredibly far from Vienna but it took a long while to get to. Luckily, getting there is part of the fun of the trip, as our destination was reached via a 2 hour journey on a scenic narrow gauge railway (stretching between St. Poelten and the pilgrim's destination of Mariazell). The train was all very modern, as this is one of the few electrified narrow gauge railways in existence (train facts!). There was certainly a lot of switchbacking, and we could see certain stations on our route for a very long time after we had left them as we were just zigzagging up rather than going anywhere. A lot of the way was pretty shrouded in trees, but there were frequent brief glimpses of mountains, including towards the end the 1800 m Oetscher itself.

Once alighting from the train we began our leisurely journey into the various limestone gorges the area has to offer. Water levels in the streams were low at first but as we got deeper in there was soon a fair amount of rushing clear water, looking quite blue occasionally against the white-grey limestone. Most of the views were along the gorge to far off cliffs or up to the nearer walls, where the limestone had weathered into pinnacles with little bits of vegetation on top, merging with steeper cliffs.

I spent a lot of the walk entranced because it was very clear by the dead straight nature of the gorge and some telltale planes of smashed up limestone (fault gouge or 'cataclasite') visible in the stream bed that we were following a large fault core with some very nice exposures of the crushed up fault rocks. Everyone else was far more impressed by the massive caterpillar we found though (details in the photo gallery!)

 An unstrenuous but beautiful walk in pleasantly cool summer weather completed, we headed for home. Stopping briefly to change trains in a sleepy hamlet by the narrow gauge railway allowed me to spot a cigarette machine that was a relic from the days of the austrian Schilling! This wasn't that surprising once one saw the interior of the nearby Gasthaus however... Just as we got back on a train the real storms started, and we then had to disembark again and change over to buses as lightening had taken out the power in a later stretch of the line. The scenic journey did begin to drag after it took nearly 3 hours to get back even to the mainline to head home, but looking at the photos now I'd say it was worth it!

Hope you enjoy the photos from the trip, and see you next time!

Der Tom

The Heukuppe

Summer marches on in all its sweltering-but-not-as-bad-as-last-year glory. I have decamped to Britain for August, hoping to avoid the last and hottest month of true summer in Austria. From there I bring you this set of images from a hike near the end of July.

This hike was directly inspired by the previous one I blogged about, as we realised that from the same point we ended that hike we could start and head up to the highest point on the Rax plateau, the Heukuppe (2007m). This isn't a hugely important peak, but as it is awkwardly located I had never climbed it and claimed the Rax plateau entirely as my own, as it were. The date was fixed by other commitments so it was lucky that the weather cooperated, delivering a cool, cloudy but pleasant day for the walk. In fact throughout the day it rained pretty much everywhere we could see from our vantage point, just not on us!

A relatively overgrown path led along the base of the steep slopes / cliffst that surround most chunks of limestone in the alps, until we eventually clambered our way up a steep gully and made it onto the rolling, green, wildflower covered top. From there a quick hike up to the peak, then a leisurely descent facing onto fantastic views over the whole plateau, via many switchbacks on the 'Schlangenweg' (snake path) and back to the car.

Throughout much of the hike the clouds were just low enough to be at or around the heights of the peaks, alternately obscuring and unveiling different views as the wind blew and adding some dramatic grey-blue-white backdrops to the views.

Enjoy the small gallery of pictures!

Der Tom

Hans von Haid Steig

Regular readers of this blog will hopefully recall what a Klettersteig is. In english, we (or at least I) call it a via ferrata, because we don't really have any in the UK so we use the italian name. Basically it is a scramble up a path far more precipitous, rocky and vertical than you would normally attempt unaided, made climbable by various miscellaneous pieces of ironwork and ladders, as well as a cable bolted to the rock which you clip to to prevent yourself falling off the mountain. Note to would-be Klettersteiger: not falling off the mountain is NOT the same as not falling, it isn't like climbing with a belayer and toprope, you really shouldn't plan on falling off!

