Salzburg, Austria

I will spend slightly less than 48 hours in Salzburg, the last city I’m truly excited about – Trento and Bolzano are nice enough but they’re mostly stops along the way to Milan, as I talked about in my last post.

My hotel, Markus Sittikus, is really lovely. After a flight of stairs, you get to the reception (and to the elevator for the rest of the building); the receptionist shows me the garden, the living room and the « bar », which is a glorified living room with a self-serve fridge for drinks. It’s a proper (and fancy) hotel with the socializing possibilities of a hostel. This, and the really comfortable room, makes me forgive them for my horrible pillow.

What I like the most about the photos of Salzburg I saw online is the mountains. It’s cold and rainy, and for the whole duration of my stay, I’ll only get occasional glances of the summits. Sad times.

While lying in bed after my afternoon nap, I think about my future plans… and completely change them. Bolzano and Trento don’t excite me? Fine. I’ll remove them completely. I’ll stay in Verona for an evening and a night, and then I’ll jump on a train and enjoy two full days… in Rome.

What I thought to be incredibly far south is, thanks to the amazing Italian railway network, exactly the same time as the small jumps I wanted to make along the way to Milan. It’s just a 3-hour ride to Rome from Verona, and a 3-hour ride to Milan after that. By my new standards, that’s almost a short commute!

But first: the present. Salzburg awaits, so I force myself out of bed and start cruising the city.

While freezing under the cold rain, I remember when I packed for this trip, bought a fleece sweater just for it, and then removed it from the backpack based on the weather forecast for the first two weeks. I regret everything.

As I walk around to the Mirabell gardens, I start hearing French everywhere. There you go: Munich had one good thing going for it, the absence of obnoxious French tourists everywhere. This era is over.

The Mirabell gardens are adorable, and I accidentally deleted my photo of them, which breaks my heart. Just imagine French gardens with multicolored peonies making swirls on the grass, with a few neoclassical sculptures and buildings on the sides. Imagine a small hill, just a few steps on a great stone stairwell, where you can hop to take your photo. Imagine, far away in the background, a fort on a hill. It’s pretty good.

I keep walking, which brings me to the river. Believe it or not, Salzburg has a river in its middle and a castle on a hill four castles on hills.

The closest of these hills is my target for today. On top of this one is a small church, but when I get there, I discover a Panoramaweg, which of course, I follow. The ground is very squishy under me, and I’m glad I have proper hiking shoes, because sneakers would not have gotten me (and my knee) far on this kind of slippery ground.

Speaking of knee, I can feel that I’m pushing it a bit too hard. It hasn’t hurt for a solid week, but in Munich, I ran after a bus; or rather, tried to run after a bus, felt a spark of pain in my knee and immediately stopped (and waited 10 minutes under the sleet for another bus, bleh). The knee has still not forgiven me, and it feels sore and fragile, without being as painful as earlier this month. I’d love to give it a break, but I’m on top of a hill right now.

When I get back down, I cruise through the old city center. It’s really beautiful, in that Viennese Austrian marmoreal way.

It’s not yet exactly dinner time, so I find a coffee shop with severe New Age vibes. One guy stares at me while I come inside. There are many white women wearing harem pants. The walls are covered with quotes. They’re all from the same person. His portrait is plastered over the wall. A man in a corner is reading his biography.

Yep, that’s a cult.

The chai’s good.

I get dinner at a hotel restaurant, which I’d normally avoid if I had found any restaurant that doesn’t have a hotel above it. It’s called Imlauer Brau and while it’s a bit expensive, the food is good. I’ll second LittleMissLing’s advice here: the Knockerl, a kind of giant île flottante without custard and with red berry coulis, is absolutely delicious. I realize it’s the first time since the Struklji that I feel like I’m eating something truly foreign and new. It’s nice!

Stats

• Train: 1h47, 2 972km
• Steps: 12 216

Full day

I wake up feeling good. I feel like I should have left for Verona tonight, but it is a 6-hour train ride and I do want to enjoy my day here without arriving in the middle of the night, so leaving tomorrow morning is still the best scenario, I suppose.

I grab brunch (that is, a sandwich and a cinnamon roll) at BackWerk, a café that looks suspiciously like a huge chain with no personality. Maybe that’s what I need after the cult café, though, and it tastes nice enough.

Today, I have my sights set on another castle on a hill – a higher one, too, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t listen to their body.

On the way there, I run into… is that a sewer fountain? Sure looks like it.

I then start the long ascent to whatever is waiting for me over there. The path is slippery and wet, like yesterday; there are many, many cement stairs that are safer but more taxing on the knee, so I alternate between both and take several long breaks. (While these breaks are ostensibly to rest my knee, I can’t say that my lungs and heart hate them either.)

Finally, I make it all the way to the top.

There is no castle.

Well, there’s a castle, but it’s on another hill. (Your castle is in another princess!, my inner Mario guffaws.)

The mystery is solved a few hundred meters further: there is a fort on this hill too, it’s just not at the highest point. And it’s small, but I wasn’t too interested in visiting it either.

I finally, finally make it back down, absolutely knackered. But the old city is still there waiting for me, and it’s still so beautiful!

I round it off with a Bosna from a kiosk ran, from what I understand, by the same man for the past forty years. A Bosna (Best Of SNAcks) is two low-fat sausages in a bit of flatbread, with onions and mustard. It’s extremely simple and just as satisfying, a quick snack for all occasions.

I feel like Salzburg isn’t a two-day visit, unless you want to visit a museum (I happen to not care for Mozart and not have seen The sound of music so my cultural choices are very limited) or you want to hike for good, which is more fun with decent weather.

I decide to finish my day with cheese Spätzle (a true classic) and a Kaiserschmarren (it’s a fancy name for, essentially, pancake pieces with red berry coulis).

feel guilty about not doing much in the afternoon… but then I see my stats!

Stats

• Steps: 16 153. It’s funny: I felt bad all afternoon for finishing my exploration so early, but I actually did a full day’s worth of walking and some pretty serious elevation gain at that!

To Verona

I have written this entire blog post as the train was stranded less than five minutes outside of the Salzburg train station, still within the city. The train is now announcing a one-hour delay and we have no news whatsoever.

I’m vibing: I have my books and my keyboard and I can keep myself busy all day if I have to. I’m just bummed that I’ve missed my connection in Innsbruck and I’ll have to book another ticket (booking is mandatory on high-speed Italian rail), which might be a logistical nightmare given how last-minute it will be.

Ah well, we’ll see! Adventure!

(Between writing the draft and the publication steps, we’ve had news. As in, no news, but the screen now says that our next stop is Salzburg and the train has started going back. The old Italian man sitting in front of me is throwing his stuff in his bag and muttering « Madonna, MADONNA », while the Austrian couple behind me loudly comments on how nobody’s even telling us what’s going on. I’m having a great time.)

• Previous stop: Munich, Germany
• Full trip
• Next stop: Verona, Italy