Pfarrwerfen and Salzburg

Thurs.4^th July :  We stayed a second night at the Millstatter Lake camp site, enjoying a leisurely day on Mon.1^st  exploring the area on the bikes, reading, relaxing, taking it easy…a day off from travelling, and on Tuesday, 2^nd we packed and departed at around 11.30 after doing a load of washing, a bit of cleaning etc. and headed north to Pfarrwerfen, taking a side trip to a lovely little ski town at Filzmoos, simply because there was a sign on the autostrada mentioning the name!  The reason for the stop at Pfarrwerfen is because it is close to the starting point at nearby Werfen for the Eisriesenwelt (http://www.eisriesenwelt.at/) the world’s largest ice cave which we had read about on the internet last year and put on our ‘things to do’ list. 

On Wed.3^rd…leaving the camp, we drove to the bus station at Werfen, caught the bus up the mountain, walked 20 mins up to the cable car

which took us to the next level…another 20 min walk up to the entrance of the cave, followed by a 70 min. tour of the cave, including 700 steps going up and 700 steps going down.  It was extremely hard work but well worth the effort…it’s totally awesome!  We were given hand held davy lamps to light our way as there is no electric lighting and unfortunately we have no photos…cameras in the cave are verboten/taboo/not allowed so we had to resort to buying a couple of postcards instead.  We did take one or two photos of our climb up the mountain and of the surrounding scenery.  And then…as if we hadn’t punished our old legs and bodies enough, we back tracked about 12kms to St Johann im Pongau to visit Liechtenstein-Klamm, a gorge carved through the mountain by water melted from snow, gushing through over hundreds of years...it was spectacular and though a bit of a hike after the morning’s effort, a sight worth seeing.

Today, instead of resting our weary muscles like sensible people would, we cycled to the Pfarrwerfen station just a couple of kms away, parked the bikes and took a 1 hour train ride into Salzburg.  I must say that it was a very pleasant journey, relaxing in a comfortable seat enjoying the gorgeous mountain scenery roll by.  On arrival in Salzburg, we bought tickets for the hop on hop off bus in order to give our legs a bit of a rest, but this turned out to be not a wonderful idea as the traffic was so bad that we barely moved in the first half hour.  It was stiflingly hot on the bus, no air-conditioning and windows which didn’t seem to open…there was a retractable roof but this was closed…we couldn’t wait to get off and stopped at the Hellbrunn Palace where we ate our picnic lunch, wandered around the gardens and checked out the gazebo/pavilion, featured in ‘The Sound of Music’.  Sadly it was locked and we weren’t able to venture inside and imagine that we were ‘sixteen going on seventeen’!  Back to the bus stop then, the same bus and driver came along, this time with the top half open which was much more pleasant and back into the city where we ‘hopped’ off again to walk across the Mozart bridge to explore the Dom du Salzburg and the shopping streets.  We walked around at a very leisurely pace for a couple of hours, enjoying Salzburg, which was crowded with tourists from all over the world. After getting lost trying to find the railway station we finally caught the train, then cycled back to camp absolutely exhausted. 

This is our third night here at Camping Vierthaler at Pfarrwerfen (www.camping-vierthaler.at) and we’ll be sorry to leave …the people who run it are lovely, very helpful and friendly and we would recommend it to anyone.

ps Having trouble with adding photos. Stay tuned