The start of the route

For this reason, Klettersteigs are usually a lot less extreme than climbs, so that the lowest grade of them probably would be called an easy-ish scramble in the UK (where mountains are one of the few places where the golden rule of responsibility for oneself remains). My friend and I had already completed the easy routes up the steep limestone ramparts bordering the the Rax plateau (neighbour to the Schneeberg massif, about an hours drive southwest of Vienna). We wanted to try a harder route, for the challenge but also to understand exactly who the grades were aimed at. Probably sensibly, the Hans von Haid Steig (graded C/D, A is easiest) comes with a huge bunch of warnings attached when you look it up. Were we the 'experienced climbers only' that the description spoke of? Only one way to find out!

Just under half way, looking up into the cleft which is the next part of the route. Tiny climbers are visible on the full res version!

After a sweaty trek to the base of the route and a leisurely lunch to give the large group ahead of us time to get out of our way, we donned our helmets (the most important piece of Klettersteig equipment!!!) and harnesses and set off. I was considerably distracted throughout lunch as the route began at then followed an absolutely beautifully exposed example of a limestone fault zone ...

Klettersteiger, Steigbaum/ ladder type thingy and incidentally a beautiful fault zone.

The route was indeed much trickier than any we had attempted before, but did not present an insurmountable challenge. I am really out of practice with climbing, so I climbed very inefficiently and certainly tired myself out more than necessary. The climb led up two dramatic single-poled ladders (dunno what to call them in english, see the picture!) and through a deep cleft in the rock, with the biggest difficulty being polished wet and slippy patches of rock. In this cleft I spotted a Rock Thrush, a new bird for me!! After the tricky parts came a reasonably long grade B section to finally get to the top, the length rather than the difficulty definitely took it out of me and I was quite exhausted when we finally made it. The Rax plateau always offers great views off its lip and across to the nearby peaks, and we soaked them in before heading a far less steep route back down the mountain. Mission accomplished!

The very last part of the Klettersteig.

The photos are at this link, with a cheeky photo from the Schneeberg which I climbed again a week or so before the Klettersteig. Didn't take more photos then as they would have been repeats from the first time!

Der Tom

Return to the Hochschwab

You may or more likely may not recall that last year I went on a 3 day hike in the Hochschwab area. It turned out to be a really great hiking route. When my old friend from scouts Dave contacted me about going hiking in the alps, I decided that I didn't want to expend the effort on planning a whole new route, especially seeing how great this walk was the last time. The only change I made was to the first day, extending it from 3 or so hours to a proper days walking, now that we didn't need to set off on the friday afternoon (thanks to one of the 3 bank holidays that follow easter here).

The major difference was that we were hiking the route a lot earlier in the year. This meant much more pleasant cool conditions (though it hit 30 in Vienna while we were up there, we were in the low-mid 20s tops and had lots of cooling snow around). It also meant not all snow had melted yet, which turned out to be more a help than a hindrance.

Day one, typical scenery

We finally got off the bus at around midday on Saturday the 7th of June. The new route began already quite high at 1200m, and the highest point of the first day was a measly 1700m or so. Thus the whole thing was an extremely pleasant walk mostly contouring along the sides of slopes or across limestone plateaus. Up above 1400m there are lots of these, full of little damp clearings, dotted with hoofprints of passing cows, green with grass and in early June bristling with wildflowers and buzzing with insects. In between there are stretches of thin conifer wood, mossier and with much more lichen than you get at ground level. Every so often we would reach a high point, saddle or cliffside where we could look back over the way we had come so far or spy the distant peak of tomorrow's target, the Hochschwab. We arrived at the first hut on time, gobbled down dinner and a few shandys, got down to some serious card playing then all too soon were banished off to bed.

View from the summit

The next 2 days hike followed the route described in the previous blogpost, and with the bright sunny weather the whole thing felt enormously familiar, apart from the snowfields we occasionally had to tramp up and over. The ascent to the Hochschwab summit (2277 m) was tiring but not too difficult, and we were rewarded with the amazing view, enhanced by the patchwork of bright white flecks of unmelted snow visible even on the furthest mountains. The snow was also a huge help on the descent, instead of a monotonous, knee-jarring and steep plod down, we were able to half-run, half-slide ('glissading' you can call it apparently) straight down the snow. We were in the valley in no time, with little or no plod required! And once in the valley we were cooled by the snow, instead of baked. There was even water at the hut to wash with this time!

Perhaps my favourite shot, a distant Dave enters the snow filled valley, compare with the same valley in august...

