Untersberg

Today's blog post is brought to you by tasty German coke, not to be confused with that inimitable emetic, Austrian coke:


(Actual date: May 21)

Five litres of beer later, we were wondering if perhaps we had overdone it.

But I'm ahead of myself. Our last day in Salzburg began with us once more unexpectedly bumping into our classmates Alicia Grubb and Andrew Zamojc as they were checking in.

We then headed out for some culture for Jenn (Mozart's house, complete with antiquated instruments and yellowing manuscripts). We moved on to the Hohensalzburg Fortress, which contained many of the same lessons from previous castles: in the olden days, it was good to be clergy, better to be royalty and best to be both.



From there, we began our odyssey to Untersberg for a little bit of hiking. The lesson of the day: do better research. We first took a regional bus (~30 minutes) to the base of Untersbergbahn, which is a cable car up the mountain. There we learned that we wanted to be at Furstenbrunn to actually hike the mountain. Another thirty minutes later, we arrived at Furstenbrunn and started hiking up a raggedy-looking path. About 20 minutes later, we found a rock quarry, somewhat to the surprise of the employees working there: oops.

With some miming and some broken German (us) and broken English (them), we figured out that we had started going up about 300m too far to the left. So we followed a road that they pointed out to us to get to the actual start of the trail. (Looking back on our way out, we saw a sign: "Eintritt verboten." Hey, I thought to myself, I know what that means! Entrance forbi... Oh.)

Eventually, we got to the path and started going up. We immediately lost the path we expected to be on, but followed other path markers instead. An hour later, we passed some friendly loggers. Five minutes later, we turned around, and passed them again and selected a different fork in the trail. About thirty minutes later, we arrived as high as we could go on whatever path we had ended up on, admitted defeat, and enjoyed some great views.



We stumbled back to Salzburg and, in a splurge of excess, visited three separate beer halls, convincing ourselves that this way we'd be able to appreciate the different nuances of each. As it turns out, doing this in one night makes the nuances somewhat fuzzy in one's recollections the day after. So, uhm, they were all quite nice.