Day 12 (Monday)A fresh morning in Austria and we headed northwards into Austria's central mountain range. A toll road leads across the centre of this, with Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, in the centre.
Again this entailed turn after turn of tight climbing roads, though some found the roads less of a problem:
Below Grossglockner was a giant glacier. diagrams show how it has shrunk to a fraction of the size it was only a few tens of years ago - quite depressing. A funicular railway lead down to the glacier, or at least where it was when the railway was built. I considered spending the extra money, but we had just been stung for the expensive road toll and I wasn't convinced how far you were allowed to walk once down the bottom - i.e. if you could walk up the valley to where the glacier now ended. We had also done glaciers before, walking inside one just below Mont Blanc in France and landing on another one in New Zealand in a helicopter, so the novelty had worn off slightly.
When we arrived it was early in the morning and the place was quiet. However, in this beautiful location on the wall of the glacial valley they have built a huge concrete multistory car park with attached vehicle museum (not sure why there is a car museum there), plus restaurants, gift shops, viewing tower, etc. It was clear this had been engineered to take crowds of tourists, and soon they started to arrive. We beat a retreat at that point.
We returned part way down the valley to where there was a huge bus park (currently unused) and Sally noticed a small dirt road sloping down in the direction of a dam below where the glacier used to end in the early 1900s. We crawled down (low ratio again) and parked up for a sandwich near an old chapel. Although less than a mile from the crowds above it was a different world and we were the only people there:
We hiked down to the little lake below and across the 2 dams to the other side of the valley. There we stopped for a rest and read the sign posts which indicated that Grossglockner was the start of a long-distance walking trail that lead all the way to Trieste in the Adriatic sea. We decided that was a bit ambitious for us today and struggled back up hill to the camper.
A closed guest house was next to the chapel - closed, but some guests were still staying there:
I suspect it gets windy there in winter - look, a house with tiedowns:
We the climb back up to the road and follow it as it climbs the mountain range, crossing through several tunnels:
It clearly takes some serious equipment to keep these open:
Further along there is another large parking area, with a small cobbled side road that winds up to a peak with a lookout point. There are no signs banning us from driving up it, though it is mainly bikers riding up there. The cobbles are slippery, the road is one vehicle wide with pull-in places to let vehicles pass and the switchbacks are the type where there is no radius on the inside, it just changes immediate direction by 180 degrees. Again, I am thankful I have low ratio. At the top is a tiny car park, cafe and shop:
Sally buys a sticker to put on the back of the camper - it is the highest we have taken the camper so far.
I fire up the GPS and look for a campground somewhere north of us, in the direction of Salzburg. I selected a campground and we headed there. However, on arrival it was on a hill overlooking a noisy highway and railway. Another couple with a touring trailer had stopped just outside and were talking to each other in the car. Sally and I were doing the same. Eventually we wandered in on foot to have a look around. It was another of these campgrounds filled with lines of static trailer homes but with a small number of spaces left for campers. It didn't look promising. Plus some of the residents didn't look particularly classy. As we sat back in the camper looking at other campground options the campground host returned and came out to ask if we wanted to stay. I asked the price and said we would think about it. By this point the couple with the trailer had performed a difficult 180 degree turn and left. Sally insisted she didn't want to stay there, so we drove on, heading roughly for Salzburg. The GPS showed all other campgrounds in the area were along the same noisy valley.
We soon joined the divided highway leading towards Salzburg. It was going to be difficult to find anything from here - we would just be funneled at high speed into the city centre and at highway speed you can hardly look out for campgrounds, let alone pull over or do a U-turn.
So after a few miles I pulled off and took an alternative road. The highway carved straight through tunnels bored into the mountains, while this quiet side road wound its way following the river and railway around the mountains. Soon we came to a junction at the edge of a small town. The GPS told us to go left. I suspected this would be just routing us a quarter of a mile back to the highway, so I turned right. At that point sally said "I can see a camper parked over there", so we decided to investigate. The GPS showed there was a side road in the centre of the town that lead in that direction, so we followed it, and amazingly found ourselves in a car park with a specially demarcated section for camper parking. It said you had to pay at the swimming pool at the far end of the car park. To avoid finding ourselves on the wrong end of some Austrian parking laws we wandered over but found it was closed, but being used by the local fire department for an exercise. Annoyingly they insisted on driving backwards and forwards at speed in fire trucks late at night - ha, these young tear-aways! There was also the more predictable late night visitation of teenager attempting a standing quarter mile in the world's slowest car. Other than that there was no trouble.