The final day was a straight descent, followed by a multi hour wait in a completely asleep little alpine village for the bus to the station. Once down out of the mountains everything was really hotting up, and the 30 degree weather once we got back to Vienna really lent a very surreal feeling to the 3 days. Once we were back, it was as if they had occurred in a completely parallel universe...

Hope you enjoy the photos, I have tried to avoid repeating views from last year but inevitably the odd one crept in!!

Till next time,

Der Tom

The Wachau grand tour

It's been a whirlwind few weeks of lots of visits, so much that I sometimes get the feeling that my german is still recovering and maybe my english is still a bit more mumbly than usual (mumbly = normal for the viewers at home). Today we get a selection of photos from my parents' visit. As they make up a high percentage of the readership of this blog, detailing everything we did seems mildly perverse, but what what would a 'web log' be without the logging?

In the Wachau 1

I will pick one trip to describe in detail, as that's the one I have photos of. In addition to that though, we of course did and consumed plenty of things, including going to the zoo! It was way better than the last time I went, the nice weather had brought the animals out and we saw nearly everything. Highlights include the giraffes (it is so easy to forget how IMPROBABLE they look in real life!), the orang-utans and the polar bears in their new enclosure, including fantastic views of them diving and swimming. Yes, those are the polar bears which were catapulted to infamy around the same time when they ate a free-living zoo peacock. Oh and on the friday night we looked in a bunch of churches for the Lange Nacht der Kirchen and even got to hear a concert of proper old instruments, the theorbo and the viola de gamba!

In the Wachau 2

Although Vienna is of course a beautiful city with near infinite power to fascinate and provide sugary snacks in equal measure, it was agreed we would take a trip out of the city to give a taste of the rest of the country and its even more relaxed way of life. The decision was made to travel to the cliff and vine lined world heritage area of the Wachau, along the banks of the Danube about an hour to the West of Vienna. Through complete fluke, I managed to buy us the ticket which included a rail journey to one town (Melk), entry to their world famous Abbey, a trip down the river to the second town (Krems) and then a train home. A pretty good deal, even if I only realised what I had bought while perusing the ticket in the train!

Inside the church...

Melk abbey really is magnificent, enough to charm even a jaded catholic church viewer such as myself. The monastery is situated imposingly above the town and about 1/3 as large as it. Inside it is huge with vast corridoors stretching out all over the place. The exhibition was very well done, going in a much more spiritual direction than I feel we would have taken in the UK. Especially amazing were the 10th or 11th century portable altar and a 800+ year old sculpture of christ on the cross. Oh and the midday service in the vast church complete with organ was a real eye opener. The effect on someone from the 18th century must have been even larger!

1200 year old Jesus

A fascinating and macabre story is that of the Abbey's patron saint, St Koloman. An irish pilgrim in 1012 (according to tradition the son of an Irish king) was suspected of spying by the locals and murdered. However, out of remorse or some other motivation (the legend goes that the dead elder tree he was hanging on began to grow and flower again and his body did not rot) he was made a saint just a few years later!

Duernstein

Afterwards it was time for a leisurely voyage along the Danube. The Wachau is known for its dramatic cliffs, terraced hills overflowing with vines, and romantic perching castles. It really is a wonder and definitely great to see either by boat or by bike. We even sailed past Duernstein, the place where Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned, which boasts a ridiculous and impressive blue ornate church tower which features in the photo gallery.

Hope you enjoy the selected snaps!

Der Tom

5 days in & around Glasgow

I finally took a mini holiday this year! The destination was actually decided mostly because I wanted to go and see the band Neutral Milk Hotel. I won't bother much in trying to describe Neutral Milk Hotel for the uninitiated, suffice to say they made a cult album (in the sense that there is definitely an almost religious fervour about it that has developed over the years) in the late 1990s, then disbanded as their frontman went off to be a bit of a recluse. I don't think anyone ever expected them to play live ever again, especially not after nearly 15 years! I wasn't going to bother with the scrum of getting London tickets so I went straight away for Glasgow, which had the advantage of containing a very good friend. Serendipitously I discovered after booking my flights that two further friends had moved up to Glasgow and in with her!

2/3 of the friends I came to visit, through a random stained glass pane in their palace.

