Berchtesgaden and Salzburg

On Saturday after our morning in Innsbruck we drove to Berchtesgaden, where I had booked us into a FeWo (which is short for some long thing, that basically means self-catered apartment).  This was part of a farmhouse in the alps south of Salzburg.  Thank God for the GPS, because we would still be looking for it now otherwise!  We were a little apprehensive when we followed the directions and were driving higher and higher, and on smaller and smaller roads surrounded by deep snow!!  When we had called to arrange stay early, we had realised that the owners spoke only very limited English, and only Bettina (the mother) really spoke any English at all!  Unfortunately she was not there when we arrived, so we had an interesting time trying to check in with Anton, the father of the family who basically spoke no English.  The farmhouse was a traditional German style house, and we were shown to the top floor that had a 2 bedroom apartment.  This was not ideal for me as the ceiling was very low unless you stayed in the middle of the apartment.  Needless to say, we both ended up banging our heads a number of toimes (and generally not lightly!).  We discovered in the morning that the cows basically lived in the house too!  I'm sure it was a barn section of the house, but it was only separated by a normal house door and seem to be part of the same building...


That night we drove down the crazy mountain roads into the town of Berchtesgaden where, after a bit of hunting, we found this great pub, the Hoffbrau Haus.  The place was packed and after we had ordered our meals an Oompa band came in and started playing, just sitting around one of the tables!  I don't think you could have planned a more traditional German meal!  We ended up going there again the next night as it was such a good experience.


The next morning we drove to the amazing mountain lake Konigsee, which is the deepest lake in Germany, although only 1.5km wide and 7km long, the lake is surrounded by steep cliffs that continue down under the water, with the deepest section being some 200m.  The water is beautifully clear and to keep it that way only electric motors (and rowboats) have been allowed on it since 1908.  We caught one of the electric boats on a tour to the ancient church of St Bartholomew (40mins away), this has been around since since the 1100's or something like that. 


During the trip, they stop the boat next to one of the cliffs called “Echowall” and one of the conductors played a tune on the trumpet.  Apparently they used to fire a gun and it would echo 7 times, the trumpet only echoed 2-3 times.  In the boat on the way back we met a little boy who wanted to ask us lots of questions and didn't really comprehend that we didn't speak German.  Luckily his older brother and Grandmother spoke enough English to translate.  He couldn't believe we had travelled for 24 hours to get to Germany.  His brother was more impressed that we were driving a Mercedes as our hire car.. After the boat trip, we soon discovered that almost nothing is open on Sundays, so we drove into Salzburg to try and figure out what we would do the next day.

We woke on Monday to a snow storm and had some fun driving back down the steep, narrow, winding roads in the snow and made it into Salzburg just in time for the Sound of Music tour.  The weather meant that it was pretty hard to see some of the sights of the tour, but we did see the Captain's house, the glasshouse, the nunnery and then drove into the mountains to see the church where the wedding was held.  Of course the music was put on for the driving and we sang along with an American family to the words.  After the 4 hour tour, we headed off in the heavily falling snow to go up to the Hohensalzburg fortress on another furnicular train.  While we were inside the fortress the weather suddenly cleared up and we could actually see the sites of Salzburg.  Up until then it had been very hard to see anything.  We walked past Mozart's birthplace, but Charlie was getting tired so we didn't go in.  Driving home the snow had been fairly heavy in the alps and we had a bit of trouble getting back up the road.  Last night we bought some things to make a little dinner in the apartment.  Overnight another snow storm raged and almost a foot of snow fell.  On our way out this morning we had to drive very carefully to make sure we didn't skid off the roads!


We are now on the train from Salzburg to Vienna for the last 2 nights of our trip.

Some more photos from Berchtesgaden and Salzburg:

Berchtesgaden