The hills in Salzburg are indeed alive with the sound of music. It’s Sharon from Sydney, a tragic Julie Andrews fan who is singing very loudly as she pedals through the Austrian town made famous by the 1965 film.
She actually holds down a very respectable job as a doctor in Australia, but she’s on holidays and is not holding back on the Fraulein Maria bicycle tour, which takes you around all of the film locations.
“My patients don’t know about this side of me,” she confides, before launching into another spirited rendition of High on a Hill.
The Sound of Music is clearly one of Sharon’s favourite things. It’s also pretty high on the lists of Garry and Sue from the United States, and all the other die-hard fans who have made the pilgrimage to this pretty Austrian town.
Of course I’ve seen The Sound of Music. But unlike my touring comrades, I don’t watch it every Friday night and I hardly know the words to all the songs. (Something about kittens tied up with string?)
I suppose it was appropriate that I was running late for the tour. It wasn’t because I was frolicking on a mountainside, but was due to a train timetable mishap at my accommodation. The tour was scheduled to start at 9.30am, and my train eventually pulled in at 9.43am. I decided to give it a shot and bolt down the main street to see if I could catch them anyway.
I’m now convinced that when Maria sang the lyrics “Far – a long, long way to run” she was referring to the distance from the Salzburg railway station to the start of the Freuline Maria bike tour. I think I stunned my fellow train passengers by practically doing a crouch start off the platform, and arrived just as the tour group was about to pedal around the corner.
Me to the tour leader: “Is this (pant)… the Fraulein Maria (pant) … bike tour (pant pant pant)??.”
The tour leader very graciously turned around and got me a bike, with an expression on her face as if to say: How do you solve a problem like Megan?
(Answer: Give her an accurate train timetable, and she’ll be there on time.)
So we pedaled around the town, taking in all the sights: the abbey where Maria studies to become a nun; the back and the front of the Von Trapp family house (actually two different locations); the gardens where Maria and the children sing Do-Rei-Mei; and the Gazebo where Rolf and Liesl meet. (The gazebo had to be moved from private property to a public park because too many people kept jumping over the fence to sneak a peak. And you thought Sound of Music fans were such upstanding citizens.)
It was a very relaxing and pleasant day after a hectic week travelling through Poland and Hungary.
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, is a place I’d always wanted to visit, and it certainly lived up to its expectations. We stayed right on the Danube River and spent two days walking around the city and old town. We also visited a traditional Hungarian bathing house, where we jumped in and out of the heated pools, spas, saunas and my favourite, the whirlpool.
Now we’ve moved onto Innsbruck, Austria, where we’re resting up before braving Oktoberfest in Munich. Although yesterday I was little more energetic and went snowboarding on the Stubai Glacier, an all-year-round ski resort. This is summer season on the glacier, but there was more than 30cm of fresh snow on the ground. Pretty weird. I spent a happy day on the slopes, although I’ve pulled up even sorer than a Sound of Music fan after a day-long bike tour.
Today I feel like I’ve climbed every mountain - and then fallen all the way back down. Which is probably a pretty accurate description of my snowboarding skills.
Stay tuned for Oktoberfest …
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