5 days was a bit short really, I didn't quite have the time to bed fully back into British mode. I was also thrown off by the weather, which was actually warmer than the weather I left in Vienna as we had a miserable streak just before I went away. With the built in assumption that Glasgow would be an arctic wilderness firmly fixed in my head, I was overdressed for the weather most of the time... I need to get my act together, I don't want to lose my blessed British gift of rain-tolerance!

Glasgow Uni...

I did manage to pack the 5 days full of exciting things though. Frankly, I would have been content with sitting the whole time in the palatial and vast flat I was staying in (seriously, it took me a while to realise that in my room there were PILLARS built in to the edge of the bay window area and echoed on the fireplace). And in fact we often did our best to make this dream a reality, but there were interruptions to wander through the many green parks of Glasgow, a party where I picked up a free Neal Stephenson book, cinema event of the year (ahem) Godzilla, and yet more wandering, including a trip to the model town of New Lanark, just down from the falls of Clyde. Here you can see not only waterfalls and large stone buildings that make up the old model mill community of New Lanark, but also close ups of Peregrine falcons nesting on the river cliffs. No eggs seem to have made it this year sadly, but one falcon was obligingly sitting on the ledge and gave amazing, BBC wildlife documentary quality views through a borrowed telescope at the viewing point.

The gig was interesting. When you have such a personal relationship with a single album, it can be difficult for a live band to add anything to your experience. Some of the songs on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea have just sort of reached the point where they are so iconic for me that whenever the song starts happening the whole thing plays itself out in my head. It was amazing to experience them in the presence of 1000s of others, but the versions of the songs weren't necessarily better. However, there were some incredible moments, and in a weird way, the gig just made me appreciate the band more. They really are just a big, wonderful mess, like a band falling down a flight of stairs but with way more rhythm than that implies. And more raoucous, crazy brass. And Jeff Mangum, the lead singer, well! Some people can't handle NMH due to his nasal voice, of course for me it is a huge attraction. I was thrilled to discover that if anything, his voice is more unique, droning and penetrating than it even comes across in the recordings! Some of the best live moments came when there was just this droning voice circling and circling, singing those chant-like and hallucinatory lyrics. The crowd sang along a lot, but there were points where everybody just trailed off, absolutely unable to make the same kind of noises that Jeff Mangum could...

The photos are up in the usual place!

Der Tom

PS on my return to Wien, found out that NMH will play here too in August! Utterly unheard of but quite welcome :-)

Un petit morceau

This post has nothing to with France or french, the phrase just jumped out at me while I was looking for a title. May was the month of many visitings, on my part and on the part of family and friends. That picture backlog will slowly bubble its way to the surface over time, as these things seem to do. For now, you get yet another 'yet another gallery of Bisamberg photos'. What can I say? It isn't the furthest or the highest walk, and it doesn't even have the single best view, but it is just such a nice walk to go on when the sun is shining and the plants are out! And there's that wonderful combination of sweeping fields with the city looming in the distance. And you might see a Ziesel (saw one for half a second on this trip).

Although I didn't bother taking pictures of the actual festival, the occasion for this Bisamberg walk was to coincide with a Stammersdorf wine festival. I say 'a' as the place has multiple throughout the year, this one being called the 'Mailuefterl' which I can only assume alludes to the airing out and cleaning out of the cellars in May to make room for the wines to come, as well as welcoming back the sun (who has nonetheless contrived to be an unpredictable companion of late!).

So yes, more Bisamberg, I have tried to make sure there are some new angles this time! Especially the ones of the clouds over the Stammersdorfer wine fields came out pretty alright, I reckon!

Der Tom

Travelblogue

This one's going to have a bit of an old school feel to it as I actually use this blog to recount a small bit of travelling rather than just throwing pretty mountain pictures about. Luckily though, there is still at least one photo of an awesome invertebrate to remind you this is tominwien mark 2: this time with more serendipitous insects (the unofficial secret name of this phase of the blog).

Aaaanyway, yes. I went to Prague! This was my fourth time in Prague now, which puts it way ahead of any of the cities of Austria on the visited list... Sorry Austria. My old friend Steve is doing his PhD there and after nigh on three years he has also rather got the hang of his new city. This means every visit has a bunch of new things, as I get the best of the crop of new stuff discovered after the last time.

From the top of Vitkov hill, sunset over Prague with the cathedral/castle complex on the far right.

