No kangaroos in Austria

After setting off from Bled in Slovenia, we headed through the Alps on a spectacular train journey through to Mozart's birthplace, Salzburg. Some of the highest peaks still had snow in patches, but mostly we passed by mountains blanketed with lush pine forests, with postcard vilages in the green valleys. Salzburg is supposedly a big cultural draw card, but we found it very bland and lacking in a lot of the culture that makes Europe so interesting, like a busy town square and typical cafe strips. The old town area south of the river sits below an imposing castle, with remnants of additional fortifications on the north side of the river. The other side of the castle overlooks a big field with just one house in the centre - the executioner's residence - as it was believed to be bad luck to live anywhere near them. Past this you could see over the green fields and villages to the Alps. The city is famous for its (cheesy) Sound of Music tours, but having never seen the movie we decided to give it a miss, saving ourselves the 50 Euro ticket price - and our sanity. Apparently some of the youth hostels play the movie in the common area every day - needless to say, we also decided to give them a miss!

We did however make a trip to visit the ice caves at Werfen - these are the largest ice caves in the world. We originally planned to hike up to the mouth of the cave, but when we go to the bottom of the hill and looked up, it became very clear that the 5.50 Euro cable car ticket (up) was a far better option! The caves are pretty spectacular inside - the temperature drops to about 0 degrees, and some of the ice structures look like frozen waves while others look like giant animals made from stalagmites and stalactites. When we came out of the ice caves and started on our way hiking down, it started to rain - luckily we hadn't gone far, so we headed back to the cable car. I don't know what was more satisfying - scoring a free ride on the cable car when the guy didn't check the tickets, or not having to walk for 2 hours down the mountain!

After Salzburg we headed to Vienna, which thankfully was more interesting, although after sleeping through half of the weekend, we soon discovered that not much opens on Sunday (except cafes serving fantastic Vienna hot chocolate). So we had to content ourselves with checking out the old city centre - including the Spanish riding school, palace and museum district - and then some crazy amusement park with about a million rides for the kids and bars and casinos for the oldies.

Of all the places we've visited, Austria has been the biggest disappointment - the alpine countryside is beautiful, but the cities (especially Salzburg) we found to be overpriced and not that special. Plus it seems that smoking is a national obsession - absolutely everyone smokes, everywhere, and all the time so it's virtually impossible to avoid. So after our brief visit to Austria were were looking forward to touching down in Greece... more on that in our next post.