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