As it was the easter weekend, the plan was always to avoid Prague's picturesque but always swamped historic centre and head for the countryside and otherwise the outer districts. This was a very good plan, I saw a lot of the 'real' parts of Prague which are basically a more laissez-faire version of Vienna. The problem with Vienna is it has no run down bits which can then resurrect as cool and exciting areas, whereas Prague has plenty of 'up and coming' (much like the Czech Republic itself I guess). It's a very international feeling city, I think a lot more people drift into prague to live on a whim than in Vienna, due to the lower living cost and higher international reputation among younger people.

Cool church in the decidedly springy park where we ate breakfast.

So what did I actually do? In prague we danced to funk music till late in what amounted to the cloakrooms of an old cinema, ate tasty burgers, sat in cafes, and drank excellent Czech beer (the Czechs have a much more *varied* beer culture than the austrians I feel, or at least the brewing revolution has blown up there in a bigger way). Easter saturday saw us exploring the green bits on the rim of Prague, very analagous to the edges of Vienna. The scenery is different though, more rugged rocks and gorges, less tall hills sticking out over everything, crowded sightlines with lots of trees. But beautiful, and on the occasion of my visit also nice and sunny!

Sandstone pillars in Cesky Raj

On the Sunday it was time for a proper hike, so we took a 1h 45 train ride out to the notheast to reach an area closer to the german/polish borders, the 'Bohemian Paradise' or Český ráj. This area is very famous for its scenery, a huge expanse of sandstone weathered into dramatic cliffs and tall stacks, sticking out of the forest, and occasionally decorated with castles. To get to the coolest castles we plotted an ambitious route of 28 or so kilometres. The hike took the whole day and being so long, really gave a tour of the different landscapes of the region, from shady forest and dramatic pillars of sandstone, to fields and orchards. Apart from the whole pillars thing, everything looks very similar to northern austria.

Frankly ridiculous

Scenic highlight were definitely the twin castles of Trosky, situated with an excellent sense of drama atop two black basalt plugs sticking right up out of the landscape. When you think of a fantasy castle, you think of something like this. And the fact that they sit on the necks of an extinct volcano complex and you can see the columnar jointing in the basalts from afar just adds to the drama.

All in all a very successful trip and my first one to really feel like I was actually seeing what one would do if one lived in the country rather than just being an external tourist. Very fun! The bumper pack of photos is a mere click away.

Der Tom

Chasing the snowline

Despite a couple of stormy setbacks, the weather has now reached the setting: 't-shirt' pretty comprehensively, if not at night for people brought up south of the british isles... This week is EGU, where 11,000 geoscientists gather to agree on the fact that Vienna is very nice and that science is fun, especially when some other person did all the hard work so you can just enjoy the results! Today I saw talks about the methane/ethane lakes/ seas of Titan (there is a strait between the northern and southern lobes of Kraken Mare called semi-unofficially the Throat of the Kraken, amazing), a whole bunch on mantle rocks and one on the incredible nanocrystalline structures of mollusc shells, sea urchin teeth etc. Brachiopods have done for 500 million years what is technologically beyond us today!

But enough of the hurly burly present, lets us look a loong way back to a time before I temporarily stopped hiking and started working to deadlines, a cooler, but no less beautiful time, known to some as 'March'. I made use of my actual proper map of the alps southwest of Vienna around the Schneeberg to plan my own route for this hike. This was very rewarding as I could select roads less travelled that were empty of people and led up and down interesting ways. I am constantly grateful I have map knowledge, it is one of the most important of the knowledges I posses.

The route took us along the sharp gorge I previously walked along at the end of the Wiener Wasserleitungsweg, and then veered up the rather convex height profile of the valley walls, ending up at about 1300m, where the snow had melted so recently the plants there were still damp and pressed flat to the ground. Hellebores abounded, this time younger and showing more colour rather than the pale green unearthly colour they take on when they age.

The way down led through a really proper limestone gorge, with slowly steepening and really dramatic walls, cutting a long notch into the otherwise rather sheer drops back down onto the town which hid the train station for the return journey. Gorges are wonderful to walk along and always look amazingly dramatic, sadly though because of the vast range of light conditions from dark shadow to bright sky, they usually look kind of terrible in photographs!! The few remaining in this set are my best attempts.

Bis bald,

Der Tom